Batter out.
The pièce de résistance, however, is what center fielder Rick Ankiel pulled off last Sunday. It’s the bottom of the ninth, one out. The Reds have just tied the game with a solo homer. They need one more run to win. Batter crushes the ball to right-center field. If it clears the wall, game over.
But it doesn’t. It bounces off the wall, eluding our right fielder. Ankiel, who had dashed over from center, charges after the ball, picks it up barehanded and, in full running stride, fires it to third, to which the batter is headed and from which he is very likely to later score and win the game (there being only one out).
Now, when mortals throw a ball, they give it arc to gain distance. That’s how artillery works. Ankiel is better than artillery. He releases the ball at the top of his throwing motion, the ball rocketing out as if tracing a clothesline. It bounces five feet from third base, perfectly on line, arriving a millisecond before the batter and maybe 20 inches above the bag.
Quick tag. Batter out. Game saved. (Blown five innings later. But remember, it’s the Nats.) Said Nats broadcaster and former major leaguer F. P. Santangelo: “That might be the best throw I’ve ever seen.” Me too, except that I didn’t see it personally, as it were. Only saw it on TV. They were playing in Cincinnati. I may be a fan, but I’m not a lunatic. I don’t travel with the team.
Yet.
Yes, I know that the world is going to pieces and that the prowess of three gifted players doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. But I remind you that FDR wanted baseball to continue during World War II. I make no claim that elegance and grace on any field will ward off the apocalypse. But if it comes in summer, I’ll be waiting for it at Nats Park, Section 128, hard by the Dippin’ Dots.
The Washington Post, September 1, 2011
CHAPTER 6
HEAVEN AND EARTH
YOUR ONLY HALLEY’S
A Lutheran minister once called comets the “thick smoke of human sins,” a hypothesis that finds little support nowadays among scientists. They prefer to see comets as big dirty snowballs trailing tails of gas and enthralled by gravitation. And coming not from God but from the equally ineffable Oort cloud, a gigantic shell far beyond the solar system where aspiring comets spend eons of quiet desperation until disturbed by some celestial accident and called to race toward the sun and make men weep.
Except that men don’t weep anymore. Halley’s Comet may have brought victory to the Normans in 1066, heralded the descent of Turkish armies on Belgrade in 1456 and, in 1910, killed Mark Twain and then Edward VII. This time around all is forgiven. After all, it knows not what it does. And we know what it is: a forlorn mass of rock and ice, a few miles across, caught in endless revolution around our sun. Now an object, not an omen, it is the source not of panic but of curiosity. Five earthly spacecraft have been sent to greet it and snap its picture.
Science has thoroughly desacrilized the universe. It is in the language. When in the last election Walter Mondale warned against militarizing “the heavens,” the usage seemed quaint. After Neil Armstrong and George Lucas, what’s up there now is simply “space.” The heavens were a place for angels, gods and portentous messengers. Space is home to extraterrestrials, the Force and now snowballs cruising through emptiness.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not pining for the days of the witch doctor. Things are much better now. There are costs to demystifying the universe and turning it over to science—the ubiquity of Carl Sagan is among the heavier ones—but the gain is great.
Halley’s, like the rest of space, is friendly now, tamed. This will probably be the first time in history that Halley’s will bring wonder unalloyed with fear. Halley’s has turned into a celebration, a scientific romance.
The romance is in the return. Halley’s comes back, always exactly on time. After its current pass, it will travel 3 billion miles away from Earth and then turn to revisit your children. It is the grandest reminder that an individual can behold of the constancy of nature. This, because of its cycle: It returns about every 75 years, once in a lifetime.
The sun rises regularly, too, but so often that we can’t help being dulled to the wonder of its rhythm. And what rhythms, beyond that of the familiar year, really touch us? Sunspots come every 11 years, and what layman cares? Economists are forever coming up with “long waves” (50 years) and other putative business cycles. Even Freud’s theory of neurosis was built on the notion of a distant return, the return of the child to the mind of the man. Such cycles can most charitably be called speculative.
Others are merely too long. The ice age will be back too. Fit that in your calendar. Halley’s alone is made to human scale. Its span is precisely a lifetime. Birth and death are perhaps the only events that match Halley’s periodicity. And neither is nearly as reliable. Birth and death come with regular irregularity (to borrow a term from cardiology). Halley’s you can count on.
We know, for example, absolutely nothing about what the world will be like in 2061. Except one thing. In that unimaginable year, a year whose very number has an otherworldly look, Halley’s will light up the sky.
One price of demystifying the universe is that science, unlike religion, asks only how, not why. As to the purpose of things, science is silent. But if science cannot talk about meaning, it can talk about harmony. And Halley’s is at once a symbol and a proof of a deep harmony of the spheres.
The great author of that harmony was Newton. And one of the earliest empirical demonstrations of his gravitational theories was provided by his friend, Edmond Halley. Twenty-three years after the great comet of 1682, Halley deciphered its logic. He predicted its return in 1758. Halley died 17 years before he could be proved right. The return of the comet was a sensation. It made Halley immortal. True to its nature, science wed the comet forever to the man who did not discover it but was the first to understand it.
This time around, there will be no sensation. Halley’s will give one of the worst shows ever. This may be its dimmest apparition in more than 2,000 years. What we will celebrate, then, is not the spectacle but the idea.
Halley’s is a monument to science, a spokesman for its new celestial harmonies—and an intimation of mortality. It is at once recurring and, for us individually, singular. This will be my only Halley’s and, if you’re old enough to read this without moving your lips, your last one too, I’m afraid.
Halley’s speaks to me especially acutely. As it turns around the sun, the midpoint on its journey, I will be marking the midpoint in mine, or so say the Metropolitan Life tables. Our perihelions match. Mark Twain was rather pleased with the fact that he came in with Halley’s and would go out with it. Ashes to ashes, Oort to Oort. Hail Halley’s.
The Washington Post, December 13, 1985
HUMBLED BY THE HAYDEN
Bantam Books will soon reissue its updated—illustrated—edition of Stephen Hawking’s wildly popular A Brief History of Time. Beware. As part-time scientific food-taster for my readers, I can report that, having devoured Hawking’s original book not once but twice, it leaves no trace. That is because it is entirely incomprehensible. Illustrating the book seems to me akin to tarting up hieroglyphics with Etruscan annotation.
Want an invigorating scientific experience? I have a better idea: the new Hayden Planetarium in New York.
The building itself is worth the trip. It is an immense 10-story cube of glass inside of which seems to float a huge sphere (which houses the sky-show viewing room) surrounded by a curving walkway (tracing the origins of the universe) seemingly suspended in the void.
The intelligence of this design is as striking as its beauty. It is a brilliant metaphor for the attempt of the human imagination to wrap itself around the natural world.
Why? Because (apart from crystals) there are few straight lines in nature. Nature is more sinews: curves, waves, ellipses and, when we are blessed, perfect spheres.
Look up at the sky. It is a festival of spheres. It is we, the bipeds with the fat heads and opposable thumbs,
who impose straight lines on nature. We connect the dots between the stars to make dippers, large and small. We take the human form—as in Vitruvian Man, the famous geometrical drawing by Leonardo and Cesariano and others—and fit it with axes, right angles and diagonals.
That is what we do to grasp the incomprehensible. And on a magnificent scale that is what the new Hayden building does. It wraps an enormous cube around interior curves and spheres, just as science creates the lines that give order and solidity to the bending ephemera of nature.
That is your impression from the outside. Inside is even more thrilling. The vastness of the empty space of the cube allows for demonstrations of scale by analogy. You stand on the walkway, look down at a display housing a small ball and a plaque informing you that if the ball represents Earth, the gigantic sphere hovering above you—the sky show auditorium—represents the sun.
Lessons in scale are everywhere. One corridor, for example, features wall-size composite photos taken by astronauts on the moon. You can see a hundred pictures of the moon, but until you’ve seen one the size of a storefront window showing an astronaut in his little dune buggy in one tiny corner of the immensity of a desolate moonscape, you have not quite experienced the vastness of the void and the insignificance of man.
And yet, oddly, that very insignificance adds to the glory of the creature that dares challenge such cosmic disparities. You feel it most acutely walking down the great floating ramp, where every inch represents 3.6 million years of the evolution of the universe; each stride, 75 million. You trace the story from the Big Bang through dozens of Hubble telescope pictures displayed along the way. Then you come to Now.
You’ve been walking for about 20 minutes; you’ve traversed more than 100 yards. And you come upon a glass case containing nothing but a human hair—and a little notification that, on the scale of the events you have just traversed, the width of that hair represents all of human history.
The Hayden Planetarium thus acts as a counterpart to the great Air and Space Museum in Washington. At Air and Space everything is on a human scale: The Lindbergh plane, the jets, even the rockets are approachable. You can wrap, if not your arms, then your mind around them.
It is the universe as seen and conquered by man; the Hayden is the unconquerable universe as seen by God. Air and Space is a shrine to human defiance; the Hayden is a palace of wonder. You come out of Air and Space exhilarated; you come out of the Hayden humbled.
Humbled in more ways than one. Some visitors are overwhelmed by the sophistication of the exhibits. The curators have chosen to talk down to no one. Be prepared to have Hubble’s Constant (a mathematical formula that represents the rate at which the universe is expanding) thrown out at you without a puppet show illustration. Indeed, just a month after Hayden reopened, the New York Times ran a piece summarizing visitors’ complaints that the museum was often too difficult to grasp.
In a culture where everything from textbooks to television to SATs has been renormed and dumbed down, one should be grateful for an intellectual challenge. A building devoted to explaining the cosmos that does not leave you scratching your head and humbled—has failed. The Hayden succeeds splendidly.
The Washington Post, September 1, 2000
LIT UP FOR LIFTOFF?
Someone’s gotta do it. No one’s gonna do it. So I’ll do it. Your honor, I rise in defense of drunken astronauts. You’ve all heard the reports, delivered in scandalized tones on the evening news or as guaranteed punch lines for the late-night comics, that at least two astronauts had alcohol in their systems before flights. A stern and sober NASA has assured an anxious nation that this matter, uncovered by a NASA-commissioned study, will be thoroughly looked into and appropriately dealt with.
To which I say: Come off it. I know NASA has to get grim and do the responsible thing, but as counsel for the defense—the only counsel for the defense, as far as I can tell—I place before the jury the following considerations:
Have you ever been to the shuttle launchpad? Have you ever seen that beautiful and preposterous thing the astronauts ride? Imagine it’s you sitting on top of a 12-story winged tube bolted to a gigantic canister filled with 2 million liters of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Then picture your own buddies—the “closeout crew”—who met you at the pad, fastened your emergency chute, strapped you into your launch seat, sealed the hatch and waved smiling to you through the window. Having left you lashed to what is the largest bomb on planet Earth, they then proceed 200 feet down the elevator and drive not one, not two, but three miles away to watch as the button is pressed that lights the candle that ignites the fuel that blows you into space.
Three miles! That’s how far they calculate they must go to be beyond the radius of incineration should anything go awry on the launchpad on which, I remind you, these insanely brave people are sitting. Would you not want to be a bit soused? Would you be all aflutter if you discovered that a couple of astronauts—out of dozens—were mildly so? I dare say that if the standards of today’s fussy flight surgeons had been applied to pilots showing up for morning duty in the Battle of Britain, the signs in Piccadilly would today be in German.
Cut these cowboys some slack. These are not wobbly Northwest Airlines pilots trying to get off the runway and steer through clouds and densely occupied airspace. An ascending space shuttle, I assure you, encounters very little traffic. And for much of liftoff, the astronaut is little more than spam in a can—not pilot but guinea pig. With opposable thumbs, to be sure, yet with only one specific task: to come out alive.
And by the time the astronauts get to the part of the journey that requires delicate and skillful maneuvering—docking with the international space station, outdoor plumbing repairs in zero-G—they will long ago have peed the demon rum into their recycling units.
Okay?
The most dismaying part of this brouhaha is not the tipsy Captain Kirk or two but the fact that space makes the news today only as mini-scandal or farce. It all started out as a great romance in the 1960s, yet by the 1970s—indeed, the morning after the 1969 moon landing—romance had turned to boredom.
When the Apollo 13 astronauts gave their live broadcast from space, not a single network carried it. No interest. Until, that is, the explosion that nearly killed them, at which point the world tuned in with rapt and morbid attention.
Well, we are now in stage three of our space odyssey: mockery and amusement. The last big space story was the crazed lady astronaut on her diapered drive to a fatal-attraction rendezvous.
It’s hard to entirely blame this state of affairs on a fickle public. Blame also belongs to the idiot politicians who decided 30 years ago to abandon the moon and send us on a pointless and endless journey into low-Earth orbit. President Bush has sensibly called an end to this nonsense and committed us to going back to the moon and, ultimately, to Mars. If his successors don’t screw it up, within 10 years NASA will have us back to where we belong—on other worlds.
At which point, we’ll remember why we did this in the first place. And when we once again thrill at seeing humans on the moon—this time, making it their home—we won’t much care whether the extra bounce in their gait is the effect of the one-sixth gravity or a touch of moonshine.
The Washington Post, August 3, 2007
FAREWELL, THE NEW FRONTIER
As the space shuttle Discovery flew three times around Washington, a final salute before landing at Dulles airport for retirement in a museum, thousands on the ground gazed upward with marvel and pride. Yet what they were witnessing, for all its elegance, was a funeral march.
The shuttle was being carried—its pallbearer, a 747—because it cannot fly, nor will it ever again. It was being sent for interment. Above ground, to be sure. But just as surely embalmed as Lenin in Red Square.
Is there a better symbol of willed American decline? The pity is not Discovery’s retirement—beautiful as it was, the shuttle proved too expensive and risky to operate—but that it died without a successor. The plann
ed follow-on—the Constellation rocket-capsule program to take humans back into orbit and from there to the moon—was suddenly canceled in 2010. And with that, control of manned spaceflight was gratuitously ceded to Russia and China.
Russia went for the cash, doubling its price for carrying an astronaut into orbit to $55.8 million. (Return included. Thank you, Boris.)
China goes for the glory. Having already mastered launch and rendezvous, the Chinese plan to land on the moon by 2025. They understand well the value of symbols. And nothing could better symbolize China overtaking America than its taking our place on the moon, walking over footprints first laid down, then casually abandoned, by us.
Who cares, you say? What is national greatness, scientific prestige or inspiring the young—legacies of NASA—when we are in economic distress? Okay. But if we’re talking jobs and growth, science and technology, R&D and innovation—what President Obama insists are the keys to “an economy built to last”—why on earth cancel an incomparably sophisticated, uniquely American technological enterprise?
We lament the decline of American manufacturing, yet we stop production of the most complex machine ever made by man—and cancel the successor meant to return us to orbit. The result? Abolition of thousands of the most highly advanced aerospace jobs anywhere—its workforce abruptly unemployed and drifting away from space flight, never to be reconstituted.
Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics Page 11