Catching Up with a Great Science Writer and Bicyclist I Haven't Seen For More Than 15 Years.

 

Katharine Sanderson and I on the 

north side of the Millennium Bridge

In 2004 Katharine Sanderson flew from the offices of "Chemistry World" magazine in Cambridge, UK, to Philadelphia to write about a collection of historic science books. The museum and library I worked for the time, Science History Institute, had just acquired a collection of 6,000 science books dating back almost to the invention of printing.  The article is here.

In February of the following year, I saw Katharine again and the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).  At the meeting, which was in St. Louis that year, Katharine introduced me to Marc Abrahams, the creator and impresario of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony held the second Thursday of September in Sanders Theater on the campus of Harvard University--in the other Cambridge. I eventually became a volunteer at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony.

Marc Abrahams at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, assisted by a human flashlight

In 2005 Katharine was back to Science History Institute to write about the 40th Anniversary Moore's Law.  Gordon Moore is a co-founder of Intel Corporation and known the law of increasing complexity of microprocessor chips that bears his name. But he considers himself a chemist and held the ceremony to celebrate Moore's Law at the Science History Institute, not in Silicon Valley.

Katharine and I met at another meeting a couple of years later. During that visit we ran to Camden, New Jersey, and back across the Ben Franklin Bridge.  We have kept in touch. I followed her writing at "Chemistry World" and later at "Nature" magazine.

A decade ago she started a family and became a more avid bicyclist.  She also moved to one of the top places for the cycling in the world: the Pyrenees mountains in southwestern France. 

Now she lives in Cornwall on the southwest coast of England. A good place for riding, but not the Pyrenees! We finally got together for a long walk and coffee after more than a decade and a half.  We also walked along the Thames with Katharine's friend Elaine who lives in the Pyrenees. Her husband Peter Cossins wrote "A Cyclist's Guide to the Pyrenees." Now we have a tentative plan that if I make one last ride of the Tour de France climbs, I will ride the Pyrenees instead of the Alps and Katharine will visit and ride the big climbs.

Since she is about half my age, I will watch her disappear into the clouds.

Where Does Politics End? On Earth? How Far Into Space?

Gloria Maritza Gomez Revuelta, 

a PhD candidate at El Colegio de Mexico

At the conference on science diplomacy since World War II, one fascinating presentation was on a group of equatorial countries who in 1976 decided to claim the territory directly above their countries in space. These countries in South America, Africa and Asia were among the many non-aligned states who did not take the side of either the western democracies or the communist world.  

Pointing to a mercator map with the countries proposing the pact highlighted, Gloria Maritza Gomez Revuelta, a PhD candidate at El Colegio de Mexico, said the United States and Russia were both launching satellites into geosynchronous orbits for communication and surveillance.  The satellites travelled in space at the same speed as the earth's orbit so they remained in position until they fell from orbit.  As this band of space filled with satellites, the countries with land underneath the satellites wanted to control the space above their land.

The pact never became reality. In the discussion after the talk, several people discussed the issue of what a country can claim as sovereign territory. Where does space begin? At the limits of the atmosphere? Higher?  Gomez Revuelta said Hannah Arendt said politics is part of life on earth. 

Arendt opens her book The Human Condition by saying it was an event “second in importance to no other.”  Sputnik meant that human beings had taken a real step toward actualizing a long-wished-for goal: to escape the earth. In Arendt’s telling of the story, earth alienation is part and parcel of the all-too-human dream of freeing ourselves from our humanity. Sputnik’s launch thus signified not simply the lowering of humanity’s stature, but humanity's destruction of humanity itself. (from the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College)

The discussion continued raising serious issues, and also the issue of how far into space could an equatorial country claim territory? The solar system? The Milky Way?  The entire universe? 

The discussion continued at lunch about Hannah Arendt and space and the Cold War and world politics today.                                

Science Diplomacy Conference in Paris at La Maison de la Chimie

 

Maison de la Chimie, Paris

On June 13 and 14, I attended a conference on science and diplomacy in Paris at the Maison de la Chimie.  The two-day conference had been organized long before Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24.  The title of the conference:

Diplomatic Studies of Science: The Interplay of Science, Technology, and International Affairs after the Second World War

Most of the conference was the unchanged from its planned format in 2020, but the public panel on the first evening was about how governments and international scientific organizations in most of the world acted within 48 hours to exclude Russian researchers from international collaboration.  

The six panelists had a variety of views about what could be done and could not be done now that Russia invaded a neighbor.  One of the panelists, Joachim Hornegger, a university president in Germany, can help Ukrainian students at his school, but not Russian students. He said many of the Russian students say they are against the war and do not want to return to Russia, but by law he cannot provide any assistance.

John Krige, a professor emeritus at Georgia Institute of Technology and author of ten books on science diplomacy, said Russia was completely in the wrong to invade Ukraine and even the issue of collaborating with individual scientists who say they are against the war is difficult: support for Putin among Russians in science and technology increased after Putin seized Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014.  Other Russians in science and technology emigrated after the seizure of Crimea.

The conference was part of an annual series since 1998 by the Science History Institute of Philadelphia called the Gordon Cain Conference.  I worked at the Institute from 2002-2015 so I attended several of the Cain conferences. Some of them were among the best history of science presentations I have ever heard. I am going to write separately about a few of these conferences. I will also write more about other participants I met and talks I heard at this year's conference.

In two weeks I hope to be in Warsaw, Poland, volunteering at the main train station to help feed the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  Since March I have been volunteering with #RazomforUkraine in New Jersey making combat first aid kits for the Ukrainian Army.  Going to this conference and hearing how sanctions affect research and policy around the world gave me another dimension of how the Russian invasion of Ukraine is causing suffering everywhere.