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Naming rights: how to stake a claim in the dictionary of science

Natural History, Feb, 2003 by Neil deGrasse Tyson

If you visit the gift shop at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, you'll find all manner of space-related paraphernalia for sale. Familiar things are in stock--plastic models of the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station, cosmic refrigerator magnets, Fisher space pens. But there are unusual things, too--astronomy Monopoly, Saturn-shaped salt-and-pepper shakers, dehydrated ice cream of the kind originally confected for astronauts. And that's not to mention the weird things, such as Hubble Telescope pencil erasers, Mars rock super-balls, and edible space worms. You'd expect a place like the planetarium to stock such stuff. But something much deeper is going on. The gift shop's offerings bear silent witness to a half century of American scientific discovery.

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In the twentieth century, astronomers in the United States discovered galaxies, the expansion of the universe, the nature of supernovas, quasars, black holes, gamma ray bursts, the origin of the elements, the cosmic microwave background, and most of the known planets in orbit around solar systems other than our own. Although the Russians reached one or two places first, the U.S. sent space probes to Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. U.S. probes have also landed on Mars and on the asteroid Eros. U.S. astronauts have walked on the Moon. And nowadays most Americans take all this for granted, which is practically a working definition of culture: something everyone does or knows about, but no longer actively notices.

While shopping at the supermarket, most Americans aren't surprised to find an entire aisle filled with sugar-loaded, ready-to-eat breakfast cereals. But foreigners notice this kind of thing immediately, just as traveling Americans immediately notice that supermarkets in Italy have vast selections of pasta, and that markets in China and Japan offer astonishing choices of rice. Part of the great pleasure of foreign travel comes from the flip side of not noticing your own culture while you're surrounded by it: you realize what you hadn't noticed about your own country, and you notice what people in other countries don't realize about themselves.

Snobby people from other countries like to make fun of the U.S. for its abbreviated history and its uncouth culture, particularly compared with the millennial legacies of Europe, Africa, and Asia. But a few hundred years from now historians will surely see the twentieth century as the American century--the one in which American discoveries in science and technology rank high among the world's, list of treasured achievements.

Obviously the U.S. has not always sat atop the ladder of science. And there's, no guarantee or even likelihood that American preeminence will continue. As the capitals of science and technology shift from one nation to another, rising in one era and falling in the next, each culture leaves its imprint on the continuing attempt of our species to understand the universe and our place in it.

Many factors influence how and why a nation will make its mark at a particular time in history. Strong leadership matters. So does access to resources. But something else must be present--something less tangible, but with the power to drive people to focus their emotional, cultural, and intellectual capital on creating islands of excellence in the world. On the blind assumption that things will continue forever as they are, people who live in such dynamic times often take the excellence for granted, leaving the nation's achievements susceptible to abandonment by the very forces that gave rise to them.

Beginning in the 700s and continuing for nearly 400 years--while Europe's Christian zealots were disemboweling heretics--the Abbasid caliphs created a thriving intellectual center of arts, sciences, and medicine for the Islamic world in the city of Baghdad. Muslim astronomers and mathematicians built observatories, designed advanced timekeeping tools, and developed new methods of mathematical analysis and computation. They preserved extant works of science from ancient Greece and translated them into Arabic. They collaborated with Christian and Jewish scholars. Baghdad became a center of enlightenment. Arabic was, for a time, the lingua franca of science.

The influence of these early Islamic contributions to science remains to this day. For example, so widely distributed was the Arabic translation of Ptolemy's magnum opus on the geocentric universe (originally written in Greek in A.D. 150) that even today, in all translations, the work is known by its Arabic title, Almagest, or "The Greatest."

The Iraqi mathematician and astronomer Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi gave us the words "algorithm" (from his name, al-Khwarizmi) and "algebra" (from the word al-jabr in the title of his book on algebraic calculation). And the world's shared system of numerals--0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9--though Hindi in origin, was neither common nor widespread until Muslim mathematicians exploited it. Furthermore, the Muslims made full and innovative use of the zero, which did not exist among Roman numerals or in any established numeric system. Today, with legitimate reason, the ten symbols are internationally referred to as Arabic numerals.

Naming rights: how to stake a claim in the dictionary of science

Natural History, Feb, 2003 by Neil deGrasse Tyson

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