Star scientists open a program posing questions about our beginnings — and one about finding $50-million at a time of cutbacks
For 12 hours at Arizona State University, a sold-out crowd of 3,000 people gave a group of famous scientists a pop-star welcome, cheering their remarks and lining up for autographs after a day full of discussion about black holes, string theory, and evolutionary biology.
At a time when program cuts and faculty layoffs dominate the headlines of local and national newspapers, and educators are bemoaning the state of science education, the Origins Symposium held here during the first week in April provided an expansive start to an ambitious universitywide project.
The goal is to bring together scholars from the sciences, the social sciences, engineering, law, and the humanities to study the origins of just about everything, and support expanded research, education, and outreach. The Origins Initiative, as the project is called, "is designed to ask some of the deepest questions that people have ever asked," said Lawrence M. Krauss, director of the project, and a professor in Arizona State's School of Earth and Space Exploration.
The program has also prompted questions about the university's ability to sustain it during an economic slump. The ambitious plan includes hiring five to 10 key faculty members over the next five years, and adding an equal number of internationally known visiting professors who would come for a couple of months at a time. The program will be mostly privately supported.
Raising money for a new program at this time isn't easy, Mr. Krauss acknowledged. He hopes to raise up to $50-million over the next 10 years to back the effort, and says he is optimistic that donors will come through.
Most of the approximately $200,0000 he raised for the symposium came come from scientists and research groups; a $250,000 donation fell through when the donor's "circumstances changed."
Virgil Renzulli, vice president for public affairs, said Arizona State has protected its academic programs during budget cutting. "The Origins Initiative was planned and commitments made long before the current budget problem," he said in a written statement. "We are not backing off our goal of making ASU a top public research university. The budget cuts are short term. Origins is long term. And we didn't want to lose this opportunity."
Over the next several years, the founders hope to introduce interdisciplinary courses, an origins major, and resources for science writers and journalists.
"Most of our students aren't going to be biologists or physicists, but we want them to be able to understand the scientific process and appreciate the wonders of science," said Mr. Krauss, an internationally known theoretical physicist and cosmologist who was recruited last summer to lead the program.
Stellar Speakers
During this month's four-day symposium, which opened the project, more than 70 of the world's most influential scientific thinkers, including eight Nobel laureates and a smattering of best-selling authors, gathered at Arizona State to hash out their ideas about the origins of the universe, the stars and planets, human life, consciousness, and culture.
"We wanted to start with a bang," said Mr. Krauss.
Among the attendees was John G. Fleagle, a professor of anatomical sciences at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, who serves on the science executive committee of the Leakey Foundation, which supports research on the study of human origins.
The symposium "brought together people from all edges of academe, from people who are interested in particle physics to cosmology, to extraterrestrial life, sociology, and paleontology," said Mr. Fleagle, a noted primatologist. "I'll bet at least three-quarters of the people in that room found something new and amazing."
Asked whether he was concerned that the Arizona State effort would siphon private money from existing programs in origins research, he laughed. "What can I say — yes, I wish all the money was coming to me," he said. "But you can't hold back if there's something that needs to be done. Every group has to maximize its opportunity, and you just have to find donors whose interest matches what you want to do."
Many of the speakers at the lively, daylong series of public lectures have helped communicate and popularize complex scientific concepts through their books and public appearances.
Among the Arizona State faculty members represented were Donald C. Johanson, a paleoanthropologist who described the thrill of discovering "Lucy," a 3.2-million-year-old hominid skeleton, in Ethiopia in 1974.
"I was walking back to our Land Rover and I glanced over my shoulder, and a tiny piece of bone was glistening in the sun," he told the audience. As more and more parts of the skeleton emerged, he said, "at my feet was a boyhood dream."
Mr. Johanson is founding director of the Institute of Human Origins, which has been affiliated with Arizona State since 1997 and will work closely with the broader Origins Initiative.
Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University who specializes in string theory and quantum gravity, explained why he spends so much time explaining theoretical physics to mainstream audiences via television shows and popular books: "I do it because when I see a kid open his or her eyes and say, 'This is spectacular,' it feels great."
Other speakers included Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist recently retired from the University of Oxford, whose best-selling book, The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), urges scientists to work to dispel the idea that God exists, and Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, who is an expert on language and cognition.
Joseph Melfi, an Arizona State sophomore majoring in chemical engineering and biochemistry, arrived for the public lecture with a stack of science books he hoped to have autographed by their authors. "I'm ditching four classes for this," he said as he and eight fellow students, members of a group called the Secular Freethought Society, settled into their seats. "This is like a rock concert where every star you ever wanted to see is going to perform."
Not quite every star made the stage. Stephen W. Hawking, the famed British theoretical physicist, author of A Brief History of Time (Bantam Books, 1988), was to have been the symposium's headliner, but he had to cancel at the last minute because of a chest infection. His daughter, Lucy Hawking, took his place, along with a digitally recorded presentation that her father had prepared for the symposium about space travel and the possibilities of extraterrestrial life.
In the recording, Mr. Hawking called for having a base on the moon by 2020 and a manned landing on Mars by 2025. "Spreading out into space will completely change the future of the human race and maybe determine whether we have any future at all," he said through a voice synthesizer he uses because of a motor neuron disease that has left him severely disabled. "A new manned-spaceflight program would do a lot to restore public enthusiasm for space and for science generally."
"We live in a society that is increasingly governed by science and technology," he added, "yet fewer and fewer young people want to go into science."
The Origins Initiative's director, Mr. Krauss, moved to Arizona State last year from Case Western Reserve University, where he was chair of the physics department and wrote hundreds of scientific papers as well as books that popularized scientific concepts. In his best-selling book, The Physics of Star Trek (Basic Books, 1995), he examined both plausible and implausible concepts like time travel, wormholes, and warp drives.
Universal Questions
"People may say, 'Why spend time studying something that may seem esoteric?'" Mr. Krauss said of the origins theme. Because, he responded, this is a common touchstone of human experience. Everyone, at some point, wonders, "How did I get here?" and "Are we alone?" he said. "These are questions that help us understand, at our very core, who we are as people."
They are also questions that provoke fierce debate over issues like how evolution should be taught in the classroom. Mr. Krauss, who testified in Texas last month against efforts by social conservatives to inject skeptical language about evolution in school texts, said controversy surrounding the origins of the universe is part of what makes it such a fascinating topic.
In the coming years, he said, policy makers will be discussing many science-related issues, including stem-cell research, the potential of nanotechnology, global warming, and space travel. Having an educated and engaged public is crucial, he and other speakers agreed.
Michael M. Crow, president of Arizona State, said the initiative fits the goals of the "new American university" he envisions, in which students and faculty members work across disciplinary boundaries on scholarship that engages and benefits the broader public.
"We've been trying to find a really big question that we think will be interesting to everyone — something that connects everyone, not just some people," he said in an interview. The Origins Initiative "is a good way to get a big question on the table."
Since he was appointed president, in 2002, Mr. Crow has pushed an ambitious agenda to significantly expand Arizona State and vault it into the top tier of research institutions. Those goals have run into serious financial roadblocks, as state budget cuts have forced the university to lay off faculty members and close programs.
The president said, however, that he wouldn't let budget pressures force him to scrap ambitious programs like the Origins Initiative, which taps into the university's strengths in areas such as human origins and astrophysics. The program will also serve as an umbrella for work being done in existing centers like the Institute of Human Origins and the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.
With the $50-million, 10-year figure as a goal, Mr. Krauss said he would develop a budget proposal over the next few months with specifics on how the money would be acquired and spent
"Michael Crow convinced me that this was a university priority," he said, "and judging from past programs, I felt comfortable that the necessary resources (including faculty members) would be provided, with the understanding that both he and I would be fund raising to ultimately provide a stable operating income." Mr. Krauss added that "I did not pin my arrival to a specific figure."
The money, Mr. Crow insisted, will be well spent. "We are responsible for creating an institution that connects directly to the entire cross section of society," he said, "and to give them the best intellectual learning environment we can put together."
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 55, Issue 33, Page A8
