In this final part of our exploration of how professional scientists work, Joan visits working scientists and engineers. Most people do not often get to see these people at work, either because the work requires a lab that would be pretty disrupted if people visited all the time, or in some cases because a lot of their work takes place in regions that are remote, dangerous, or both. In other cases, the work is just largely internal, with interaction between colleagues from time to time for inspiration. First, though, you need to understand the difference between a scientist and an engineer.

Science vs. Engineering

When I still worked as a rocket scientist, relatives would ask me, “So, what exactly is it that you do all day?” It’s hard to describe within most people’s attention span. After I fumbled out an answer, the usual reply was, “That’s so nice, dear,” and a change of subject. The old joke is that a scientist like it when the results of experiments are surprising, while an engineer does not. Scientists are explorers—sometimes literally, in the case of Antarctic researchers and astronauts. When scientists use and apply existing knowledge in novel ways rather than creating new areas of study, they may be called applied scientists or sometimes engineers.

To understand the difference between a scientist and an engineer, think about the difference between a research biologist and a doctor. The biology researcher spends a long time coming up with new questions and might have a research plan spanning years. The doctor, on the other hand, has a patient for a few minutes, in which time he has to use all the existing knowledge in his field to develop a diagnosis. The researcher might find a cure for cancer and save millions of lives years in the future. (If that does not work out, more than likely he will learn something else and that will still be OK.)

Doctors usually have immediate responsibility for patients and may be legally liable if they do not figure out what is going on. Scientists vs. engineers have a similar split. Scientists pursue new knowledge for its own sake. Engineers have to know a wide range of current knowledge and often need to figure out how to apply new knowledge generated by scientists. Depending on a scientist’s or engineer’s training and overall interests, the lines between them can be very blurry. Often engineers are, like doctors, responsible for decisions that immediately affect lives and property, and they develop new solutions for problems on tight deadlines. Often engineers wish they could use things just discovered by scientists to do something new. More often than not, though—to avoid surprises—engineers have to go with what is known and has been used before, unless they are designing something that is impossible with current technology. Then engineers and scientists have to talk to each other.

The Business of Science

Science is fiercely competitive, and scientists sometimes find themselves underemployed (in the United States, anyway) because of the lack of research funding and the specialization that makes openings in some fields scarce. The National Science Foundation (NSF) reported in 2000 that over the previous ten years it funded 30–34% of submitted proposals overall. By 2010, this had fallen to 23% overall. Teaching typically covers nine months of an academic researcher’s salary. The rest is found through grants or consulting. Academics must also obtain grants so that they can do high-quality research leading to publication in the science journals in their field. If they do not succeed, they may find themselves unemployed.

Even in a corporate laboratory, scientists need to convince executives that their research will bear fruit for the organization down the road. Those executives, in turn, need to predict the future: do I believe this guy in the lab who says he might have a new product for our company in 5 (or 15) years? Will the new product cannibalize the market for our existing products? If so, are our competitors working on the same thing anyway, and do we need to do this research to stay ahead of them? Researchers in this environment also have the disadvantage that, for competitive reasons, they often cannot talk freely about their work to their colleagues elsewhere. This tends to mean that corporate research and development labs need to be big enough so that there is a real community (if a partially closed one) for those scientists and engineers.

Sometimes a scientist or engineer who fails to convince his employer that an idea is worthwhile quits and negotiates to take some part of his research to start a new company, which then means the scientist has to talk to venture capitalists and other investors. Everyone has to agree on which part of the not-quite-invented potential discovery is owned by the scientist and which part the former employer retains. As Rich notes, science proceeds quickly when everyone shares results, but sometimes this just is not realistic because labs do, in reality, compete with each other for limited grant resources. For science to be truly open, there will need to be more money to support most good researchers, instead of the handful that are supported now.

Science and engineering require tremendous focus and attention to detail. Many scientists are also talented musicians, since learning to play an instrument takes concentration, memory, ability to recognize patterns, and sheer doggedness similar to that required in rooting through data, debugging computer programs, or writing 50-page grant proposals. The sometimes-tedious legwork behind great insights requires physical and emotional stamina. Keeping up with new developments is a never-ending task and usually requires work in the evenings and on weekends—reading, talking to colleagues, and bushwhacking through the forest of interesting new things that appear daily in all fields.

The Daily Grind

Science is similar to many other creative fields in that people develop a small cadre of collaborators. Most science projects require specialists from several disciplines. Teams might be scattered around the globe, but modern communications (and the occasional airplane) hold projects together quite easily. In that sense, science is similar to the film industry. There, too, teams come together for the project and might split up and reform years later for the sequel to an earlier success. A producer, director, and writer might live in Los Angeles, New York, and Topeka, respectively, most of the time, but might go to live together in the forests of New Zealand for six months to shoot a film.

Because it is relatively easy to make off with a new idea when it is being fleshed out, a culture of trust must develop, and peer pressure generally prevents theft of science ideas. Properly giving credit on published papers and patents and recognizing the primary inventor can accelerate (or wreck) careers. Both scientists and filmmakers are always raising money for their next project. In both professions, you’re as good as your last success, and the quest for funding for the Next Big Thing takes up a lot of time that in an ideal world would be spent creatively instead.

Even though working with a group of people you know is comfortable, grazing the edges of other fields and finding new paths often becomes necessary. A new chemistry insight might have implications for biologists, and fundamental discoveries frequently jump across several disciplines. So, it is not enough for a scientist merely to keep up with his own discipline, and new people must be added to a scientist’s lists of collaborators over time. More than other scientists, field scientists depend on their logistics crews, pilots, and mechanics. Even those who are working with more abstract ideas, like mathematicians, need to compare notes with each other or people in other fields.

Scientists tend to work long (and sometimes odd) hours, too. If a scientist is out in the field, she is probably more or less working all day—making measurements, packing samples, and so on. Work in a lab might be driven by the process the scientist is exploring. If a chemical reaction takes 12 hours to complete, going home after 8 hours is not an option. If data on a biological process needs to be taken every 4 hours, often that means that a scientist (or assisting grad student) is going to be coming in every 4 hours, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, until the experiment is done. Academic scientists usually need to teach classes as well, and scientists in industrial jobs might need to meet with colleagues in other departments. All in all, the work tends to lead to lots of nights and weekends taking data or writing it up for others to study. All this raises the question: why would anyone become a scientist or engineer?

The years of training are a big investment, followed by a life of long hours and a continual need to prove yourself. Most do it because they cannot imagine doing anything else. The thrill of exploration, and of seeing something for the first time, are experiences that cannot be given up easily. All scientists share the explorer’s drive—but use very different tools to survey their lands, literally or figuratively.

Some Typical Scientists (and Engineers, and Mathematicians…)

My career has been focused on helping teams of experts work well together. I sometimes say that I specialize in being a generalist, or that I am a translator between people in very different fields. Rather than give you specific examples of things I have done, in this section I introduce you to a few very different types of scientists, throwing in a couple mathematicians and an engineer for variety. My intent is to give you enough of a view so that you can imagine them working on your team every day, seeing just a bit farther than the day before.

Southern Crossings

In their explorations, scientists push forward the boundaries of what we know. Sometimes this is physically, literally true, as is the case for David Vaughan, a British Antarctic Survey (BAS) scientist who studies the interaction between polar ice sheets and Earth’s climate. Most of the time he is in Cambridge, England, at BAS headquarters. However, for many years he went South, as they say, to Antarctica every three years or so. Vaughan has visited some of the more isolated areas of Antarctica, which explorers call the deep field. Figures 14-1 and 14-2 show some pictures he took in the field.

He says, “We do work pretty hard when we’re down there. When you’re out in the field, it’s the top of the logistics pyramid. We have the two bases, and they’re halfway up the pyramid getting things from the U.K. to the deep field.” Because a lot of resources are expended to get to these distant places, once a scientist is in place, the workload is intense.

There are some things—like certain foods—that polar explorers miss when they’re in the field for months. “You get used to the food that you’ve got—all you want is food,” says Vaughan. “You need the calories and you get that release from whatever you’ve got available. When you’re out in the field with one other person for weeks at a time, it’s pretty relentless. You’re so focused on that one job that there’s very little real break. You have to find a release. For me, it’s reading books.”

A benefit of working in Antarctica in the summer, when the sun shines 24 hours a day, is reading in the tent at night without needing a light. “I’ve spent many months over the course of years in those tents,” Vaughan says, “a comfortable little womb in the middle of the white expanse.” In principle, Antarctica could have all 24 time zones arrayed around the South Pole, and sometimes this can create a lot of confusion. To give structure to the day, they schedule a particular time to call in to their base station.

Usually they make this call their first action item of their day, and no matter how late they went to sleep the “night” before, they get up at that time and say, “We’re going to get up and start a new day and call in.” In many ways, these explorers have lives similar to astronauts on a mission. What else does Vaughan miss? “One of the things that we look for in people we’re interviewing is that they have to be able to handle no solitude. Your buddy is only going to be 100 meters away. If anything, it’s quite a crowded space. You have to stay close to people. One of the nice things [about] being back in the U.K. is being able to walk out and not have someone on your shoulder. It’s usually a good relationship, but there’s always somebody there. And for ten weeks it might be exactly the same person.”

On his last trip to the Pine Island Glacier, on Antarctica’s western side, he remembers, “We were nine people and we had sleeping tents, but our whole lives centered around one living tent and one science tent. Very much we were living on top of one another. We were out there for 60 days, and we got very used to one another’s company. It was a whole lot more sociable than going out with two people or four people.”

Does Vaughan take accounts of early British explorers with him to read in the tents? No, he reads novels. Vaughan says that a couple of years ago, his expedition was attempting to get into Pine Island Bay. “We didn’t get into Pine Island Bay because it was blocked by sea ice. When we came back, we were reading a book about Cook’s expeditions. He probably got to almost the same point as we did. The explorers that went down there 100 or 200 years ago were so tenacious and so brave. I appreciate how tenacious and goal oriented [they were]. I find it very hard to read the accounts of what they did; it makes you feel very unworthy and small in comparison. The level of personal commitment is so much greater than what I can bring to it I find myself being embarrassed reading of what they did with so little. I tend not to read that sort of book when you’re in the Antarctic. It’s hard not to draw comparisons. These guys really did it. They laid their lives on the line just to explore. When they were down there, the thing that must have pushed them on from day to day to day was not knowing what was there.”

Mental Frontiers

Exploring a glacier is one way to extend the frontiers of what we know. At the other extreme, the expedition occurs entirely in the abstract, using paper, pencil, brain cells, and perhaps a computer. Probably the one scientific discipline we find the hardest to think about is mathematics. Is math a science? There are many types of mathematicians, ranging from statisticians who develop methods to understand whether bird populations are doing well in an ecosystem to those doing very abstract work that might someday enable new ways of thinking about physics or chemistry problems.

There are a lot of mathematicians. As one indication, the American Mathematical Society, a professional organization, reports 30,000 members. Many mathematicians are brought in as part of a larger team for their ability to propose ways to organize complicated problems. But what does it all mean? If someone develops a new piece of mathematics, so what? Fundamentally, one can think of each new development in mathematics as a new tool that engineers and scientists can use to better understand and predict the world, just like inventing a new physical instrument such as a microscope.

In the late 1600s, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz developed different mathematical techniques that collectively became what we call calculus. A few hundred years later, the tools of calculus allowed pioneers to understand electricity and magnetism. Calculus underlies almost all engineering work today, and there probably is not an office building, car, or airplane that did not require calculus during its design.

Good mathematical tools can vastly cut down on the need to hunt and peck around to find out how something works; a testable prediction can be made and a hypothesis proved (or disproved) using a mix of mathematical tools and shiny instruments. If you imagine how hard it would be to use just addition for your daily life without ever using multiplication, you can get an idea of how useful a full box of mathematical tools can be for people who use them daily.

Mathematician Niles Ritter points out the key distinctions between mathematics and the other sciences: “They call mathematics the queen of the sciences, but it differs from other sciences because it is not empirical. You can do mathematics completely in your head. Where’s the world you’re experimenting on?”

Ritter has been a math professor and a researcher figuring out ways to process images from space, and now he’s a problem solver for a software company, who lives far out in the Utah desert (see Figure 14-3). Ritter continues: “Imagine you had a cube made from wire and you put it on the ground out in the sunlight. The wires of the cube’s frame would create a complicated shadow on the ground. If an ant wandered by, it would not be able to tell that the pattern of light and shadow on the ground came from the wire cube above.”

When mathematicians solve problems that look complicated in two or three dimensions by thinking about them in more abstract realms, they call it lifting. Maybe a problem that looks too hard and complicated to develop mathematics for is a shadow of something that is quite simple in a higher dimension. Mathematicians think of the view from above—the broader view—as their world, in which the best understanding of how things work can be found.

What becomes possible when mathematicians and others think beyond three dimensions? Mathematicians have a hard time developing good mathematics, for example, when something—poof!—changes from one thing into another. When a particle inside an atom splits in two, it gives mathematicians fits. Looking at things in higher dimensions lets a physicist look at the particle from a point of view as different as ours is from an ant’s. Ritter allows, though, that this can tend to make mathematicians a little otherworldly. If mathematicians create these worlds in their heads, how do they know that the cloth they are spinning has at least some threads tied to reality?

Ritter notes that mathematicians have developed precise rules for understanding things. In the early 1900s, people like David Hilbert tried to prove (using math) that some simple areas of math were completely consistent. After some decades of unsuccessful wrestling with this, Hilbert (and later Kurt Göedel) came up with metamathematics—theories about mathematical theories. He proved that even simple math could not be proven to be completely consistent. This situation continues to worry mathematicians, who have to depend on their own self-consistency for things too complex to observe in the real world.

How do mathematicians solve problems? Do they close their eyes and sit in a darkened room? Actually, one of the things they do is talk to other people—sometimes to other mathematicians, sometimes to other specialists, depending on the problem at hand. If they get stuck, they might say to each other, “I’ve tried this and I’ve tried that,” and another mathematician may talk about similar problems he has seen solved a different way.

Scientists looking at data that is subject to interpretation have it harder. In biology or other physical sciences, a researcher may get to a certain point only to discover he cannot take data to answer a question with current instrumentation, because the instrument is not sensitive enough or there are other problems. It’s also possible for tools to limit a mathematician, though this problem comes up less often. From the point of view of helping other scientists, mathematicians want to see whether the math is “right enough” to provide data within a certain range. They then have to delineate when this kind of math will work without misleading results.

Why are people afraid of math? Learning mathematics is mostly learning how to think a particular way, which takes practice. However, as discussed in Chapter 12, it can often be crucial to find a good coach so that your practice is effective. As a specialist in problem solving, Niles Ritter’s opinion is that most people could be mathematicians, but phobics had a bad math teacher who did not understand mathematics. People with math anxiety develop a picture in their heads that math is like a ladder. Down at the bottom rung is learning how to count, the next one up is multiplication, and then algebra, and so on. Not a good picture, he says; math is much more an art rather than an empirical science.

There are as many different kinds of mathematicians as there are artists, and different mathematicians develop different problem-solving styles. Some mathematicians think visually, and others think about the exact same objects in a verbal way. To solve the same problem, one person might immediately go to a whiteboard and draw a sphere, circles, and so on to get a feel for how the problem might appear if physical objects were interacting. Someone else would do nothing but draw letters, symbols, and arrows.

It’s like drawing versus writing to explain an artistic idea. But in the end, they’re all abstract—and all mathematicians love the abstract and the ability it gives them to lift above the real world and fly around, looking down on us mortals and helping to solve our problems. If I am helping someone with a math problem and they get stuck and start hyperventilating, I ask: “If you knew the answer, what would it be?” Amazingly often, people answer that question with the correct answer, given the implied permission to be wrong.

To learn a discipline like math or science, you must be willing to try things and fall down sometimes, just like an athlete learning a new move. Mathematicians have a certain amount of faith that if they try enough avenues, they will ultimately find answers, but there sure can be a lot of crumpled paper in the meantime. The reward at the end—knowing that you have the unambiguously correct answer—is a powerful motivator.

Bird Societies

Earlier in this chapter, you met a scientist who explores a literal frontier and a few who work in more abstract realms. Even the discipline of biology encompasses a huge range of topics and styles of problem solving these days—from analyzing DNA at the molecular level to trying to understand entire ecosystems.

Dave Moriarty, a professor of biological sciences at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, sits between these extremes. He studies why certain species of birds live together while others aren’t in a particular community. He says, “That tells us about evolution, about how the world came to be the way it is. On the more practical side, it tells us about conservation. If we want to save something, we need to know the rules about its assembly.”

There are some bigger questions out there right now about how birds are related to other species on Earth. For example, based on unique features shared by bird and dinosaur skeletons, most scientists think birds are avian dinosaurs. Moriarty’s research group at Cal Poly studies birds and their habits using a combination of statistical analysis and fieldwork. One area that has received a lot of attention lately is how birds elect to set up housekeeping.

DNA evidence has allowed scientists to establish the paternity of chicks in a nest. This has shown that the prevailing theory—that most birds are monogamous—is not necessarily true. Sparrows will form a seasonal pair bond and build a nest, but there is a fairly good chance the babies weren’t fathered by that male, even though both parents are engaged in caring for the young. “Theory,” he says, “has fallen behind the empirical evidence.”

To catch up, more fieldwork is required to get more data about how things work. Mist nets (which Moriarty describes as “hairnets gone wild”) are set up to catch the birds without hurting them. The nets are taller than a person, about 12 meters long, and arranged in a way that resembles four shelves. The nets are black and normally placed where vegetation is thick. Birds fly into the nets, and researchers such as Moriarty’s grad student put bands on the bird’s legs to identify them later. With the bands in place, Moriarty says, “She could recognize who was hanging out with whom and take a blood sample.”

When the babies hatch, Moriarty’s student also takes samples from chicks. If she finds eggs broken, she tests DNA from the eggshells as well; because birds have lots of predators, there are lots of broken eggs. Blood samples are analyzed back in the lab with more or less the same technology used by crime labs to develop DNA profiles. She also keeps track of how many chicks are female and how many are male to see if any population imbalances occur. Over time, this new data provides an understanding of how bird populations evolve in an area, and how to protect populations when changes due to natural or manmade causes disrupt a bird’s environment.

Moriarty guides many budding scientists through their studies. Some may become employees of federal or state fish and game agencies. Those students learn how to do fieldwork, and also have to learn how to do a lot of background research on what is known about the animals they will manage and their habitats. They have to know about current laws protecting the creatures they are studying, and may have some work to do getting various permits before grabbing the binoculars. A developer may want to build 50 houses at a particular location and need biological surveys done. Scientists trained by Moriarty might be assigned the task of doing the survey to see whether any state or federally protected birds, mammals, reptiles, or amphibians would be affected by the development.

How is Moriarty’s area different from other scientific disciplines? “The scale of the problems is quite different,” he says. “We’re interested in chemical processes but want to know how it plays out at the level of organism.” In other words, he tries to find the big picture of an ecosystem in the DNA of a bird’s egg.

Robot Crew

This chapter has covered a range of scientists and has even gone on a foray into mathematics. To complete our tour of different kinds of scientists, we need to ask: what does an engineer do? The introduction to this section lays out some of the differences between a scientist and an engineer. What does an engineer who considers himself a researcher actually do all day? An associate professor of engineering, Chris Kitts rides herd on undergraduate and graduate students—and robots. The robotic inhabitants of his gizmo-stuffed lab space have been to the bottom of Lake Tahoe, to trenches off the California coast, to a wide variety of places on land and sea, and even into space.

Floor-to-ceiling whiteboards at his Santa Clara University lab, located in California’s Silicon Valley, are covered with diagrams, scribbles, and to-do lists—a reflection of the frenetic activity that almost never seems to slow as students raised on video games move on to controlling a machine in the real world. Developing and building these robots teaches Santa Clara engineering students how to design and build complex machines. It also teaches them to work in teams to create something bigger than any one student could possibly make.

This is a crucial lesson to learn for their professional careers, since most engineering projects require teams, sometimes with thousands of participants. Kitts and his student crew can provide low-cost exploration services to scientists. For example, the Triton remotely operated underwater robot has explored the depths of Lake Tahoe, allowing scientists to see what they think might be evidence of ancient landslides.

For Kitts, the difference between engineers and scientists is simple: “An engineer’s ultimate goal is to build stuff.” Sometimes that means working in an environment very close to that of a scientist—determining how feasible new technology might be without necessarily aiming it at concrete problems. Engineering research gives more tools and options to those who are oriented to solving specific problems. Kitts, like so many others in this book, believes that “tinkering” is the key to getting kids excited about science and engineering. Hands-on experience lets students go through the whole process of hypothesis testing and enables them to go off on their own tangents. Is tinkering enough? No, he says. “A next crucial step is catching it up with the real engineering analysis.” Tinkering, in short, works better if you know what you’re doing.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

About a decade ago, I had an opportunity to visit the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts, where the Pilgrims landed in 1620. Even though it was June, it was chilly and rainy—one of those New England early summer days when all you want is a bowl of chili and some dry place to eat it. There is no shortage of such places in the tourist part of Plymouth, but it seems only right to earn your food and warmth by walking around for a while first.

Plymouth’s waterfront looks out onto Cape Cod Bay, a chunk of the Atlantic protected by the curve of the Cape. The water on this drizzly day was flat under a low gray sky. A full-scale replica of the Mayflower rests in the harbor, absurdly small and with the odd bit of plastic sheeting covering parts presumably under repair (see Figure 14-4). (What would the Pilgrims have given for a big plastic tarp, one wonders—not to mention outboard motors?)

A little way around the curve of the shore stands an enormous, mausoleum-like edifice. In the middle of its imposing grayish columns there is an opening in the floor. I peered through the columns and down the hole and discovered that the structure is designed to frame a bit of rippled beach and Plymouth Rock (see Figure 14-5). The memorial is wildly out of scale for what is left of the Rock after nearly 400 years of erosion, tourists, and other insults. After all, it is not just about the small Rock but memorializing all that has unfolded since the Pilgrims’ buckled shoes first stepped here. I decided to walk up to higher ground to look out over the city and the bay. I went up past the tourist shops and restaurants, past the church, and found I was walking uphill into a wooded graveyard. The only sounds were the trees dripping from fog condensing into drops on their branches, and my footsteps on the path.

I paused where a sign announced I was standing at the grave of the colony’s leader, William Bradford, and looked out through the nearly illegible mossy nubbins of tombstones, the misty trees, and wisps of fog that closed out the bay below (see Figure 14-6). It was easy to imagine the early days of the colony, with black-clad figures making too-frequent trips up this hill. What would Bradford make of me? What would he make of my airplane trip in five hours from Los Angeles to Boston? Would he approve of my time working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on robot spacecraft that sailed alone to other planets? What would he think about a United States with over 316 million people in it, and cures available for nearly all the common diseases of his time (but not for some new ones)? What about Massasoit, the leader of the Wampanoag tribe living here then? What would he make of me?

Statues in town honor both men, and it was not hard to imagine either of them walking out of the mist to ask me what my business might be: Bradford in his black Pilgrim hat and swinging cape, Massasoit wearing a breechcloth. I imagined showing them spacecraft images of Saturn and Venus and telling them what we now know about those places. Even photographs would be surreal for them, much less images captured by a robot flying on its own to other planets.

What would Bradford and Massasoit ask me? If they saw a tourist bus go by on the road below, would they think the world had been taken over by witches and was now run by magic? Would they ask whether people still had wars and poverty (and how disappointed would they be when I answered in the affirmative?) Would the Pilgrims recognize that they were part of a long heritage of exploration, now reaching out toward the edges of the solar system? The scientific method was developed in Europe just around the Pilgrims’ time, the start of a period of rapid changes in politics and technology. And what would Massasoit think of how things worked out for his people? It is easy to stand on their land in modern raingear and think romantically of their simpler time, but they certainly could not walk down the hill always assured of a meal whenever they felt like it. Nor could they predict the world as it is today. As for me, I shook off the water pooling on parts of my raingear and headed back into our present, imperfect though it may be. It was finally time to leave the fog-shrouded cemetery behind and get that bowl of chili.

What would I ask if I had the opportunity to come out of the graveyard mists above Plymouth 400 years from now? A Plymouth visitor in the year 2415 would presumably be musing over events 800 years in the past. What events from our time would be remembered 400 years from now? Will the park visitor in 2407 be wearing outlandish but warm clothes, or will he be hungry and draped in homespun of lower quality than that available in 1600? Will he be 200 years old and in better shape than I am now, or will he be 35 and dying of a bacterial infection? Will he be one of a few survivors—or one of billions of humans living both on Earth and on other planets?

I would want to ask him whether my team won: did science and its methods survive, or did so few people become scientists and engineers that the world could not manage its problems? People of every era must think that theirs is the critical time for humanity, but the hazards now are particularly great. We have developed incredible technologies using the scientific method—but we are not making it a high priority to train new scientists and engineers to tend to what exists and make improvements where needed. Will enough voters understand the tough choices (and the need to invent solutions to problems) that we face regarding climate change and our use of energy? Science’s core message is that we can always learn more: what we know will always continue to change and grow. That message makes it hard to have a comfortable routine that we know will never change, but routine is a luxury in a world that is rapidly adding people.

I would like to think that the park visitor in 2415 will be 200 years old, and on vacation from his home on Mars. I would like to think that he will be clothed in a fuchsia and green leisure suit (hey, the future cannot be too perfect) that was not made by people living in poverty. (Rich thinks that if clothes are still made by people at all in 2415, that will be a failure of intervening generations.) And I would like to think that it will still be misty and cool in Cape Cod in the summer, and that Plymouth Rock and the beach walked by Bradford and Massasoit will not lie submerged below a risen sea.

All of us—scientists, students, citizens—hold in our hands the power to choose whether the visitor to Plymouth in 2415 has to arrive by boat, or whether he has the resources to do more than survive. Think about what has made the changes since 1620 possible and consider: what is the best way to honor those long-ago Plymouth residents and the many scientists and other world-changers who have come along since then? The best way is to become a bit of an explorer—a part-time scientist—yourself. There are plenty of questions left to ask. Get out there and ask them until you believe the answers.

Summary

In this chapter, you have seen some of the everyday activities of several scientists, engineers, and mathematicians, and learned how they think about their activities. The chapter also compared the distinctions between these professionals and argued that there are often blurry lines among them. This three-chapter section concluded with a bit of reflection on the last 350 years and how our current progress may look 350 years from now.