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Wayfinding

Page 23

by M. R. O'Connor


  Huth was an early project leader at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, when it began building the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the twenty-seven-kilometer-long underground particle accelerator. His focus was the ATLAS Experiment, a proton-collision detector that is described as one of the largest, most complex scientific instruments ever constructed. Along with three thousand other scientists, he helped to construct and operate ATLAS’s detector and analyze the bewildering amount of data (enough to fill one hundred thousand CDs per second) created by the collision of high-energy protons traveling at near light speed inside the collider. The LHC is sometimes called the Big Bang Machine because one of its goals from the start was to locate the mysterious Higgs boson, a theoretical particle that makes up an omnipresent but invisible field that gives atoms their mass and could help explain the beginning of time. In 2012, an experiment Huth collaborated on at ATLAS helped find the Higgs boson, an occasion that marked what many described as a new frontier in the human understanding of matter. ATLAS’s future work will likely focus on trying to solve mysteries like the origin of mass, extra dimensions of space, and black holes, and will search for evidence of dark matter. “The discovery of the Higgs was this crowning moment, and it’s also the start of physics moving into unknown territory,” Huth told me later. “We’re in terra incognita now.”

  I was interested in how Huth came to teach an undergraduate class on traditional navigation without the aid of instruments and eventually to publish a book on the subject called The Lost Art of Finding Our Way. In August 2003, Huth told me, he rented a sea kayak in the Cranberry Islands in Maine. He steered offshore but a dense fog moved in and cut off his vision in all directions except for a patch of blue sky above. Huth hadn’t prepared for anything other than a quick paddle; he had no compass, phone, map, or supplies with him. To keep from panicking, he forced himself to pay attention to his surroundings, noting the direction of the wind and the swell. He could hear waves breaking on a beach somewhere and he figured it had to be to the northwest based on his vague internal image of the coastline. He tried to keep track of time and judged his progress against what he imagined his position was in his mind’s eye. Lobster buoys created little wakes from what he knew to be the incoming tide, and he used them as guideposts, finally managing to reach the shore.

  This experience alarmed Huth enough that two months later when he was kayaking near Nantucket Sound off the coast of Cape Cod, he made sure he took note of the surrounding area before setting off. That day a fog also set in, and when it did he oriented himself by the direction of the wind and waves. Unbeknownst to him, less than half a mile away, two young women were also sea kayaking and enveloped by the same fog. When they didn’t return as expected, the Coast Guard launched a search effort. The following day one of their bodies was found; the other was never recovered. Huth was devastated by this event. He guessed that the primary reason he survived and they didn’t was his ability to interpret some of the environmental cues around him in order to orient in the right direction. It was possible that the women had misinterpreted their direction and paddled out to the open sea.

  After that, Huth began amassing practical information on how to survive being lost without instruments, whether in the forest or at sea. He studied research on the behavior of people who are lost and on navigational practices around the world. One thing repeatedly struck him. Whether it was children in Greenland learning rope tricks for sea kayaking or Kalahari hunters tracking animals, navigation was evidence of an incredibly sophisticated body of science in cultures that were widely dismissed as primitive and without scientific traditions. “These cultures created a taxonomy in which they practice these arts,” he told me. “Navigation was a way of thinking or organizing one’s environment in a scientific way. It’s an example of scientific thought that people were engaging in way before the Scientific Revolution.” The original impetus for his research had been a practical one: even the most basic knowledge can help someone survive unexpected circumstances outdoors, and he wanted to offer a synthesis of this information to students. SPU:26 was designed to teach them how to read the sun, stars, shadows, waves, tides, and currents in order to find their way, and to cover aspects of the navigational cultures of Polynesian, Norse, Arab, and early Western seafarers.

  Now I watched fifty or so students file into the amphitheater and Huth begin his lecture. “Up to now what we’ve done is talk about navigation in various guises,” he said. “Dead reckoning, stars, sun, using a compass. Now we’re going to talk about the weather. Did anyone happen to notice the direction the wind was blowing before they got inside?”

  No one raised their hand.

  “Which way is the wind blowing? Anyone notice?”

  “Southeast?” said a male student tentatively.

  “Why do you think that?” asked Huth.

  “Because the wind seemed to be at my back?”

  “The wind is coming from the northwest,” said Huth. “Around this area, buildings can make wind currents swirl, so the best way to note the wind direction is by looking up at the clouds.” Huth began to scrawl across the chalkboard, explaining the mechanics of cloud formation, air density, wind, and geography. If you think this seems kind of elementary for a Harvard lecture hall and a particle physicist, you’re not alone—I thought the same thing. Yet I couldn’t have answered Huth’s question about the wind. I had noticed a breeze on campus, but I failed to observe the direction it was coming from, not just that day but ever, because I wasn’t in the habit of doing so. My method for observing the weather was the same as that of most people: I might glance out the window to decide whether or not I need a sweater, but to get a forecast, I turn to a phone or computer. I trust the forecasts I find there to be accurate, but for all I know about interpreting weather data, they might as well be handed down to me by Zeus and Hera. It’s an example of what anthropologist Charles Frake calls “magical thinking.” The example Frake uses is of tides, and the differences between how medieval sailors and modern sailors understood them. Modern Western society knows vastly more about tides, but tidal theory—based on complex mathematics—is beyond the understanding of individual navigators today. “Sailors today have no need to understand tidal theory at any level. They merely consult their tide table anew for each voyage. They never have to think about the tides as a system,” writes Frake. “Consequently it is the modern literate sailor, not the medieval one, who is prone to ‘magical thinking’ about the tides.”

  Considering the students’ average age was about ten years younger than me, I hazarded to guess that everyone else was equally technology dependent, if not more so. Clearly there had been a hemorrhage of basic knowledge of weather prediction to the point that skills that would have been familiar to many just a few generations ago were not widely practiced now. “In our era, people rarely notice the signs of the weather,” Huth explained to me later. “But at a not-too-distant time in the past, weather dictated travel. Travelers had to cast their lot with fate or rely on their ability to read the signs in the clouds and winds to predict the weather for themselves.”

  Huth sees the willingness among his students to place their faith in technology and relinquish the power of their own observation as a larger, problematic trend in education. Students learn biology, chemistry, and geology—the result of hundreds of years of scientific discovery—but they atomize this knowledge rather than find a home for it within a larger conceptual framework, namely their own direct experience. And so, over the course of a young person’s life in the classroom, students are surrendering the deeper meaning of what’s taught to them to what Huth calls “guardians of knowledge.” Their ability to see personal meaning and an existential stake in the environment around them disappears.

  To illustrate how discouraging and pervasive this trend really is, Huth often cites a 1987 documentary called A Private Universe, made by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The film’s producers went to a
Harvard commencement ceremony and asked faculty, alumni, and seniors, “Why is it warm in the summer and cold in the winter?” Of the twenty-three people questioned, only two could answer the question correctly. The film’s message is clear: even the highly educated lack rudimentary knowledge about the environment they inhabit. Why do the seasons change? Why does the moon go through phases? Two hundred years ago, Huth points out, any bumpkin farmer—even if they hadn’t gone to school and learned the earth rotates on an axis—would know that it is warmer in the summer because the earth is getting more direct light. “All empiricism has to start with stuff that is immediately palpable to you,” Huth told me. “The march of education—especially in the sciences—has been divorced from reality and I think that’s where you have to start.”

  Asking a classroom of elite students to pay attention to which way the wind is blowing, I realized, is a deceptively simple request. In order to succeed in Huth’s primitive navigation class, students have to reclaim the most fundamental aspect of their experience, one that is so often mediated and cushioned: inhabiting space and time. It wasn’t always this way, a truth brought home by the fact that at the other end of the building from where Huth teaches you can visit the university’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments. In it are thousands of Western instruments for observing and navigating, like telescopes, sextants, compasses, and celestial globes, some of them dating back to 1400. These tools were integral to Harvard’s core curriculum of “natural philosophy” when the school opened in 1636.

  Huth’s thinking about the significance of navigation has evolved since he had his kayaking experiences. The students he meets often come to class with a yearning to fill the gaps in their own knowledge. It was like the course slaked a thirst. By the end, a handful of students would relate heady, pseudomystical insights. “I’m leaving this class empowered to learn and simply be present,” wrote one. “This course isn’t about navigation but about a mindful way of living and finding our way and ourselves,” said another. “To truly understand our surroundings we must immerse ourselves in them,” wrote a third.

  One of Huth’s teaching fellows, a twenty-three-year-old PhD candidate in physics named Louis Baum, told me that he and the other fellows talk this way sometimes. “We get philosophical about it, how knowing where you are helps you know your place in the world,” said Baum. “I find it comforting to be orienting myself. I notice it a lot among my friends: they memorize paths and then they don’t pay attention.” What Huth now thinks is that learning navigation ends up making students feel less isolated. “It’s a framework that they use to put down observations, and it forces them to be keenly sensitive to their surroundings,” he said. “And sometimes they’re engaging in it and then experiencing an epiphany to other aspects of their life.” The more attuned they are, the more their consciousness seems to expand. In this respect the effect of learning navigation struck me as echoing the discovery of a religious worldview or a transformative life experience: it thins the barriers between ourselves and the world.

  * * *

  In the summer of 2015, a few months after I visited his class, Huth joined a three-week expedition to the Marshall Islands, the chain of small volcanic islands and coral atolls in the South Pacific Ocean. Also on the trip was Gerbrant van Vledder, an expert in wind and wave dynamics and professor at the University of Delft, and Joe Genz, an anthropologist at the University of Hawaii who had spent years living and studying on the Marshall Islands. They had been invited there by the islands’ traditional navigators, who asked the scientists to join a voyage between atolls and collect data and information that would shed light on their practice of orienting and piloting over long stretches of open water using only waves. For these navigators, the patterns of reflected and refracted waves off land act as a kind of map. The patterns were traditionally taught to initiate navigators with “stick charts,” weavings made from plant fibers and shells that show lines and curves representing the behavior of waves around islands. In the late 1800s, European explorers had collected several of these charts and sent them to museums back home, where they have been a source of cartographic fascination ever since.

  Huth and the rest of the expedition hoped to answer longstanding questions about Marshallese wave piloting. Genz has described wave piloting as a “spatial field of multitudes of waves coming from every possible direction, that [navigators] filter out, it’s an embodied kind of experience.” But previous expeditions to explain how had fallen short. Marshallese navigators could describe reflected waves that were too weak to even be detected by wave buoys, while other patterns they described seemed to contradict the accepted wave transformation progress described by oceanographers. How Marshallese navigators understood the behavior of these extremely complex wave patterns, let alone “read” or sensed them with enough accuracy to sail over miles of open, seemingly undifferentiated ocean and make landfall at extremely small atolls and islands, was a puzzle. The team of scientists, including Huth, armed themselves with instruments, computers, GPS, compasses, anemometers, and satellite data and flew to the Marshalls to find a connection between two seemingly dissimiliar ways of seeing the world, indigenous and scientific, sensory and technological.

  For hundreds of years the outside world has been fascinated by how people inhabited the South Pacific, a twenty-five-million-square-mile area of ocean dotted with thousands of small islands. How did humans possibly find their way to these small pinpricks of land scattered across a vast and bewildering ocean three times the size of Europe? As early as 1522 the historian Maximilian Transylvanus wrote that the Pacific was “so vast that the human mind can scarcely grasp it.” When the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen stumbled across Rapa Nui, a tiny volcanic island on the southern end of Polynesia, on Easter Day in 1722, he decided that the only way people with such small canoes could be living there was if God had created them separately from the rest of humanity. Julien Crozet, a French explorer, hypothesized that there must have been an entire continent of similar language speakers that had sunk below the water, leaving only the atolls and islands of the South Pacific above water.

  For islanders in the South Pacific, Western explanations for their presence in Oceania were misguided and often insulting. In the 1940s, a New Zealand historian by the name of Charles Andrew Sharp claimed that humans couldn’t sail more than three hundred miles out of sight of land without instruments—the maximum range, he believed, before navigational errors would doom them. As a result, Sharp thought distant islands must have been settled by unintentional voyagers; sailors probably fleeing famine or conflict being blown by storms or simply straying off course. His book Ancient Voyages of the Pacific put forth the idea that Oceanic islanders must have stumbled onto their islands from Southeast Asia by chance, accident, or fortuitous providence rather than conscious decision-making and skill. Just a few years before Sharp published his book, the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl famously sought to prove a similar theory, though he believed that these accidental colonizers of the Pacific had arrived from South America. In 1947 he launched a raft with six others from Peru and spent 121 days riding it along the prevailing east to west winds before making landfall in the South Pacific. Recounted in his internationally bestselling book Kon Tiki, Heyerdahl’s ideas about the accidental peopling of Oceania became globally known—despite the fact that no South Pacific Islander agreed with him. As the anthropologist Ben Finney has written, “[S]tandard histories of cartography focused on physical map artifacts have largely ignored the way Oceanic navigators mentally charted the islands, stars, and swells.” Nāʻālehu Anthony, a Hawaiian navigator, put it more bluntly: “All these things they told us about drifting off course was a lie. This was intentional. We did it thousands and thousands of years before anyone would lose sight of land in Europe.”

  Indeed, the Marshall Islands were first inhabited some two thousand years ago by people from the Eastern Solomon Islands, who likely used the stars and wind to orient, as well as wave piloting to ant
icipate land by detecting how islands disrupt ocean swells and current. Eventually, the long-distance voyages that were necessary for trading food, animals, and information with other island communities in Micronesia decreased, and wave piloting was primarily used for interisland voyages between the Marshalls’ two chains of islands and coral atolls that stretch over some one hundred thousand square miles. During this time, the practice of wave piloting reached the pinnacle of mastery. Polynesians use a combination of wind and stars to wayfind, and other Micronesian communities primarily rely on stars. But the Marshallese rely on waves almost exclusively to deduce the direction of land, and they can do so over hundreds of miles.

  The idea to bring anthropologists, physicists, and oceanographers to the Marshalls to study wave piloting was Korent Joel’s, known as Captain Korent. From the atoll of Kwajalein, and one of the few remaining people on the islands who practiced traditional navigation, Joel hoped that Western scientists would not only validate the knowledge behind the practice but also increase its prestige and help him to preserve it for the next generation. His main desire, Genz told me, was to obtain a computer simulation of how the waves work that would both enhance his abilities and help teach subsequent generations. There was urgency to Joel’s mission. For hundreds of years the Marshall Islands’ indigenous navigation knowledge and practices had been eroded by colonialism. First the Germans, then the Japanese, and finally the Americans had brought social disruption in the form of new economies and technology, missionaries, and disease. The Germans and the Japanese banned voyaging altogether, considering it dangerous and threatening to their control and trading companies. By 1910, nearly all the Marshallese chiefs, called Irooj, were using European boats instead of the traditional canoes. It wasn’t just navigation that was affected: other knowledge systems, from medicine to textiles, oral storytelling, chants, and songs, also disappeared.

 

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