On a series of Wednesdays throughout the semester, a steady stream of science professors from various universities (including our own) ventures to Wesleyan to give a lecture sponsored by the Public Science Lecture Series. In conjunction with the course Chem 180, students were asked to attend several of the lectures and then generate a review, expressing their reactions to the material, the speaker, and the manner in which the information was relayed. One principal focus of this course has been on the portrayal of science to a general audience. Therefore, students were strongly encouraged to approach the reviews from the standpoint of a member of the general audience and determine whether the lecture succeeded in speaking to each individual who had attended, whether a knowledgeable professor or an interested student. Students were also asked to consider the role of language in scientific practices and their popularization.

Two of the lectures the class attended showcased Margaret Geller of Harvard University speaking about her research in astronomy involving generating a "map of the universe" as well as a lecture on plant plasticity and the nature vs. nurture issue in the botanical world given by Sonia Sultan of the Biology Department at Wesleyan University. Here are the reactions of some selected individuals to the lectures.

Margaret Geller Lecture

Sonia Sultan Lecture

I loved to "play science" when I was a child. In those glory days of pioneering research, I would mix together any two substances that I found in my kitchen cabinets and carefully observe what happened. Usually, I produced a gloppy mess. It was fun. It was predictable. It was easy. I took notes.

Today, science is much, much harder on me. Much of the time, when presented with cutting edge scientific belief, I reach a point beyond which I am not willing to go. I imagine that people first dealt with the concept of a round world in the same way. I comprehend DNA; I understand the greenhouse effect. But when quantum scientists insist that the cat is neither in the box nor not in the box until I look, I get a headache. And about halfway through Professor Margaret Geller's presentation, titled "So Many Galaxies, So Little Time," my head began to throb.

It had nothing to do with her lecturing style. Her quick and engaging manner, wry sense of humour, and strong use of visual aids caught and held attention. The pictures of Zwicky were a particularly nice touch, and the use of the projector and slides to simply show us what might have taken ten minutes to describe showed that she was familiar with the ways that audiences react to solid, boring lectures. It was her simplest visual aid that gave me the most trouble. It still gives me a headache to think about it. A simple strip of elastic black cloth, with bright yellow stars stitched onto it. As Professor Geller stretched the strip of cloth, we all saw the stars move. Simple, right?

Wrong. The space is stretching, too. I was unsure of this the first time Professor Geller made a reference to it, wondering whether I was making an incorrect assumption or had just heard her incorrectly. But Professor Geller referred to this phenomenon again, this time as the explanation for redshift, the process by which visible light from distant stars slides down the wavelength towards infra-red. It is not because the star and the observer are moving away from each other, it is because the space itself is stretching. If I had the chance, I'd ask her one more time to tell me exactly what that means, because trying to think about it by myself isn't getting me anywhere.

Concept: space. Space is the absence of matter, in any of it's four states. It is empty. It is nothing. You can move through it, because it's the final frontier. You can't do anything with it, though. It's what there is when there isn't anything else.

Concept: space. A malleable surface, like a sheet of rubber tubing, that we live in. It can be stretched, compressed, maybe even cut or folded. My mind goes pop.

If space is a thing, then that allows for the possibility that there is a limit to it, some sort of non-space where presumably there really is nothing. No anything. Nothing to stretch, nothing to compress. Is there an Edge of Everything where space ends, and you simply cannot pass beyond that, not because you are prevented from doing so by any physical barrier but because there is just nowhere to go?

The mind rebels. Nevermind that the human race can see some 2 billion light years into space, that the edge of everything cannot therefore be closer than that. Nevermind that current science holds that we will never actually be able to reach the speed of light. Just knowing that there is a potential boundary beyond which we will never be able to cross leaves me cold.

When I was a child I did childish science, but now that I am grown I know that if I had managed to mix bleach and ammonia by accident I would have died in a cloud of chlorine gas. Even the search for little truths can be dangerous. Still, the science I practiced as a child provided me with simple answers (tide and windex makes blue green goop) that never threatened my faith in the foundations of reality. As exciting as modern science is, as potentially rewarding as it is, I sometimes wish for a return to the old days. Maybe the experiments were a little more dangerous, but the answers never were.

*For More information regarding Astrophysics at Harvard CLICK HERE

Amir Hasson

Language is an integral part of all interpretation and understanding --without it we would not be able to make sense of anything. In her "Adaptive Flexibility in Plants," Sonia Sultan made an excellent use of both everyday and scientific language to explain the procedures and conclusions of her experiment with growing clone weed plants in different environments. Language was not only essential to communicating her research, it was also essential to structuring the concepts and methods that propelled her research. Indeed, the lecture was successful because it integrated the concepts and language of her research with the language she used to communicate her research. In this way there was a transparency between what she hypothesized, what she did, what she concluded, and what she explained. This review attempts to assess and recapitulate the transparency of Sultan's lecture.

Sultan had some premonitions about why certain plant environments are so diversified, especially weeds. Her photos of the weeds growing in all different kinds of terrains and geographical locations --from deserts to marshes to the concrete jungle of city sidewalks-- provided a good starting point for her lecture, causing the audience to ask the same question which prompted her research: how can and do these plants do this? Sultan was also curious about the whole nature vs. nurture debate. She wished to redefine what the terms 'nature' and 'nurture' might actually mean, and perhaps reveal a new understanding of how they inter-relate. Indeed, this is exactly what she accomplished by setting up an experiment to see how 'smartweed' genotype clones would adjust to different environments. The concepts 'genotype clone' and 'adjust to environment' were key to doing research on her hypothesis; they translated her belief that 'the same living organism could develop in different ways' into a workable set of terms that served as the basis for her whole experiment. It was interesting to find out Sultan began her research. I wondered if most scientists begin their research in the same way.

Cloning smartweed genotypes, or any plant, was straight-forward; determining and structuring the different environments were the key aspects of her experiment. She made an informed choice to use light and water as the independent variables, as light and water seem to be the basis of life itself. 'Independent variable' is another key term. For light and water to be 'independent' of other variables, she had construct the experiment so that the light and water affecting the weeds remained constant. She did this by using different levels of screening for the light variable, and an automated irrigation system, for the water variable. In order for her research to be valid, she had to reduce as much margin of error and inconsistency as possible. She had to convince her audience that she had done all she could to structure the experiment to make it valid --nothing could have been added or taken out (perhaps reminding one of a Brunelleschian or Vetruvian definition of beauty).

In part, Sultan's lecture was convincing because her experiment was not too complicated, so not much simplification was required to explain her procedures as they were fairly self-explanatory. Sultan's use of graphs and pictures of her experiment were both informative and persuasive. Through them she effectively described how smartweeds with less light allocate thinner, wider leaf tissue to capture more light with more surface area; and those with less water develop root systems that maximize their necessary accessibility to water. In essence, Sultan's research and lecture showed how smartweeds with the same genes could adjust their physiological development in order to survive in different (even very severe) environments. Although this conclusion has serious implications for the nature vs. nurture debate, Sultan's primary focus was to demonstrate and justify her research, probably since her conclusions were so momentous.

Towards the end of her lecture Sultan did address the implications of her research. Her conclusions, though somewhat radical in the context of the gene-driven view of development, were sound. Although plant genes are not human genes, they are still genes, which are structurally, for the most part, very similar to human genes. Furthermore, plants do not adjust to their environments based on intentionality, which implies that humans have an even greater capacity to adjust to their environments. Sultan suggested that genes function as a "set of possibilities," rather than an absolute, predetermined blueprint for an organism. She argued that evolution and development are processes that essentially occur through the interaction between the individual and the environment, neither is primarily. Hence, she felt that scientists should not construe the question as nature vs. nature, but rather how the interaction between nature and nurture determines development. Sultan concluded that 'adjustability' or 'repertoires of response' is the chief criterion of evolution, rather than individual traits based on genes.

Clearly, language is essential to the nature/ nurture debate, even if it just involves changing the phrase 'nature vs. nurture' to 'nature and nurture.' Without the language of Sultan's research, there would be less incentive to make this kind of shift. Yet these 'shifts' reveal how crucial language is to interpretation and understanding. Without these shifts we would not be able to think about the world in newer, truer ways. By saying 'nature and nurture' the whole concept of development changes, and it seemed that Sultan felt that research should shift in order to develop a language for this new concept, which is what her research had begun to explore. Sultan's lecture was concise, coherent, and controversial. She provided statistical, visual, and theoretical evidence to support her conclusions while communicating to her audience in an enthusiastic and engaging manner. I learned more about how biological research is done and I discovered some thought-provoking ideas that, at the very least, have lead to some fascinating conversations.

*For more information about Sonia Sultan CLICK HERE