As an engineer at Thiokol Corporation, I learned from "the school of hard knocks" that it was very challenging to accurately predict how a rocket motor, particularly a new design, would perform in a test on the ground or in flight. It would take many tests, both small scale and the actual size, to finally be able to say the design was "flightworthy." We always had a schedule to meet when the tests should be over and production would begin.
When I started my career in 1972, we were using slide rules and fairly simple models. When I retired in 2003, the understanding of how a rocket motor works had developed from rocket engineering to rocket science. The knowledge had leap-frogged into very sophisticated predictive computer models.
I remember the time when a colleague, a true scientist in the lab, was frustrated because the big boss was not giving him enough research time to find the root cause of a problem. "We are not searching for the truth," the boss said. "We are searching for something that works."
Siddharth Mukherjee, the 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner for his outstanding book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer defines science thus: "Science is often described as an iterative and cumulative process, a puzzle solved piece by piece with each piece contributing a few hazy pixels of a much larger picture. But the arrival of a truly powerful new theory in science often feels far from iterative. Rather than explain one observation or a phenomenon in a single pixelated step, an entire field of observations suddenly seems to crystallize into a perfect whole. The effect is almost like watching a puzzle solve itself."
Watching the recent political debates where a majority of the Republican candidates openly deride global warming as human-caused, one has to look at their backgrounds to determine how they reach their conclusions. A check on the internet reveals that the leader in the polls, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, has an educational background littered with failing grades in just about every science subject. The only sane contender is John Huntsman. I just hope he doesn't sell his values to the extreme right. Utah did very well under his leadership.
What we voters should be interested in is which candidate has the critical thinking skills to lead our nation.
"I am pro-business" is the Republican slogan. I shudder to think which of the candidates would have had the guts to stand up to the tobacco industry, for instance, when science began to show that lung cancer was caused by smoking. Would they have supported the tobacco fat cats because they employ thousands of people or the scientists who were overcoming great political pressure not to show the link between smoking and lung cancer?
In the late 1950s, the tobacco industry CEOs and lobbyists went to Congress to thwart the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) directive that cigarette packs should have a label stating "Caution: Cigarette Smoking is Dangerous to Health. It May Cause Death from Cancer and Other Diseases."
And they succeeded, because the label changed to "Cigarette Smoking may be hazardous to your health." Politicians clearly were not looking out for the health of the nation, only the prosperity of the tobacco industry. The September, 1965 issue of The Atlantic Monthly reported that this was "an unabashed act to protect private industry from government regulation."
Lack of government regulation has led to our economic collapse. Yet Perry, Romney, etc. continue to push for even less regulation and more tax breaks for the rich. No wonder their mantra is eagerly embraced by the Wall Street fat cats and low-tax-rate-paying CEOs! Just like the tobacco industry, this elite group apparently has much more to gain than the general public.
Today, we are very fortunate to have news agencies and websites (eg. www.factcheck.org) to let us know the hyperboles (and lies) the candidates resort to in debates and speeches.
For example, if we were to check if job growth came as a result of their policies in Texas (Perry) or in Massachusetts (Romney), neither outpaced the longer term trends of shaping the job market in his state.
Another example of a fact check was performed by the CNN truth squad after Michele Bachmann made this statement in the Sept 22 debate on FOX News: "President Obama has embraced a view of government-directed temporary fixes and gimmicks. They don't work. He's destroyed the economy."
The truth squad presented factual data and concluded that her statement is "false. The Obama administration's much-criticized effort to revive the economy may not have lived up to their billing, but statistics show the bulk of the damage was done before he was sworn in."
On the topic of no new taxes for job creators: In 1995, the effective tax rate paid by millionaires was 30.4 percent. By 2009, it had dropped to 22.4 percent, but unemployment over the same period went up from 5.6 percent to 9.3 percent.
Factual data, which is what scientists use to judge the truth, seems to be lacking in what the candidates are presenting.
Kulkarni lives in Perry.
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