Steeped in History and Tankers

I took this video out of my little window/door in my office.   The view is a huge StatOil tanker filling up on the neighboring pier (red) completely dwarfing our NTNU research vessel (blue) docking at our pier.  This a nice illustration of science and industry creeping ever closer together.  I'm not saying this isn't true in the states, but the Norwegians don't seem to hide the fact.  NTNU is a very applied university.  At the official opening of the AUR (Applied Underwater Robotics) Laboratory a few weeks ago, the university representative said that the reason we study the oceans is for the "unexplored opportunities and unexploited resources."   He would have literally been eaten alive by the faculty at UConn, if he had presumed to suggest we do science to exploit the environment and not for basic research.  Maybe it is lost in translation, but the word "exploited" is really not something that most researchers want linked to their science.   We might do science to "understand", "manage", and "sustain" our resources, but not really to exploit them.

My friend Molly at the Univ. Texas recently posted a link on the benefits of "basic" research from Lowry and Kirshenbaum. "During tense economic times, arguments over the federal budget and national debt have caused many Americans to lose sight of the tremendous value of science." Without basic research funding through the National Science Foundation, for example, we would not have the internet that we are all using to read this.  When you look at the numbers, Medicare and Medicaid collectively cost about $2,746 annually per person, Social Security $2,364, Department of Defense $2,981, and the war on terror $7,486.  The entire National Science Foundation budget costs an individual only $22/year -- less than the cost of one month of internet service.  This is really cheap considering that many of our biggest intellectual leaps have been from basic research.

Somewhat ironically, I have been steeping myself in scientific history lately.  I've been working on writing yet another encyclopedia entry, but this one is on bathymetry.  The history involves Lord Kelvin and a brilliant piano-wire machine used to measure ocean depths from a chemical reaction of seawater with a silver chromate-lined glass tube.  The foundations of using sound or acoustics to estimate bathymetry came about even earlier with yet other famous "dudes."   Leonardo da Vinci  in 1490 wrote, “If you cause your ship to stop, and place the head of a long tube in the water and place the outer extremity to your ear, you will hear ships at a great distance from you.”  Benjamin Franklin, to my mind probably the most influential person in history (at least U.S. history) in 1762 disputed claims of the day about the speed of sound: “two stones being struck smartly together under water, the stroke may be heard at a greater distance by an ear placed under water in the same river,than it can be heard through the air....I think I have heard it near a mile; how much farther it may be heard, I know not; but suppose a great deal farther, because the sound did not seem faint, as if at a distance, like distant sounds through air, but smart and strong, and as if present just at the ear. … ”  It is amazing to think of the curiosity and experimentation of these individuals way back in time.  Who listens anymore to anything???  

As a feminist, I can only imagine that more than one uncredited woman forged the scientific pathway as well.  Marie Tharp who with Heezen created the modern view of the ocean floor that led to the theory of plate tectonics has quite a history (panel D in the figure I put together below).  She was one of a handful of students recruited to the University of Michigan’s petroleum geology program during World War II and graduated with a master's degree.  Not finding a job, she then finished a B.S. in mathematics.   However, she wasn't hired afterwards as a scientist, but as a general drafter.   

On a final note, a great marine historian Albert Theberge compiled much of the forgotten history of the world's great bathymetrists.  He ends with this excellent quote from the 19th century between two great oceanographers (Aggasiz and Haeckel):  “In some way, men who have made their mark in the history of science disappear from the very history of the centers where they have been most active, because their successors are always in a hurry to show how much wiser and more learned they are than their predecessors” (Agassiz 1913).