These scientific advances were ‘Made in the U.S.A.' Will they continue?
And yet, as an American patriot, I take pride that so much scientific research bears the imprint 'Made in the U.S.A.' By so many measures, this country — my country — has dominated all branches of the scientific enterprise since World War II: the number of Nobel Prizes in the sciences (nearly 300, with second-place Britain having about one-third of that amount), the number of patents in the sciences (with China rapidly catching up), the sheer number of Big Discoveries. We Americans have walked on the moon and brought back chunks of it for further study. We've whipped polio and fenced in HIV.
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Consider just my small branch of science. I'm an astronomer, so here are some of the things we've learned about our solar system and the cosmos during the six decades of my scientific career:
We know the universe started years ago hot and dense, and we know its age — 13.8 billion years.
A photo of the galaxy JADES-GS-z14-0, the farthest discovered yet.
Most of the colored smudges in this infrared photo taken by the James Webb Space Telescope are galaxies, not stars. Each can contain billions of stars and planets.
A star in
our galaxy
This is the most distant galaxy ever confirmed, as it looked 13.5 billion years ago — just about 290 million years after the Big Bang.
Galaxy
JADES-GS-z14-0
Sources: NASA, ESA, CSA, Brant Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), Ben Johnson (CfA), Sandro Tacchella (Cambridge), Phill Cargile (CfA), Joris Witstok (Cambridge, University of Copenhagen), P. Jakobsen (University of Copenhagen), Alyssa Pagan (STScI), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Webb), JADES Collaboration
Most of the colored smudges in this infrared photo taken by the James Webb Space Telescope are galaxies, not stars. Each can contain billions of stars and planets.
A star in
our galaxy
This is the most distant galaxy ever confirmed, as it looked 13.5 billion years ago — just about 290 million years after the Big Bang.
Galaxy
JADES-GS-z14-0
Sources: NASA, ESA, CSA, Brant Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), Ben Johnson (CfA), Sandro Tacchella (Cambridge), Phill Cargile (CfA), Joris Witstok (Cambridge, University of Copenhagen), P. Jakobsen (University of Copenhagen), Alyssa Pagan (STScI), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Webb), JADES Collaboration
Most of the colored smudges in this infrared photo taken by the James Webb Space Telescope are galaxies, not stars. Each can contain billions of stars and planets.
A star in
our galaxy
This is the most distant galaxy ever confirmed, as it looked 13.5 billion years ago — just about 290 million years after the Big Bang.
Galaxy
JADES-GS-z14-0
Sources: NASA, ESA, CSA, Brant Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), Ben Johnson (CfA), Sandro Tacchella (Cambridge), Phill Cargile (CfA), Joris Witstok (Cambridge, University of Copenhagen), P. Jakobsen (University of Copenhagen), Alyssa Pagan (STScI), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Webb), JADES Collaboration
Most of the colored smudges in this infrared photo taken by the James Webb Space Telescope are galaxies, not stars. Each can contain billions of stars and planets.
A star in
our galaxy
This is the most distant galaxy ever confirmed, as it looked 13.5 billion years ago — just about 290 million years after the Big Bang.
Galaxy
JADES-GS-z14-0
Sources: NASA, ESA, CSA, Brant Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), Ben Johnson (CfA), Sandro Tacchella (Cambridge), Phill Cargile (CfA), Joris Witstok (Cambridge, University of Copenhagen), P. Jakobsen (University of Copenhagen), Alyssa Pagan (STScI), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Webb), JADES Collaboration
We know the Earth has been around for only one-third of that time — and how long it will be before the dying Sun engulfs the Earth. (Reassuringly, 4 billion to 5 billion years from now.)
We know ordinary matter — the stuff that makes up people and planets and stars — is only about 5 percent of the total mass in the universe.
We know what powers the stars, and that some stars end their lives in the blink of an eye by exploding spectacularly. Here's one example: the Crab Nebula, what remains of a star that exploded 1,000 years ago, in an infrared photo taken by the James Webb Space Telescope.
The Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant located 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. (NASA/ESA/CSA/Tea Temim/Princeton University)
We know black holes are real; some are dead stars and some, 1 million or more times more massive, squat at the centers of galaxies, including our own Milky Way. The magenta spots in the image below show two black holes in the Topsy Turvy galaxy, about 13 million light-years away from us.
The magenta spots in this image show two black holes. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/IRAP)
We know neutron stars — stars so dense that a speck the size of a sesame seed would weigh more than a few thousand elephants — are common. The X-ray image below was made by NASA's Chandra mission. The numerous colorful dots are possible neutron stars or black holes located in a distant galaxy like our own.
An image of neutron stars and black holes in a distant galaxy.
Possible
black holes or
neutron stars
Galaxy
nucleus
(NASA/CXC/U.Leicester/U.London/R.Soria & K.Wu)
Possible
black holes or
neutron stars
Galaxy nucleus
The red areas
are light from
stars in the
galaxy
(NASA/CXC/U.Leicester/U.London/R.Soria & K.Wu)
Possible black holes
or neutron stars
Galaxy nucleus
The red areas
are light from
stars in the
galaxy
(NASA/CXC/U.Leicester/U.London/R.Soria & K.Wu)
Possible black holes
or neutron stars
Galaxy nucleus
The red areas
are light from
stars in the galaxy
(NASA/CXC/U.Leicester/U.London/R.Soria & K.Wu)
We know some of these neutron stars spin as fast as a car engine, with a regularity better than the best clocks we can manufacture.
We know how all the chemical elements are made: helium in the first few minutes of the long history of the universe; carbon in stars such as the Sun; and gold in stellar explosions or collisions of neutron stars.
Our robot ambassadors have trundled across the rust-red surface of Mars, and we've mapped its deep canyons and monstrous volcanoes. The image below shows a canyon in Mars that's longer than the continental United States, known as Valles Marineris.
A mosaic of 102 images from the Viking Orbiter. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Our American robots have visited every one of the planets of our solar system and many of its myriad moons.
An image of a volcano eruption in Io.
An ice volcano eruption
on Io, a moon of Jupiter.
The volcanic plume is this photo from 1997 is mostly ice and extended about 60 miles into space. (NASA-JPL, DLR)
An ice volcano eruption on Io,
a moon of Jupiter.
The volcanic plume is this photo from 1997 is mostly ice and extended about 60 miles into space. (NASA-JPL, DLR)
An ice volcano eruption on Io,
a moon of Jupiter.
The volcanic plume is this photo from 1997 is mostly ice and extended about 60 miles into space.
(NASA-JPL, DLR)
And we've discovered thousands of planets revolving around other stars.
All this knowledge can be labeled 'Made in the U.S.A.' All this is our legacy, enabled by federal funding.
In just a few months, the Trump administration has undermined U.S. dominance in science, built up over many decades. The federal funding that made America the world's science leader is threatened with crippling reductions, not just for astronomy and space science but also for fundamental research in energy, chemistry, computer science and preventive medicine.
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Consider, for example, the proposed budget for the National Science Foundation, the federal agency that has funded many U.S. contributions to astronomy (including mine), as well as research in physics, chemistry and computer science. Last year, NSF supported more than 330,000 scientists, students and teachers; next year, the budget allows for only 90,000. The funding rug will be pulled out from under nearly a quarter of a million American scientists, engineers and future scientists.
Why?
Does science cost too much? I've been involved in some of the discoveries listed above. The total cost to the average American taxpayer for all of my research, from my first article in 1961 to now, is less than a penny. The entire National Science Foundation budget for all research in astronomy costs each American about $1 a year.
Is the scientific enterprise riddled with waste and fraud, as some in Washington insistently allege? Some experiments don't work — I've had some duds. But we learn from our mistakes; failure is not always a waste. And allegations of widespread fraud in the scientific enterprise are not just entirely unproven; they make no sense. If I receive funds from NASA, I have to account for them, and officials at both my college and NASA review my accounts. Carefully.
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If, instead, the gutting of science and so much else the federal government does for us is just a whim, it is a costly one. Investments in basic research have been one of the most cost-effective expenditures of government money in my lifetime. It is not just the faster computer chips, the better weather forecasts, the cheaper batteries and the more potent vaccines American science has pioneered. Scientists at colleges and universities across the country have trained the scientists and engineers who go on to found companies that now employ millions.
In the last letter he wrote, Thomas Jefferson pointed to the value of 'the light of science.' Whatever the reasons are — real or proffered — for dimming this light, we risk surrendering leadership in an enterprise of proven value to our health, prosperity and sense of wonder at the marvels of the natural world.
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