TMT could be another great tool to aid science in Hawaii

The Thirty Meter Telescope debate reflects a misinformed view that science is just another religion.

Science is fundamentally different from religion in that it has no fixed dogmas, and does not use supernatural explanations to explain the physical universe.

By careful observations and experiments, incorrect explanations are discarded and correct ones developed. An example of the working of the scientific process is the development of the Global Positioning System (GPS).

Since there have been humans, we have looked up at the sky and wondered about the workings of the universe. Eventually, our ancestors learned enough celestial navigation to cross continents and oceans. While the stars provided reliable guides, some objects, the planets — from the Greek word for “wanderers” — moved in ways unlike the others.

Philosophers and religious figures posed many guesses as to explain planetary motions, but none fit all of the observed evidence. Some explanations, such as the idea that all celestial objects orbited the Earth, became tenets of religious dogma. Any inconvenient facts were ignored, and the heretics who dared publicize the discrepancies were persecuted or even murdered: Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543) was persecuted but survived, while Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was burned at the stake.

The observations by Copernicus and other astronomers finally and incontestably established that the Earth and other planets orbit the sun, yet the underlying physical principles explaining how they move remained elusive, until Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and theory of gravitation. Astronomical observations confirmed that the moon and planets followed Newton’s mathematics, and the questions of how our solar system works seemed settled.

In science, however, we do not rest; we constantly re-test our understanding. With better telescopes, the planet Mercury was found to not quite obey Newton’s equations. By the mid-1800s, it was clear that the perturbations in Mercury’s orbit were definitely present, and more-precise observations only confirmed its oddity, and the need to correct Newton’s model.

That better model is Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The distortions of space and time in the vicinity of the mass of the sun perturbed Mercury’s orbit in exactly the way Einstein predicted. In the century since, every observation so far has confirmed Einstein’s discovery.

In the 1980s, scientists working on the Global Position System investigated errors in satellite-based navigation. The errors were resolved by applying general relativity even for satellites traveling nearly 9,000 miles per hour at altitudes of 16,500 miles. Earth’s gravity causes space-time distortions that affect the accuracy of GPS timing and location, exactly as general relativity predicts.

The astronomers observing Mercury didn’t set out to invent GPS; they were trying to understand how our universe works. Likewise, Einstein was laboring to understand the principles that explain those workings.

In Einstein’s lifetime, some people rejected his work because of his Jewish heritage. Fortunately, the principles of nature apply regardless of the user’s religion, ethnicity or ideology. Now, almost every smart phone is GPS-enabled, and millions of motorists, hikers, sailors and pilots rely on GPS every day.

A century from now, people will benefit from today’s science and astronomy in ways we cannot yet imagine.

I am proud to make my own small contributions to science, and even prouder that Hawaii is home to some of the world’s greatest instruments to further our understanding of how the universe works.