It was almost one year ago that the space shuttle Atlantis rose into the sky on a pillar of flame for the last time. The shuttle program ended forever with that mission. American astronauts were left to hitch rides on Russian space capsules, and American kids were left with no tangible direction forward for their dreams of a high-tech, space-happy future.

Tomorrow morning, the unmanned Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral so that supplies can reach the space station.

What's the big deal? The Falcon 9 is a private spaceship. It was fully developed and is owned by the private company SpaceX, brainchild of Elon Musk, the Internet billionaire who made his fortune from PayPal. With contracts from NASA to develop new launch platforms, SpaceX and other companies are poised to make space the domain of profitable businesses. And Musk has been explicit about his intentions to go beyond Earth's orbit and build commercially viable ventures that might take people to Mars in a decade or two.

His timing couldn't be better or more urgent. Even with the shuttle program over, America needs to remain a leader in space.

When I was a kid, the U.S. space program fueled my imagination and led me into a life of science. But as I got older, it became clear that the real business of building a human presence across the solar system was going to have to fall to business.

Governments might get the exploration of space started, but the vagaries of election and budget cycles meant that it could never go further. Now, we've reached the point where it's the exploitation of space that matters.

While exploitation might seem a dirty word to some folks, they should stop to consider how dependent we've all already become on the commercialization of that region of space called Low Earth Orbit.

Think of the billions of dollars in commercial activity tied to weather prediction, global broadcasting and global positioning. All this business depends on satellites orbiting overhead right now.

But if, as a species, we want to go beyond the thin veil of space directly overhead, then the basic principles of private venture and risk will have to apply.

These are the ones that have always applied. While Queen Isabella may have given Columbus his ships to cross the Atlantic, it was private companies that built the seagoing trade routes and brought folks across to settle (for better or worse). Likewise, it's only through commercially viable endeavors that large numbers of humans are getting off this world and into the high frontier of space.

It is no small irony that many of the billionaires bankrolling the new space entrepreneurship built their fortunes not in jet-fighter aerospace manufacturing, but in the dream space of the Internet. Like so many of the post-Apollo generation (myself included), these former high-tech whiz kids had their visions of the future forged in rocket fire. In that way, the wide vista of their dreams is uniquely American.

While no one can doubt that problems enough exist here on Earth, the high frontier of space has always called to us as a nation. In stepping out across that threshold, who knows what new solutions we might imagine, what new expressions of our own creativity we might invoke.

But none of it will happen unless we ... get ... out ... there.

I am counting on that small step that SpaceX will take tomorrow to one day prove to be a giant leap for us all.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia, the artist Stuart Ringholt leads unusual, after-hours tours: art-gazing in the nude. One day last month, 32 men and 16 women signed up. The New York Times was there to document the tour, in all its glory.

The link between art appreciation and clothes-shedding is pretty tenuous. Ringholt's naked tour may strike you as a mere stunt. Yet it also leads to some interesting questions.

How do we come to be comfortable with certain patterns of dress (or undress) and wildly uneasy about others? What factors influence how different groups or individuals think about nudity and other aspects of body image?

 

An evolutionary perspective helps here. I know of no other animals who cover up or decorate their bodies in socially prescribed ways, unless we work hard to stretch our definitions. Wild chimpanzees from Sierra Leone fashion "twig sandals" to protect their feet from the thorns of the kapok tree. A wild chimpanzee in Tanzania was observed to drape a knotted "skin necklace" from a colobus monkey around her neck.

Among the primates we humans are the only near-hairless ones, and to some degree this evolved biology plays a role. The original selection pressures to protect our non-furry selves with animal skins may be linked to cold climates. I've always thought it likely that Neanderthals used animal skins for protection in cold regions, though some anthropologists date the first clothes only to our own species at around 70,000 years ago. That research uses what I affectionately call "the lice method," in which the origins of worn clothing are dated to the appearance of body lice.

Perhaps full-on clothing or decorating of the body is a human-only thing to do. Yet the wearing of clothes is not universally prescribed; in some groups, nudity or limited genital cover-ups work just fine. Cross-cultural patterns of dress range from penis sheaths for males to full-body cloth claustration for females, with lots of variation at every turn.

Cultural tradition, partially but by no means entirely linked to environment, is a major force at work here. In Europe, for instance, naturism has a long history, and in many areas today nude beach-going and sea-bathing are widely accepted. Nude beaches and clothing-optional resorts exist in this country too, including at my childhood beach, Sandy Hook in New Jersey. But generally, as travel writer Rick Steves points out, Americans just don't exhibit the broad comfort level with nudity that Europeans do.

Cultural preferences may become entrenched, but they also respond to changing social conventions — even on a tiny time scale. Some years back, in a social experiment, the BBC brought together eight strangers who, after some days going naked around each other, shifted from great initial discomfort to easy modesty with each other. Embarrassment and shame are socially malleable.

Yet I don't want to suggest that nudity, or partial nudity, is experienced the same way by every person within some identified group. Certainly, going nude or partly nude is a gendered experience in the U.S.: ask any girl who's told that her physical safety relates to the degree of her "provocative" dress, or any woman who is informed that breast-feeding in public is inappropriate. In large swathes of the world, a woman's public nudity or partial nudity would be unspeakably dangerous for her.

Maybe Australian artist Ringholt, with his nude museum tours, has pulled off something more than a stunt after all: a sort of performance art that invites all of us to think in fresh ways about the clothes we put on, or don't, every day.

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You can keep up with more of what Barbara is thinking on Twitter.

Sometimes death comes from unexpected places. If you were a dinosaur living some 65 million years ago, your greatest fear was probably other dinosaurs; especially if you weren't a mighty meat-eater like the tyrannosaur, who had little to fear apart from, perhaps, other mighty meat-eaters. Yet, in spite of possible downward trends in some types of dinosaurs, what finished them off was a cosmic cataclysm of untold proportions, the collision with a six-mile wide asteroid.

The impact left a 100-mile-wide crater off the coast of Mexico in the Yucatán peninsula. It's hard to imagine that a single impact could do so much damage. But doing the math, the collision with a rock that big traveling at about 20 miles per second (150 times faster than a jet airliner) would deposit as much energy as one-hundred-thousand times the energy that would have been produced by the detonating all the H-bombs that existed at the height of the Cold War. Apparently, the violence of the impact was such that the rebound shot debris half the distance to the moon.

 

Dense clouds of dust blocked sunlight for months, causing the Earth's surface temperature to plummet. After the dust settled, greenhouse gases had the reverse effect. Temperatures to skyrocketed, going well above pre-impact levels. Over 50 percent of all living species died.

This was not the only impact, or the most deadly. A list of impacts and their respective craters can be found on the Internet. Fortunately, all large impacts are quite old. The most recent one of note is the Tunguska Event of 1908, possibly an asteroid fragment about 120-feet across that blew up a couple of miles above the ground. It flattened a 20-mile-wide swath of Siberian pine forest. The energy released was equivalent to 185 Hiroshima bombs.

Can something like this happen again? NASA's Near Earth Object Program attempts to map and estimate the impact risk of asteroids that come close to our cosmic neighborhood. Within their window of precision, we have nothing to fear in the short term, and certainly nothing to fear from really large objects, the so-called "global killers," such as the one that finished off the dinosaurs.

Large comets and asteroids should be detectable a couple of years out from impact, giving us some time to prepare. Our response wouldn't be quite as spectacular as the operation in the blockbuster movie Armageddon. Instead, by sending an unmanned craft with explosive devices or attachable rockets, we could ease the threat into a new, non-impact orbit. I discuss some ways of dealing with possible impacts in my book The Prophet and the Astronomer.

The rich history of cosmic collisions teaches us something important about life on Earth: had history been different, life would have taken a different course and we wouldn't be here.

We owe our existence to massive cataclysmic events, random accidents that played a large role in determining the pace of evolution. As a consequence, we can state confidently that humans are unique in the cosmos. Even if intelligent life exists on some Earth-like planet in a distant corner of our galaxy, "they" will be very different from us. We are the products of our own planetary history, a history that hasn't and won't be duplicated anywhere else.

The history of life on a planet mirrors the planet's life history.

Since no two cosmic histories will ever be the same, we are unique in the universe; a good lesson to learn from dead dinosaurs, especially in days when you may not be feeling so important in the big scheme of things.

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You can keep up with more of what Marcelo is thinking on Facebook and Twitter.

The only constant is change. It's the most basic fact of human existence. Nothing lasts, nothing stays the same.

We feel it with each breath. From birth to the unknown moment of our passing, we ride a river of change. And yet, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we exhaust ourselves in an endless search for solidity. We hunger for something that lasts, some idea or principle that rises above time and change. We hunger for certainty. That is a big problem.

It might even be THE problem.

 

Religions are often built around this heartache for certainty. In the face of sickness, loss and grief, a thousand dogmas with a thousand names have risen. Many profess that if only the faithful hold fast to the "rules," the "precepts" or the "doctrine" then certainty can be obtained.

Fate and future can be fixed through promises of freedom from immediate suffering, divine favor or everlasting salvation. Scriptures are transformed into unwavering blueprints for an unchanging order. These documents must live beyond question lest the certainty they provide crumble. When human spiritual endeavor devolves into these white-knuckle forms of clinging they become monuments to the fear of change and uncertainty.

It would be symmetrical if I could point to science as the pure antidote to the rigid rejection of uncertainty. Science, in the purest forms of its expression as a practice, holds to no doctrine other than that the world might be known. In the ceaseless pursuit of its own questioning path, science asks us to allow for ceaseless change in our ideas, beliefs and opinions. It's this aspect of science that I value more than any other.

But science does not exist alone as practice. It's also a constellation of ideas that exist within culture and those ideas can gain value, in and of themselves, without connection to actual practice. In this way science becomes something more and less. For some people the idea of Science offers a trumped up certainty that yields its own false defense against the rootlessness that roots of our existence.

My co-blogger Marcelo Gleiser put it beautifully two weeks ago when he wrote, "what is pompous is to think that we can know all the answers. Or that it's the job of science to find them." When science as an idea is used to push away the tremulous reality of our lived existential uncertainty then it, too, is degraded. It becomes just another imaginary fixed point in a life without fixed points.

Of course it doesn't have to be this way. The world's history of spiritual endeavor contains many beautiful descriptions of authentic encounters with uncertainty. Ironically these often serve as gateways to the most compassionate experience of what can be called sacred in human life.

Buddhism's First Noble Truth, which focuses specifically on the reality of change and suffering, serves as one example. In the Christian tradition works like the "Cloud of Unknowing," a 14th century paean to the importance of experience over doctrine or dogma, serves as another. Dig around in most of the world's great religious traditions and you find people finding their sense of grace by embracing uncertainty rather than trying to bury it in codified dogmas.

For science, embracing uncertainty means more than claiming "we don't know now, but we will know in the future". It means embracing the fuzzy boundaries of the very process of asking questions. It means embracing the frontiers of what explanations, for all their power, can do. It means understanding that a life of deepest inquiry requires all kinds of vehicles: from poetry to particle accelerators; from quiet reveries to abstract analysis.

Though I am an atheist, some of the wisest people I have met are those whose spiritual lives (some explicitly religious, some not) have forced them to continually confront uncertainty. This daily act has made them patient and forgiving, generous and inclusive. Likewise, the atheists I have met who most embody the ideals of free inquiry seem to best understand the limitations of every perspective, including their own. They encounter the ever shifting ground of their lives with humor, good will and compassion.

In the end, embracing uncertainty is to embrace a quality I have written about many times before: mystery. These lives we live, surrounded by beauty and horror, profound knowledge and pitiful ignorance, are a mystery to us all. To push that truth away with false certainty, falsely derived from either religion or reason, is to miss our most perfect truth.

We are, after all, just "such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep."

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You can keep up with more of what Adam Frank is thinking on Facebook and Twitter. His new book is About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang.

Last week I started a new series of micro-posts touching on the different ways quantum physics is weird. The motivation comes from my summer project of reviewing old notes and reacquainting myself with the mechanics of quantum mechanics. But no matter how many theorems on Eigenstates and Unitary operators I crank out, I am still bothered by how strange the quantum world is compared with our common sense expectations (of course the world cares not a whit about our expectations).

So today's weirdness can be summed up in a single word: probability. We are all familiar with probability. You flip a coin and before it lands there is a 50 percent chance it will come up "heads" and a 50 percent chance it comes up "tails."

The reason we don't know which side we'll get before it lands is because of ignorance.

 

From a classical physics perspective, if we knew the initial location and motion of every atom in the coin and the air and our hand we could, in principle, exactly and explicitly predict the coin's fate. Thus the probabilities we usually deal with in life come from not knowing everything there is to know.

Probabilities in quantum mechanics are not like this.

Not at all.

Not even a little.

In quantum mechanics probabilities are inherent. They don't come from ignorance. They are an intrinsic to reality. While I can speak quite accurately about half-lives relevant for a large collection of radioactive atoms, there is no way to predict exactly when an individual radioactive atom will decay.

Why is this weird?

Well, we like to think that every event we see in the universe has a cause. Vases don't fall from shelves on their own. Something, or someone, has to knock them off the shelf. Not so in quantum physics. Individual events like a radioactive decay just happen when they damn well want. They are inherently probabilistic or, better yet, "a-causal."

That is very weird indeed.

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You can keep up with more of what Adam Frank is thinking on Facebook and Twitter. His latest book is About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang.

From this primate mother to all others out there ... Happy Mother's Day!

I'm sharing here a beautiful two-minute video from the forests of Sumatra; it shows the intense, prolonged mother-infant bond among orangutans (great apes from Asia).

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You can keep up with more of what Barbara is thinking on Twitter.

Let's call it Heimat is a show by Hans Schabus, a 42-year-old Austrian artist, now up at Simon Preston's gallery at 301 Broome Street in New York's Lower East Side. The focus of the show is a video installation entitled "Atelier." A roughly 10-minute loop, "Atelier" takes as its score the final shoot-out scene in Sam Peckinpah's 1969 movie The Wild Bunch. Cut for cut, and camera angle by angle, "Atelier," which documents the artist's studio and its Vienna neighborhood, is a match to the Peckinpah original.

The dynamics and visual logic of the Peckinpah battle organize our perceptual encounter with what appears to be a safe, benign urban locale. We hear the Peckinpah soundtrack, very loud — mostly the violent noise of gun fire — as it builds energetically to a bloody conclusion.

The effect is darkly hilarious and even shocking; it is mysterious and fascinating, even once you are in on the joke. (See here for a short, very positive review.)

 

There's a lot one could say about what gives this video installation its authority and power. "Heimat" is a word with very particular associations in German; it has been used by Nazis and other right-wing extremists and has something like the meaning of homeland or fatherland. And then there is the fact that Schabus uses an artistic rendition of extreme graphic violence and mayhem to choreograph his own presentation of his Viennese art studio. Is it significant, given these themes, that two women in Islamic dress are briefly shown ambling down the street (to the sound of gunfire)? And what of the fact that the studio itself — the place of work and creation that is the video's ostensible subject — seems to be located in or near one of the famous pre-war Viennese Gemeindebau, that is, low-income social housing projects?

All this doubtless repays further thought. But I suggest we turn in a different direction.

The poet Antonio Machado once wrote, "you lay down a path in walking."

The act of walking scores the earth, marks it, and produces the path which, in turn, guides, but also constrains, our movements. Our lives play out against scores — in this case the sculptured ground on which we stand — which are of our own devising.

We are wanderers, says the poet; that is, we are path makers by nature.

Path-making, in the end, it turns out, is a graphical practice. The path is the trace of our wanderings, just as the line on paper, or in the clay, is itself, whatever else it is, the trace of the movements of the hand that made it.

The link between home and studio (Heimat and atelier) is as basic as it gets, then. Let's call it fundamental.

The work of art never contents itself with mere manufacture, with mere mark making, but seeks to exhibit what creation and mark making presuppose.

Part of what is displayed in Hans Schabus' video installation, and part of what makes it so outstanding, is this: life itself is a process of making; action leaves traces and these traces, whether on a piece of paper or canvas, or on the earth, are the scores we live by. This is what is presupposed and it is the work of art to bring this fact into focus.

Art is a way of keeping score.

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You can keep up with more of what Alva Noë is thinking on Facebook and Twitter.

Thanks to Bad Astronomy for posting this beautiful fly-over of the asteroid Vesta via the Dawn space probe.

Franklin and Lila had no clue they were making history earlier this week when they went to the hospital in upstate New York.

Franklin is a piglet and Lila is a goat. Each was rescued from a life-threatening situation and taken to Farm Sanctuary's new animal hospital, the country's first to be dedicated to what a Sanctuary press release calls "the victims of America's industrialized food system."

I see the new Melrose Small Animal Hospital in Watkins Glen as an excellent step forward in how we may think about, and work to protect, farm animals.

 

Lila the goat was part of a rescue operation at a farm that housed over 70 animals. Accounts of the rescue, one in the Buffalo News and the other by Farm Sanctuary, make for rough reading because the extent of the animals' suffering is made so clear. Emaciated as she was, Lila couldn't even stand up when she was discovered.

But Lila is recovering now, as are the other animals seized from that farm.

Franklin's survival was at risk in the short term because he was a runty piglet. He'd been briefly adopted from a pig farm by a kind person who first endeavored to nurse him back to health, then couldn't tolerate the idea of his surviving only to be slaughtered later for food. Franklin arrived at the hospital with mange, a skin condition that caused him great discomfort.

The animal hospital will treat chickens, turkeys, calves, piglets and goats. Patients will not be in short supply. Lila and Franklin attest to the fact that animal abuse may occur on farms of any size when the animals are seen primarily as financial commodities. Factory farms supply 95 percent of the meat, dairy and eggs consumed in the U.S.; that animals frequently endure injury and trauma on farms of this type is no secret.

Am I tarring all farms with a single dark brush? Is my purpose in blogging about this news to push everyone to lay down their steak knives and chicken nuggets, and convert to a vegetarian or vegan diet?

No, on both counts. Some farmers, of course, do not treat their animals poorly.

And until, maybe, 10 years ago, I'd happily have eaten Franklin. For that matter, until 4 months ago, I ate chicken and turkey frequently. So I'm in no position to moralize about diet to anyone.

But even meat-eaters can get behind the fair treatment of farm animals. Gene Baur, Farm Sanctuary's President and Co-Founder, put it to me this way in an email message:

"The creation of this hospital, from the generosity of so many supporters around the country, shows a growing mainstream awareness that farm animals are intelligent, emotional beings who deserve to be provided with the same level of care that we have traditionally given to dogs and cats. Regardless of dietary choices, most people now agree that intensely confining and abusing animals who are destined to be slaughtered for food is no longer acceptable. We have a moral responsibility to protect animals from factory farming abuses."

I, myself, can't eat farm animals anymore.

As Farm Sanctuary puts it, farm animals are "someone" and not "something."

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You can keep up with more of what Barbara is thinking on Twitter.

So, the semester is over, which means I have a little more time to turn to issues that keep me awake at night. One thing I am trying to do this summer is relearn some facets of quantum mechanics I may have forgotten over the years. In the process I am getting hit over the head, yet again, with how weird the world is at the micro-level. I was thinking that it would be fun to share these little tidbits with the 13.7 community. So today I begin an ongoing series of little posts on what makes quantum mechanics so strange.

Let's start with the most basic fact. On small enough scales, the world, which seems like a seamless whole to us, resolves itself into sand. What I mean is that, ultimately, reality is granular. That is what "quantum" in physics means: "package." To paraphrase Oliver Morsch:

"The photon... is the the quantum of light and as such indivisible: it is the smallest denomination of the currency of nature representing electromagnetic radiation. With a real currency such as the dollar you can, in principle, speak meaningfully of a fraction of a cent (when quoting for instance, stock market prices) although as a physical object it doesn't exist. No so in physics. A photon cannot be divided into anything smaller, period."

What is true of a photon is also true for something like spin. The spin of a particle is quantized. There are only certain values it takes and nothing else. Everything in nature, including energy, motion and space and time comes in discreet chunks. It's as if when, walking from one side of the room to another, you could only appear and disappear from discreet locations as you cross. That is weird.

And it only gets stranger from there.

Science is expensive, but the payoffs more than justify the costs. Let's focus here on basic science, that is, science that doesn't have the goal of being "useful" in the short run through technological or medical applications, and through generating wealth (usually for the shareholders). By basic science (and the boundary between basic and applied science is very blurry) I mean science for science's sake, the investigation of the fundamental workings of nature. How much should a country spend on basic scientific research?

In a time when balancing the United States' federal budget seems a distant dream, we have to ask if, indeed, a country is justified in spending billions of dollars on fundamental research. There are funding shortages in education, transportation infrastructure, modernization of the Internet, health care for millions of people and so on.

Of course, as well-argued by Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg in a recent essay for The New York Review of Books, the solution should never be to take money out of services that are badly needed, such as health care or public transportation, to sponsor scientific projects. However, the directive to invest in basic science should be a no brainer to any country that intends to either remain in, or climb to, a position of world leadership.

 

At the dawn of the 20th century, physicists were grappling with a whole new way of thinking about the world. Einstein forced people to rethink the meaning of space, time and energy, while the mysteries of the atom were redefining the laws of nature. Planck, Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and others could never have imagined then that their revolutionary ideas about the physics of the very small would effectively redefine the world in which we live. From the insides of the atom came the quantum revolution, spawning the myriad digital applications we take for granted today, from the laptop that I am using to type this essay to our cellular phones and ultrafast fiber optic cables.

In his article, Weinberg shares his concern for the future of "big science," that is, large science projects with billion-plus-dollar budgets. The recent example of the James Webb Space Telescope, the planned successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, brings this point home. Last July, the House Appropriations Committee voted to cancel the Webb telescope altogether, citing concerns about cost increases. (What wasn't clarified is that these cost increases were the result of previously insufficient funding for the project: when choking, it's natural to grab as much air as possible to survive.) Funding has been restored, but the feeling of uncertainty about the future of the project remains.

Meanwhile, in the world of the very small, Europe has been carrying the flag for a while with the Large Hadron Collider, the giant particle accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland. No longer able to compete solo against the Europeans, U.S. scientists have joined the project, which is a de facto worldwide collaboration to push the frontiers of knowledge. However, given Europe's recent economic woes, it's not clear that the current level of funding will continue, even with U.S. support.

How can we guarantee that higher energy accelerators and more powerful telescopes will continue to be built so that the science of the very small and of the very large can move forward? (Mid-scale science is poised to continue, in spite of frequent cuts. The same with creative small-science projects.)

In my view, it is unacceptable to cut the funding for big science. A world focused exclusively on the immediate, the pragmatic and the useful is efficient, but horribly dull. Imagine a world without news of mind-boggling discoveries about the universe or the mysteries of matter; a world without the Higgs, exploding stars, colliding galaxies or giant black holes. Even worse, imagine a world without all that we still don't know, and won't be able to discover without new tools for exploration. Then there are the potential spinoffs we would miss, the unpredictable discoveries, the revolutions that won't happen.

There are different ways to address this issue. One promising avenue is a continuation of, and increase in, international collaboration. New big science projects should operate as worldwide ventures, with larger participation from new players on the economic front, such as China, India and Brazil.

When I think of a world without big science, and see that the price tag of a B-2 bomber runs at more than $1 billion, or that each of the 10 running Nimitz class aircraft carriers cost $4.5 billion to build and about $400 million per year to run, I wonder whether we are focusing our priorities on the creative or the destructive side of humanity.

When we stop investing in the new we are bound to only see the old.

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You can keep up with more of what Marcelo is thinking on Facebook and Twitter.

Way back in 1992, the great saxophonist Branford Marsalis was trying to explain to an interviewer how jazz improvisation always works within constraints. "There's only freedom in structure, my man," he said. "There's no freedom in freedom." Now it might seem like a stretch to some of you, but I think Marsalis' point holds just as true for the great new Avengers movie as it does to Bebop.

Beyond the explosions, sky-cycle-riding aliens and enormous green anti-hero, The Avengers (and the movies which led up to it) achieved a kind of greatness exactly because of its constraints. Like all grand (science) fiction they forced themselves to live within a self-consistent universe of self-consistent rules. Why does that matter? Here is why, take away the superheroes and that's exactly how our universe works: self-consistently and with self-consistent rules.

 

The Avengers is the culmination of five separate films, beginning with Iron Man in 2008. At the end of that movie, Samuel L. Jackson, playing Nick Fury, the director of S.H.I.E.L.D., appears uninvited at Tony Stark's home and tells him: "I'm here to talk with you about the Avengers Initiative".

True comic fans worldwide swooned a swoon of collective joy. Audiences soon learned to wait through the credits to catch a glimpse of the next step on the road to a final adventure. There was the Incredible Hulk, then Iron Man 2, then Thor and finally Captain America: The First Avenger. Each film introduced essential new story elements and new characters to the Avengers cosmos.

But the creators of this Marvel cinematic universe went beyond characters and shared histories. It's the meta-physics (literally) shaping that universe that makes The Avengers so damn good and so enjoyable. It's a shared sense of rules dictating what can, and can not, happen.

While Gods and their magic play an essential role in the film, the writers were careful to link that magic to a science we have yet to understand. This is a point made explicitly in Thor via Arthur C. Clarke's 3rd Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Thus the mysterious "Tesseract" driving The Avengers plot is either a divine artifact of great power or a cube containing that most scientific of entities — Dark Energy. Likewise the portals between distant parts of this fictional universe are either the "Rainbow Bridges" of ancient myth or wormholes of modern general relativity. While excellent science advising is one reason these story elements are so engaging, it's the willingness of the series creators to stay within the lines they've drawn for themselves that is just as important. The reason why these lines matter is simple. We already live in a universe with rules.

Once we entered the age of science, magical thinking on a grand cultural scale disappeared. That's what makes politically sponsored prayer vigils to end something like a drought seem like such anachronisms. As a whole, we've come to accept that the universe has rules and our lives play out within their dictates.

When science fiction (or any fiction for that matter) remains true to the contours of its own rules it echoes the reality we inhabit. Star Trek was so successful because it kept both its political and technological universe coherent and consistent.

Bad science fiction (like the original Battlestar Galactica) can't make up its mind about the limits of its own technology, or the socio-political landscape it inhabits. In one episode ships can travel faster than light, in the next they can't, in the one after that they are making hyperspace jumps. The rules change so much that it becomes apparent that there are no rules and it stops being interesting.

And that is where The Avengers shines. Ever since the onslaught of CGI, we denizens of the summertime blockbuster have seen lots of superhero flics. From the flaccid Fantastic Four to the dismal Green Lantern, most of these efforts have been very forgettable. But the Avengers reminds us of something important even as we happily forget ourselves in watching the Hulk batter poor Loki like a ragdoll.

Only by acknowledging how science and technological boundaries limit our stories do we gain the freedom to transcend them and, in the process, invent new narratives of wonderfully heroic proportions.

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You can keep up with more of what Adam Frank is thinking on Facebook and Twitter. His latest book is About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang.

What leads people to acts of violence and genocide? What triggers empathy and altruism? Duke evolutionary biologist Brian Hare and research scientist Vanessa Woods believe the answer may be found in the great ape known as the bonobo.

Often mistaken for chimpanzees, bonobos are slightly smaller, with longer black hair atop their heads and pink lips. Unlike male-dominated chimp culture, it's the female bonobos that rule their communities. In these matriarchal societies, alliances are strong and females gang up together on males who step out of line.

There is another difference: while bonobos live in relatively peaceful communities, chimpanzees sometimes engage in a kind of primitive warfare. These instances were famously first documented the 1970's between two neighboring groups at Gombe by primatologist Jane Goodall. Gangs of roving chimps beat, tortured, and killed their rivals to acquire new territory. Since then, other scientists in the field have recorded equally horrible and gruesome accounts of conflict. Sometimes there is even infanticide and cannibalism.

 

Though bonobos can get feisty at times, on the whole their culture is markedly different. When conflicts arise, tensions are more often eased through sex than aggression. It may sound like a kind of hippie-utopia, but there's more going on than free love. And this is the reason that scientists are keenly interested in learning more about this unusual ape.

In their controlled experiments, Hare and Woods have noted marked differences in the way chimpanzees and bonobos react to strangers of their own species. A chimp treats the other as an outsider or rival. If food is available, he will hoard it for himself. However, under the same circumstances at Lola ya Bonobo Sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a bonobo will treat the stranger as if he is already part of the same group. If his new companion is locked out of his enclosure containing food, the bonobo finds a way to open the door in order to share his meal. And in case you're wondering, there might be some sex involved between them as well.

So what do such experiments and accounts of war and peace among other primates have to do with our own species? A look back at human history demonstrates that we are unquestionably capable of acting at both ends of the spectrum. Sometimes we do absolutely terrible, evil things to each other. We commit murder and genocide in the name of race, religion and prejudice of all sorts. We engage in war over boundary and resource disputes. In other words, there is an aggressive side to humanity that is often also visible in chimpanzee populations.

Yet we also clearly have the capacity to do a tremendous amount of good. We provide food and medicine to strangers in need through international aid organizations. We donate organs to unknown recipients. We sponsor children in the developing world so that they can go to school. These generous traits are reflected, to some degree, in the less aggressive bonobos.

By understanding all we can about the behavior and biochemistry of both species, evolutionary biologists such as Hare and Woods suspect that we may learn more about what pushes humans toward either extreme. And if we're lucky, that knowledge could be the key to a more peaceful existence for all of us.

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Guest blogger Sheril Kirshenbaum writes frequently on the relationship between science and culture. She is also director of The Energy Poll at The University of Texas at Austin. You can keep up with what she's thinking on Twitter and on the Web.

I was fascinated a few years ago to learn the initial meaning in the Greek agora and among its citizens of "rhetoric." But first, what do we now mean by the term?

Alva wrote recently about cigarette packages carrying frightening images of the consequences of smoking. He described it as propaganda, meant to manipulate, not persuade with the truth. He makes a powerful case.

We now think of rhetoric as, essentially, propaganda. Rhetoric is used to overstate and, often, misrepresent a case. In Alva's good phrase, it is used to "manipulate." In today's sense, "rhetoric" is slightly malign, intentionally misleading, not to be trusted.

Hence my astonishment when I learned (a claim I assume is true) that in ancient Greece the meaning of rhetoric — and the reason it was taught widely in Greece and the Roman Empire — was quite different.

 

Citizens found themselves confronted with practical, real-life choices, where they did not have access to "all the facts," yet had to make a real decision in face of uncertainty. Rhetoric evolved as the "art" of reasonably persuading one's peers of a course of action in the face of uncertainty.

On learning this, two big issues snap into place for me. First, if not for these sensible reasons, why did the Greeks and Romans teach rhetoric with so much care? Presumably rhetoric was an aspect of responsible citizenship.

I'm reading now the wonderful new book The Swerve, by Stephen Greenblatt, about the rediscovery of the Roman poet Lucretius in 1417 by one Poggio Bracciolini. He was a papal scribe and more, perhaps in the German monastery of Fulda. The discovery did much to pitch the Western world into the flowering humanism of the Renaissance, after perhaps 700 or 800 years of intellectual confinement to the authority of the church.

The second big issue that hits me is this: why do we not teach rhetoric in the ancient sense now? I suspect the answer is the role of science since Newton. We truly believe that science will know and, as Alva wrote, we can be informed of the facts and use reason as our basis of judgement.

Rhetoric, in this worldview, has no civil job to do; just the facts, please.

But I think this view mistakes our real world today. We, like the ancient Greeks, often do not know "the facts" as they stand, or those that may become relevant.

Then, in face of this uncertainty, we, like the Greeks, still have to decide.

If so, it seems to me that rhetoric — in the sense of the ancient world — remains honorable and is part of our civic duty.

Here is a link to an interesting piece in Science on the psychology of faith. The question raised relates to the cognitive basis for one's sense of religious belief. As the article states:

"Many people with religious convictions feel that their faith is rock solid. But a new study finds that prompting people to engage in analytical thinking can cause their religious beliefs to waver, if only a little. Researchers say the findings have potentially significant implications for understanding the cognitive underpinnings of religion."

While some folks may be offended by the very idea of the study, I think it's worth reading. Also I wonder about the difference between faith in doctrine or dogma vs. the sense of conviction arising from experience. In some sense this is the difference between religion in its institutional settings and spirituality in its personal expression.