Alan Alda will be presenting the Flame Challenge Prize winner during the 2013 World Science Festival, which takes place May 29–June 2.
Credit: Greg Kessler © 2012 World Science Festival

In his first memoir Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I’ve Learned, Alan Alda recalls that as a young child, his mother would often caution him to keep silent in public. “Don’t notice anything,” she’d admonish him. It’s no small irony that years later, he would play a universally beloved television character named Hawkeye.

Alda played that part for 11 years in the classic hit M*A*S*H and, more recently, tweaked liberal sensibilities as the Goldwater-like Arnold Vinick in The West Wing. He is a prolific writer and director with 33 Emmy nominations (six wins) plus three Tony nominations for his work on Broadway. And then there are the many memorable film roles, from Crimes and Misdemeanors to California Suite to, most recently, Tower Heist.

It’s no surprise that Alda’s perpetually in demand for films and TV, but what is surprising is where his heart is these days. His deep-rooted passion for science has evolved into a remarkable endeavor: He’s currently visiting professor at Stony Brook University’s Center for Communicating Science—a department he helped found in 2009 to train scientists to communicate more effectively with the public. As if that weren’t a sufficient departure from show biz, in 2012 Alda and the center also created the Flame Challenge, an annual international contest in which scientists are challenged to explain complex concepts to 11-year-old children. More so than any of his television, stage, or screen credits, Alda is palpably animated when conversing about these unique ventures.

Question: How did you become a visiting professor at Stony Brook University?
Alan Alda: I realized when I was doing Scientific American Frontiers for 11 years on PBS how important it was for the scientists to have really good communication skills. Science really surrounds us in our lives, and it’s at the heart of our economy. We all have to understand it better. So, in my travels, whenever I was at a university where they taught science, I would ask, did they think it would be possible to train scientists as communicators while they are training them as scientists? The only place in the country that really picked up on the idea was Stony Brook. And Howie Schneider, who runs the school of journalism, got very enthused about it and began the Center for Communicating Science. And I’ve been helping with that.

Q: This is a rather unusual move for a movie star.
AA: My relationship with science is as someone who’s curious and hungry to know, hungry to understand. So all I have to offer is my ignorance and my curiosity, which is a good combination, as long as they come together. Ignorance without curiosity is not so hot. But I actually do have something to offer, which is that I’ve spent my life communicating and thinking about how communication works.

Q: There should probably also be a center for communicating economics, public policy, law—all kinds of other disciplines, don’t you think?
AA: I can’t change the entire world [laughing]. Yeah, better communication would be terrific. I’ve often wondered what the “fiscal cliff” was [chuckling], or even what “Obamacare“ actually entails—it’s always been a little murky and could have been communicated better.

Q: And yet we’re voting on these things.
AA: I know that some members of Congress have not understood these subjects as well as they might want to. So, yeah, our lives depend on good communication. Good communication helps personal relationships, it helps bosses and employees get along better. We rely on it.

Q: Speaking of science, what’s the status of your play, Radiance: The Passion of Marie Curie?
AA: We did a wonderful production of it at the Geffen Playhouse in California. Anna Gunn played Marie, and she was fantastic and that was wonderful for me to see. I’m constantly revising it. In the car on the way over here I was making notes on a couple of scenes. It sounds stupid if I tell you how many drafts I have.

Q: I’m a writer. Please, share!
AA: How about 100. I probably will be continuing to work on it until well after I’m dead. I love the character; she is a hero of mine and I want to tell that story as well as I can.

Q: You write, act, direct. Do you sing, too?
AA: I have sung twice on Broadway—in The Apple Tree and in a musical that lasted until the end of the first act. [Laughs.] It was called Café Crown. I have to work hard at singing. I was thrown out of the glee club in high school because I had trouble staying in the same key. I have this unique ability to sing in three keys at once. Seriously, I’ve gotten a lot better over the years. I sing when I have to.

Q: Would you star in a television series again?
AA: If they asked me to do a show that I’m interested in or that I’d get to work with someone that I’d like to work with. I like to work with Laura Linney, so I did her show [The Big C] a few times. I did ER and The West Wing. They were really interesting places to act. And 30 Rock. That was fun. Tina Fey is so brilliant. I’m in this wonderful position where I can do what interests me. And whatever comes along that interests me, I do. The rest of the time I bother scientists about communicating.

Alan Alda The Saturday Evening Post

 

October 1985

“The next simulation will give you some idea of what it’s like to fly through a meteor shower.”

January/February 1986

“I’m convinced he’s got one of those tiny TV sets in there.”

October 1985

“You have a lot to learn about stem cell research.”

January/February 2007

“Gentlemen, Professor Didlip has some disturbing news about the new miracle vitamin X!”

June 1957

“Don’t look now, but I think we’ve developed a germ that eats microscopes!”

March 1984

Cartoons: Science Friction The Saturday Evening Post

Like psychoanalysis, autosuggestion, and the Lost Generation, relativity was one of those trendy terms everyone used in the 1920s but few understood. 

The nation’s newspapers informed readers that relativity was a revolutionary idea that would change our understanding of the universe, but they were rarely able to explain any further.

“The meaning of relativity,” Einstein said in a 1929 interview with The Saturday Evening Post, “has been widely misunderstood. Philosophers play with the word, like a child with a doll. Relativity, as I see it, merely denotes that certain physical and mechanical facts, which have been regarded as positive and permanent, are relative with regard to certain other facts in the sphere of physics and mechanics. It does not mean that we have the right to turn the world mischievously topsy-turvy.” (Read the entire the interview here “What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck”; October 26, 1929.)

And still Americans used the word for what they thought it should mean: Everything is relative. An act was only ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in relation to something else. There were no absolutes.

Hoping to correct this error, James R. Newman wrote an extensive article on Einstein’s theories for The Saturday Evening Post in 1959. “The statement that everything is relative is as meaningful as the statement that everything is bigger. As Bertrand Russell pointed out, if everything were relative there would be nothing for it to be relative to.

“The name relativity is misleading. Einstein was in fact concerned with finding something that is not relative, something that mathematicians call an invariant. With this as a fixed point, it might be possible to formulate physical laws which would incorporate the ‘objective residue’ of an observer’s experience; that is, that part of the space and time characteristics of a physical event which, though perceived by him, are independent of the observer and might therefore be expected to appear the same to all observers.” (See “Einstein’s Great Idea” by James R. Newman; May 16, 1959.)

Relativity reconciled the mechanical model of the physical world—as described by Isaac Newton—to a universe in which scientists could measure the distance of light years and the speed of electrons. He achieved this with a mathematical model that amended Newton’s claim that time was absolute, true, and flowed evenly without interference.

As shown in Einstein’s explanation, reproduced by Newman and printed in the Post, time did not ‘flow’ identically for two observers. Two events that appeared simultaneous to one person could appear sequential to another.
 

Einstein’s Own Example of the Relativity of Time

The diagram shows a long railroad train traveling along the rails with velocity (V), in the direction toward the right of the page.

The bottom line denotes the embankment running parallel to the rails.

The letters A and B mark two places on the rails, and the letter M marks a point on the embankment directly midway between A and B.

At M stands an observer equipped with a pair of mirrors that are joined in a “V” and inclined at 90 degrees. By means of this device he can observe both places, A and B, at the same time.

We imagine two events at A and B, say two flashes of lightning, which the observer perceives in his mirror device at the same time. These he pronounces to be simultaneous, by which he means that the rays of light emitted at A and at B by the lightning bolts meet at the midpoint M of the length A—> B along the embankment.

Now consider the moving train, and imagine a passenger seated in it.

As the train proceeds along the rails, the passenger will arrive at a point M¹, which is directly opposite M, and therefore exactly midpoint between the length A —> B along the rails.

Assume further that the passenger arrives at M¹ just when the flashes of lightning occur.

We have seen that the observer at M correctly pronounces the lighting bolts as simultaneous; the question is, will the train passenger at M¹ make the same pronouncement? It is easily shown that he will not.

Obviously if the point M¹ were stationary with respect to M, the passenger would have the same impression of simultaneity of the lightning flashes as the observer on the embankment. But M¹ is not stationary; it is moving toward the right with the velocity (V) of the train.

Therefore (considered with reference to the embankment) the passenger is moving toward the beam of light coming from B, and away from the beam coming from A.

It seems clear then that he will see the beam emitted by the flash at B sooner than the beam emitted by the flash at A. Accordingly he will pronounce the flash at B as earlier in time than the flash at A.

Which of the two pronouncements is correct, the observer’s or the passenger’s?

The answer is that each is right in its own system. The observer is right with respect to the embankment, the passenger with respect to the train. The observer may say that he alone is right because he is at rest while the passenger is moving and his impressions are therefore distorted.

To this the passenger can reply that motion does not distort the signals, and that, in any case, there is no more reason to believe that he was moving and the observer at rest than that the passenger was at rest and the observer moving.

There is nothing to choose between these views, and they can be logically reconciled only by accepting the principle that simultaneity of events is meaningful only with respect to a particular reference system; moreover, that every such system has its own particular time, and unless, as Einstein says, we are told the reference system to which the statement of time refers, a bare statement of the time of an event is meaningless.

Did relativity profoundly change our lives, as the newspapers of the 1920s claimed? Not directly—unless you’re able to drive your car at the speed of light, in which case relativity would be a matter of infinite concern to you. But relativity did lead to other innovations, such as nuclear power and GPS.

So, you can live quite comfortably without understanding why energy = (mass) x (the speed of light squared). Just keep your speedometer under 186,282 miles per second and you’ll be fine.

Relativity: Einstein’s Explanation The Saturday Evening Post

The issue is clouded by political and economic implications. It doesn’t help that global warming has only been seriously considered by the media in the recent past. Not long ago, the topic was dismissed as yet another crisis invented by tree-hugging ecologists.

The media avoided the issue partly because they’re better at handling gossip, scandals, and trivia and partly because the issue is incredibly complicated. The terms and concepts of climatology are based on principles and measures that are unique to this science. Yet, as the 1950 article below indicates, climatology — and the concern for global warming — is not so very new.

In “Is the World Getting Warmer?” [PDF download] Albert Abarbanel and Thorp McClusky noted that many persons suspected, and a few scientists knew, that  “mysterious changes are happening to the world’s climate.”

Cumulative studies now indicate that the climate of vast areas is warming rapidly.

This is the first fluctuation in the endless series of past and future climatic variations in the history of the earth which we can measure, investigate and possibly also explain.

For the past three winters a colony of Penobscot Indians who live on an island in the Penobscot River, near Old Town, Maine, have been plagued by unseasonable thaws. Since time immemorial, the tribe has used the ice as a bridge to the mainland from November until April, walking back and forth and even driving trucks and automobiles on sawdust laid across the slippery surface. Until recently the ice had never gone out in January, as the memories of older tribesmen and the results of annual betting pools on the day and hour of the spring breakup attested.

But since 1948 there has been a January thaw every year — to the astonishment of Indians and Old Towners alike. In 1949 the ice went out so suddenly that 610 Indians were marooned on their island for three days. Now the state of Maine has decided to build a bridge across the river to the island. “God has really been good to us,” says Mr. Bruce Poolaw, wife of the chief. ” If He hadn’t changed the weather we’d never have had the new bridge.”

Such observations caused scientists to speculate, five decades ago, whether glaciers could be melting:

"The choking dust storms of America’s Midwest, the freak New England hurricane of 1938, the fact that Utah’

It’s impossible to say. Recent coastline surveys off the coasts of New Guinea and South Australia indicate that, at the peak of the last great glaciations, the ocean surface was 300 feet below its present level. Estimates of the amount of water still immobilized in the frozen, rigid state vary greatly, due to the fact that we know almost nothing of the underlying land contours of both Greenland and Antarctica. In a given spot, the ice may be three miles deep or it may be only a thin sheath atop a mountain peak or plateau. Some scientists calculate that melting of all the planet’s ice would raise the oceans no more than ninety feet; others assert the rise would be in the neighborhood of 500 feet. In either event, all present seaports would be seriously affected while the majority would be completely inundated. Millions of square miles of land surface, including most of England, for example, would disappear beneath the waves.

Is the sun throwing out more heat, perhaps getting ready to explode and snuff out all life on earth in a matter of seconds? Is the solar system, in its twelve-mile-a-second spiral through the Milky Way, or Sol’s home galaxy, emerging from the last filmy fringes of a cloud of cosmic dust which, for centuries, has prevented a small but critical portion of our luminary’s radiation from reaching the earth? Has atomic experimentation upset delicate thermal balances, perhaps by increasing molecular activity in the atmosphere? Is the warming-up process worldwide or merely regional?

The scientific community of 1950 offered two explanations for the warming trend. The first was a rise in energy from the sun:

Many meteorologists agree that an increase in solar-energy output is responsible for the changing climate. According to Prof. Carl-Gustaf Rossby, Swedish meteorologist, ‘…the most plausible cause is some change in the activity of the sun. It may be that more ultraviolet light is being produced. Such an increased production of ultraviolet light might affect the upper atmosphere and so make the climate warmer. Should we succeed in finding the cause, we may well be able to estimate how long the warming process will go on.’

The other explanation suggested a swing in temperatures across several milleniae.

The earth is emerging from the last lingering chill of one of a succession of little ice ages that followed the last great ice age some 15,000 years ago.

Note that the theories say nothing about the human activity affecting global temperature. The world in 1950 was still enormous. The sky was infinitely capable of absorbing the coal smoke of steel mills and the leaded exhaust of automobiles. The rivers and seas could easily absorb runoffs of nitrate fertilizers and heavy metals.

Environmental disasters were not uncommon back then, but they weren’t taken seriously. It was only after industrial waste in Ohio’s Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969 and caused millions of dollars in damage that the government established the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Agency. The river had caught fire before — at least nine times since 1868 — but pubic tolerance finally snapped in ’69.

Unfortunately, the signs of global warming aren’t as clear. It will probably require another disaster to prompt Washington to take action. (It can hardly be expected to come from business.)

At one time, politicians and business owners could deny “climate change.” Today, they’ll concede something is happening to our climate, but they ask for more time to study the problem.

More time.

Why is it that we have so few facts 60 years after knowing about this issue?

Read “Is the World Getting Warmer?” by Albert Abarbanel and Thorp McClusky, July 1, 1950 [PDF download].

Global Warming Sixty Years Ago The Saturday Evening Post

The woman is Lucia Simion, an Italian who has, to use her term, “over-wintered” at the Concordia Station in Antactica. She told us,

“I am not the only one, since many other people, women and men, researchers and technicians, are under the spell of this lonely place at the end of the world. The air sparkles with millions of tiny snow crystals and – except for the snow that cracks under your thick Sorel boots—there is a huge, fantastic silence.”

I Lived With the Russians in Antarctica
by Gordon D. Cartwright
October 18, 1958

This Concordia station consists of a few buildings surmounted by two white towers. Even by Antarctica standards it’s near nothing: “far from the Ross sea and the Dumont d’Urville sea…and even far from the South Pole, 1,800 kilometers away…”

One might well ask why a person would want to spend the winter in an isolated spot in the middle of the most remote continent on the planet. “Dome C is considered to be one of the best places on earth for astronomy and astrophysics,” Simion’s article states. “More and more experiments and telescopes are coming to the station. Lots of big projects are programmed for the future, including the search for extra-solar planets, observations in the infrared spectrum, and the study of cosmic microwave background radiation.” .

Between 1997 and 2004, “Dome C hosted the successful EPICA project (European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica), during which the most ancient ice to date in Antarctica was retrieved—a climatic archive spanning over 800,000 years.”

The Concordia station is European, being owned and operated by two countries – France and Italy. As an Italian who lives in France, Ms. Simion fits right in. “Most of the time people go along very well,” she writes. But there can be conflict, “especially about…FOOD. Yes, it’s hardly believable, but Italians and French have different tastes. So the chef must prepare French and Italian food!!! One day snails…the other day risotto!” Saturdays are special: “Pizza party for everybody”.

The article Ms. Simion requested concerned an American meteorologist who spent a year with Soviet scientists at the South Pole. It must have been an unusually warm spot for people in the middle of a Cold War.

Ms. Simion writes that the article, “is very interesting, even if it was published 52 years ago! The Saturday Evening Post was ahead of its time.”

To read the 1958 article (also with excellent photos), “I Lived With the Russians in Antarctica,” click below:

Article: “I Lived With the Russians in Antarctica” from October 18, 1958.[PDF]

And, oh, yes, the next time you feel like complaining about winter, remember the scientists at the South Pole, and think about what “40 degrees below Zero” would feel like.

Reading The Post at the South Pole The Saturday Evening Post

He’s the man in front of the camera and behind the scenes of the Food Network’s long-running television series Good Eats, a show dedicated to exploring the history and science of food. Network fans also know him as the host of Iron Chef America and the documentary series Feasting on Asphalt and Feasting on Waves. Brown is the author of the James Beard Foundation Award-winning cookbook I’m Just Here for the Food,and when he’s not writing, directing, experimenting, hosting, or filming, look up … you just might spot him piloting through America’s spacious skies (and possibly doing a little research for an upcoming series).

So, if you answered E, you are correct. However, above all, he considers himself a filmmaker, investing the majority of his time in “the one thing I get my feelings hurt by if people don’t mention” — Good Eats, now celebrating its 10th anniversary on air.

With show titles such as “What’s Up Duck?” and “Flap Jack Do It Again,” each episode is a humorous exploration of the origins of food. Paired with playful skits and unconventional cooking demonstrations, Brown won over audiences by inventing a show that’s not your run-of-the-mill cooking program.

In the spirit of the Post’s “American Ingenuity” issue, we caught up with the Food Network’s celebrity pioneer filmmaker to discover the formula for making Good Eats.

SEP: Why the fascination with food science on your show?

AB: Everything that happens in the kitchen has to do with science. In a way, everything in life has to do with science, and if you want to take control in the kitchen and be self-reliant, you really have to understand what’s going on. My particular conduit for that is science. It’s not enough to know that something works, you have to know why.

SEP: Is there something you’re most proud of for having figured out on the show?

AB: My beef jerky rig. I figured out the problem with beef jerky: It all tasted cooked, and real beef jerky is not cooked — it’s dried. So I got a few furnace filters, bungee-corded them to a box fan with a brine-marinated meat sandwiched between the filters, and used it to make really great beef jerky. Looking outside of the standard apparatus for figuring out how to do that was very satisfying.

SEP: What’s your favorite cooking innovation?

AB: The immersion circulator: the adaptation of a digitally controlled laboratory device into a culinary device. It gives people (who are willing to drop $900 on basically a water heater) the ability to dial in exact temperatures. I can cook spare ribs at a very low temperature for nearly 40 hours, opening up a new dimension of texture and flavors.

Recipe: Alton Brown’s Eggplant Pasta

Alton Brown: Good Eats The Saturday Evening Post