The 14th of July, besides being a national holiday for the French as the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, was a great day for the scientific world and by extension for all mankind. Among local political and finance news in our small country here in the eastern Mediterranean, some other important international headlines appeared.
We started reading enthusiastically that after nine years of traveling through our solar system, the fast spacecraft New Horizons (traveling at 50,000 kilometers per hour) arrived at Pluto who is nearly five billion kilometers away from us, even carrying the ashes of the American astronomer Clyde William Tombaugh who discovered it in 1930. The craft passed within 12,500 km from the dwarf planet, sending the first detailed images of the surface. With a little imagination you can also see Pluto the cartoon in the outline of the large crater making the pictures even more fun to look at.
From the large and the distant, we dive into the depths of matter and the other unknown waters of the microcosmos this time. At CERN a new exotic particle (the pentaquark) was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The existence of the pentaquark was theoretically predicted in the 1960s, but as with the Higgs particle, it was not detected in the laboratory until now.
It was a great day for physicists and during its course we even heard of significant political developments as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) announced that it signed a ”roadmap ” for inspections of Iran’s facilities in order to resolve all its nuclear issues until the end of the year.
Although for most people the political significance of the Iran news is obvious (we are talking about nuclear technology in the Middle East), for several readers the news on the exploration of the solar system and the new subatomic particles do not have the same obvious importance for life here on Earth.
It is therefore important to remember that from astronomical observations we reached important theories such as Einstein’s relativity and on this knowledge we later built technologies that gave us satellites, GPS and the ability to send scientific instruments to other worlds. At the atomic level the development of quantum theory was what later led to lasers and computers. The non-expert contemporary of Newton or Einstein and Planck would also not have been able to understand the importance of their discoveries and where they would lead us to (even experts can’t usually predict). But whatever reveals how the world works is important on both a philosophical and a technological level.
So it was a great day for humanity and science. While we all focus on the small every day stuff, science takes us to unknown and magical worlds, as always, giving us optimism and inspiration!
Dr Spiros Kitsinelis is a physical chemist and former associate professor at Ehime University in Japan. He has worked as a researcher at various universities and companies in Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, Greece and France. Since his participation in the international competition Famelab (in 2007) where he received both the audience and the judging committee’s first awards he has been a very active science communicator. He is the co-founder of the first scientific theater group in Greece (SciCo), the science communication website www.openscience.gr, judge and presenter for the International Science Film Festival of Athens (ISFFA by CAID), author of books and articles on various scientific topics for the general public (www.the-nightlab.com, Protagon.gr), speaker of public scientific events in Athens with the most recent being his talk at TEDxAcademy and guest science presenter on major Greek TV and radio stations(Alpha TV, SKAI radio). Currently he is collaborating with the science journalism organization Science View delivering science communication courses at various European universities. Website: www.the-nightlab.com – email: kitsinelis@yahoo.gr