400 years of science

This weekend is 100 Hours of Astronomy, part of the International Year of Astronomy, which in turn celebrates the 400^th anniversary of Galileo's first use of the telescope. As a biologist, I’ve already celebrated Darwin Day with two posts (a phylogenetic tree gallery and “What would Darwin think?”), but I want to take second to celebrate Galileo’s legacy, which is much bigger than Darwin’s.

I”n not talking about the use of the telescope, the discovery of Jupiter’s moons, or that falling objects all accelerate at the same rate.

Galileo’s legacy is nothing less than science itself.

Galileo was the first practitioner of scientist as we understand it today. As Edward Tufte wrote in Beautiful Evidence, Galileo contributed a “forever idea,” that you should be able settle arguments with “visible certainty.” We would now call that “empiricism.”

Thanks, Galileo, for creating a career for people like me.

First pictures of planets outside our solar system

When I wrote one of my first science-related articles in 1991, planets outside our solar system were only suspected. None were known directly. When I revised the article in late 1996, the first extrasolar planets had just been demonstrated.

Now, we have pictures.



More here.

And some people say there's no such thing as progress.

Still paradoxical after all these years

Most people are inclined to think that the universe is teeming with life, because the universe is just so darned big. But if so, where are they? That's the question physicist Enrico Fermi famously asked, and has since become known as Fermi's paradox.

One of my first articles concerned the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. It has been interesting to see new knowledge come in on that front since I wrote that article over a decade and a half ago. This article in the New York Times provides a nice overview from a more recent perspective, such as the discovery of extrasolar planets (none were known when I wrote my original article).

Science marches on!

One of my first published articles (in Skeptical Inquirer) concerned extraterrestrial intelligence. At the time, there were no planets known outside our solar system.

Now, the first solar system that seems to resemble ours has been described, here. The researchers estimate that in maybe 10 years, there will be good, solid estimates for whether solar systems like ours are highly unusual or not.

This doesn't dramatically affect the argument I made in the article, but it's neat to see some of the blanks being filled in.