when the stars came out

As Ayn Rand said of her novel, the dominant narrative these days around the world fountainhead, The story of ‘Individualism vs. Collectivism, not in politics, but in the soul of man’. In India, we also celebrate individualism where heroic individuals, through their will power, strategic vision, perseverance and unique personal qualities, like Nietzsche’s Superman, elevate society by their bootstraps, and create a new moral make arrangements. This new social order would, apparently, enjoy a higher degree of human creativity and human freedom. In this narrative individualism has created the modern world.

However, that is only half the story. While Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Stephen Schwarzman, NR Narayana Murthy, Mukesh Ambani have made a significant difference as individuals, along with countless others who have passed away, there is another point of view that is equally important but Rarely celebrated. Ambiguous by the dominant narrative, it appreciates the contributions of other account groups. Working together in collaboration, such groups, through sharing and collaboration, produce results that are no less beneficial to society. In this story, there is no Superman, only worker bees.

$9.7 billion creation James Webb Telescope There is one such story. One of the most important technological achievements of the past few years, which included construction, transportation, launchThe James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is one such project that has marked more than twenty years of continuous collaboration between multiple teams. Its successful location in deep space marks a defining moment in the history of mankind reaching the stars. Another journey in the ‘soul of man’ has just begun.

telescope making

There are four aspects to this other narrative, which complement Superman, and are not competitors. These are the project’s ambitions; how it was put together; technologies involved; and its implications for human society. Taken together, they form an illustrative case of the collective production of a common good.

The James Webb Telescope was conceived by its initiators as the coming together of several cutting-edge technologies. It was planned to enable humanity to look deep into space and look further back in time. The telescope will give us new knowledge about the origin of the universe. Because it is essentially an infra-red spectrum telescope, compared to Hubble which operates largely in the UV and visible light range, it will allow us to see the beginning of ‘Cosmic Dawn’, which is 250 million years old. later period. The big bang when the light from the haze cloud began to break and the first stars and galaxies began to form. JWST will take us back about 150 million years to Hubble, when it all began.

The project seeks to understand how galaxies form and evolve. It will seek evidence of dark matter, study exoplanets, capture images of planets in our solar system, and address other such cosmic curiosities. This knowledge will impact not only the physical sciences but also the humanities and social sciences as we attempt to understand our place in the universe and ask those perennial questions such as: is there other life in the universe? Will it look like us and, even more worrisome, will it find us? What is the relationship between ‘chance’ and ‘need’ to use Jacques Monod’s thesis in the origin of life? In this ambition, JWST relates to the classical tradition of scientific inquiry: the search for fundamental curiosities untouched by special interests.

The CEO of Northrop Grumman, an aerospace and defense company and the project’s primary contractor, has gone on record to announce that due to delays and production constraints, the company will book profits only after the telescope’s successful deployment.

collaborative science

If the project’s ambition was to understand the origin of the universe and our place in it, then the execution of the project was an outstanding product of a collective effort. Although the project had many notable individuals leading the various groups, the entire emphasis was on its achievement by the teams that worked together to build the instruments, build the telescope parts, design the cooling system, etc. This new collective, which includes liberated scientists and engineers, collaborated with the single objective of producing, launching, and placing at a chosen Lagrange point (a point where the gravitational forces of Earth and the Sun are balanced), a telescope that was lighter than Hubble. But the mirror was six times bigger. Compared to Hubble’s location, 550 km from Earth, JWST was located 1.5 million km away. Therefore, all its parts had to work the first time. There was no second chance. Recent reports from NASA tell us that the deployment and alignment of the Mammoth telescope is progressing well and may even ‘exceed expectations’. The satellite’s launch on 25 December 2021, was a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency and involved several universities, organizations and companies from 14 countries.

Furthermore, the science and technology that was deployed should be toasted as a tribute to human ingenuity. Eighteen hexagonal beryllium mirrors had to first be folded to fit the available space in the Ariane rocket and then revealed in deep space, to create a single mirror with nanometric precision. For example, one of the instruments has 250,000 individually controlled shutters to ensure that the light of only a narrow part of the sky is seen. The JWST teams built and installed a near infra-red spectrograph, a near infra-red camera, a slitless spectrograph and, after technical difficulties, a mid infra-red instrument, as opposed to other instruments, which were required to be cooled to 40 K. It needs to be cooled down to 7K. The successful cryocooler was eventually engineered at great cost.

These collaborative achievements have created a sophisticated scientific infrastructure for space exploration and opening doors to new scientific knowledge. It has created a new ‘Knowledge Commons’. Administered by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI), which has a charter and a website that places all relevant information in the public domain, and which invites scientists from around the world to submit projects, JWST, through a process of commonsense. Through, is on the threshold of producing a vast knowledge commons. The ‘Veer Collective’ thus shares space with the ‘Veer Person’. Hubble gave us adorable pictures of the infinite sky, like the Lagoon Nebula. JWST will give us pictures of the sky that Isaac Asimov imagined in his brilliant science fiction short story dusk When the stars came out

(Peter Ronald D’Souza is DD Kosambi Visiting Professor at Goa University)