From e-Skeptic reader Joe, joe@seither.com:
Frisbeterian = Someone who believes that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and you can't get it down.

I am delighted to report that I have been named a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London. It is one of the oldest and most prestigious scientific societies in England, named after the great Swedish inventor of the binomial classification system (Homo sapiens, Australopithicus africanus, Ratus ratus, Bushes republicus, etc.) There is no "fellowship" in the sense of a grant or award, but presumably I'll get free tea and scones when I visit their offices and library next time I'm in London. This is good timing because I just signed a contract with Oxford University Press to publish my biography of Alfred Russel Wallace, the 19th-century British naturalist who co-discovered natural selection (with that other guy who also had a "FLS" after his name). Wallace was the subject of my doctoral dissertation that has been sitting in a cardboard box for ten years now. It's time to let him out. Thanks Richard Milner for nominating me for the Linnean.

Vanished! on NOVA Tuesday, January 30, 2001 at 9pm ET on PBS www.pbs.org/nova/vanished On August 2, 1947, a converted British bomber named "Stardust" disappeared on a commercial flight over the Andes. For more than fifty years, no one knew what happened to the plane and the eleven people on board, and the incident remained one of the most notorious unsolved cases in the history of aviation.

Then in 1998, two mountaineers stumbled across a huge engine on the Tupangato glacier high in the Andes. It was Stardust's, and it was far from the flight path that the airliner was supposedly following.

NOVA travels to the site of this long ago catastrophe to solve the riddle of Stardust's disappearance on Vanished!, airing Tuesday, January 30, at 9pm ET on PBS (check local listings).

The Argentine military-led expedition takes NOVA viewers on an arduous trek to 16,500 feet, where wreckage and human remains are strewn across the icy landscape. The sobering scene holds tantalizing clues to the twin mysteries of the case: what brought Stardust down, and why has it only now turned up?

Rumors were rife after Stardust failed to reach Santiago, Chile, on its seemingly routine flight from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Was it blown to bits in an espionage plot? Did it crash land with survivors who sent faint signals for help before dying in the mountains? Was there a large amount of gold aboard?

The plane's enigmatic last message--"Stendec"--fueled speculation and even became the name of a UFO magazine theorizing that Stardust was intercepted by extraterrestrials.

All that was known for certain was that Stardust was behind schedule because of bad weather. After making its way over the mountains, the plane radioed that it was only four minutes from Santiago on its final approach. Then came the inexplicable transmission "Stendec" in Morse code. Puzzled air controllers asked for clarification. "Stendec" was repeated twice more. Then silence.

The plane had no known problems and was one of the few capable of flying at extreme altitudes over the Andes. Its five crewmembers were highly experienced World War II veterans from the Royal Air Force.

Many elements of the story are straight out of a John Le Carre novel. One of the passengers was a King's Messenger for the British government, carrying se cret papers possibly relating to strained relations between Argentina and Great Britain. The Peron government in Argentina was threatening nationalization that might have affected British business interests. Argentina was also vying for control of the British-held Falkland Islands. Furthermore, one expert speculates that the documents related to ongoing efforts by Argentina to give refuge to former Nazis. Any one of these issues may have been a motive for someone to sabotage the plane.

Details about other passengers have also fueled conspiracy theories. On board was a wealthy Palestinian said to be carrying a large diamond sewn into the lining of his jacket. There was also a German emigre, completing the last leg of an emotional postwar journey to bring the ashes of her dead husband back to Chile.

With the newly discovered evidence and the help of experts in aviation, forensics, and meteorology, NOVA presents a riveting reconstruction of Stardust's final flight--its unplanned change of course, its encounter with a previously unknown phenomenon, and its strange disappearance for over half a century.

Now in its twenty-seventh season, NOVA is produced for PBS by the WGBH Science Unit. The director of the WGBH Science Unit and executive producer of NOVA is Paula S. Apsell. For more information visit www.wgbh.org.

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES
On the Verge of Re-Creating Creation. Then What?
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/28/weekinreview/28GLAN.html

January 28, 2001

By JAMES GLANZ

Ask a philosopher, a theologian, an artist or a composer how close humanity is to understanding the mystery of cosmic creation, and you are liable to get an answer that is majestic, inspiring and extremely imprecise. Ask a physicist the same question and the answer will be much more cut-and-dried: about 10 millionths of a second.

If the theory that the universe began in a single tremendous explosion more than 10 billion years ago is correct, as most scientists believe, then a few millionths of a second after that instant, the cosmos was filled with a fiery sea of particles that scientists refer to inelegantly as a quark-gluon plasma.

At a government laboratory near Exit 68 on the Long Island Expressway, physicists appear close to recreating a drop of that primordial sea by smashing together the central cores of gold nuclei at nearly the speed of light. And next summer NASA plans to launch a new satellite whose observations, along with experiments like those on Long Island, could help scientists work out a mechanistic, gears-and-levers theory of the genesis moment itself the hows, if not the whys, of creation ex nihilo.

That final revelation, if so florid a word is apt in this context, may still be decades off, if indeed some hidden flaw does not bring the whole logical structure crashing to earth before then. But this may be a good time to ask whether, as science treads over those final 10 microseconds, there is a human epiphany something to match the scale of "The Divine Comedy" or Handel's "Messiah" waiting at the other end.

If so, will it leave any room for those glorious cultural expressions of creation's mystery, or simply reduce them to the status of historical knickknacks? When all terms in that equation are filled in, what becomes of the scientific quest itself?

Few scientists willingly take up those loaded questions. Not surprisingly, some religious and philosophical thinkers who are familiar with the latest scientific work are already considering them. In fact, in a few decades scientists may be surprised to find these thinkers there waiting for them.

"What is important in creation is not envisioning God up on some platform, pushing the mighty `On' switch," said Dr. Owen Gingerich, a historian of science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who is a member of the Anabaptist faith and who is noted for his writings on religion and science. "Rather, it is the design and intention that went into it, how it unfolds. In that sense, driving it back farther and farther with a gluon soup doesn't have any moral implication at all, because that doesn't take away from the grandeur of the design."

Dr. Gingerich said a cosmic explosion would merely add layers of meaning to the Biblical God's "Let there be light." But others have suspected, not without reason, that the cultural and emotional landscape after science passes through often resembles the site of a monster truck rally the day after the last race is run and the last six-pack discarded.

"The cold star-bane has cloven and rent their hearts in twain," Yeats famously sneered in a warning on the dangers of regarding the heavens scientifically, "and dead is all their human truth."

Indeed, evidence for scientists' deafness to the cultural and aesthetic implications of their work can be found in the very words they use to describe the creation event. They call it the Big Bang, a term coined in the 1950's by a British cosmologist, Sir Fred Hoyle, who was intentionally belittling the theory because he didn't believe in it.

Is the Big Bang a fitting replacement for the clash of fire and ice within a dark abyss, the birth of the cosmos according to the great Icelandic epic the Edda? "The majesty is in the understanding," said Dr. Michael Turner, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago. "The human mind was able to figure out, from the clues left behind, how it all began. That's the majesty."

If humanity does figure it out, a certain debt of gratitude will be due to scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., who are smashing gold nuclei in hopes of making a dab of primordial soup. Dr. Alan Guth, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that if the Brookhaven experiments succeed, as appears close, the behavior of the stuff they make would be "very similar to what we would expect in the early universe," around 10 microseconds after the moment of creation.

Particle accelerators are still not powerful enough to mimic the cosmos earlier on, when it was even hotter and denser. But Dr. Guth is the prime discoverer of a theory that goes by another (sigh) whimsical moniker inflation and that scientists believe is their best bet for explaining what set off the Big Bang, perhaps filling in the last gap in the cosmic timetable.

The so-called inflationary epoch in which a kind of self-replicating energy may have existed in the primordial nothingness, igniting the great explosion would have been over almost before it began. But the $145 million NASA satellite, called MAP, that will be launched this summer is intended to collect hints of subtle processes that took place during that epoch.

Scientists still have a way to go before they can calculate just how that inflating speck popped into being; still, they are close enough that various competing theories have set off a debate about whether it is proper to speak of a beginning of cosmic time, or whether the expression has no meaning.

THE scientific exploration of cosmic birth "clarifies somewhat those first mysterious moments," said Dr. Ernan McMullin, a Catholic priest who is an emeritus professor at the University of Notre Dame and a former director of its history and philosophy of science program.

But he said no solution of the scientific problem would ambush philosophers and theologians, many of whom have already worked the Big Bang into their worldviews a judgment shared heartily by Dr. Guth.

"In a sense, it goes up to the doorstep of God without opening the door," Dr. Guth said. "It would still leave completely open the question."

Oddly enough, the most painful repercussions of approaching the moment of creation could be felt in the scientific enterprise itself.

John Horgan, author of the 1996 book "The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age," said he thought a full understanding of creation was "a complete pipe dream," since trying to span those final microseconds would eventually lead scientists to conditions too extreme to be explored in an experiment or clarified in a theory.

"We can fine-tune the Big Bang theory," Mr. Horgan said, but "the general outlines of what we can know about the origins of the universe are already in place."

Few scientists, who tend toward sunny outlooks when it comes to gauging the power of rational inquiry, would agree that their greatest quest is nigh on bringing them to a dead end. But in their more candid moments, some will admit to the slightest frisson of dread not dread of failing, but of succeeding so entirely that the adventure would be over.

"I hope it's not on my watch," Dr. Turner said. "It's just too fun unraveling the history of the universe."

The New York Times on the Web
http://www.nytimes.com