I am distressed to see that the anti-intellectualism, which drove the 16th century dispute between Galileo and the Pope, is evidently alive and well today and reflected on your editorial page in “TMT and Christopher Columbus” on May 24. Five hundred years ago it was decreed that mankind didn’t need to know the facts that made our universe work but was simply to accept the word revealed by the church in Rome — a thoroughly incorrect revealed word as was in fact already known to many even at that time. Today, a few apparently hold that science must yield to religion because the theoretical knowledge to be gained from the Thirty Meter Telescope is deemed “frivolous at best.” I had thought, on the contrary, that modern educated society had concluded that religion and science ought to work together to appreciate how and why the universe functions.
Was it not this integrated spirit that struck so many on Earth when on Christmas Eve 1968 the crew of Apollo 8, the first manned mission to orbit the moon, broadcast a reading from Genesis? Believers and non-believers alike were touched by this amalgam of cutting-edge science and the traditional beliefs of many. In 2014, Pope Francis, virtually declaring that “science versus religion” thinking must end, urged that religion and science are not irreconcilable at all but instead must be seen as cooperative, that the “Big Bang” origin of the universe and subsequent evolution of man are not incompatible with faith but part of it.
It is nonsense to protest against the TMT by arguing that we don’t need to know the information it will provide because theoretical astrophysics doesn’t have practical utility, no “visions of spices and jewels, gold, silks and perfumes sure to swell the royal coffers” as the previous writer claimed. The reality is that in the history of man all scientific knowledge has value. It is the very nature of discovery that at that precise moment we can’t know its full practical potential. That’s why we pursue theoretical science on the understanding that the practical side catches up later. Did anyone really appreciate the implications when Watson and Crick (and the unsung Wilkins and Franklin) discovered DNA in 1953? Yet now, in but a heartbeat of history, so much of medicine, biology, and even law are the outgrowth of that discovery.
It is science fantasy to argue that “the future of cosmic investigation will be based from space on satellites and planets and moons.” The Hubble telescope will come to the end of its useful life, which may be as early as 2018, and we are decades, if not a century, away from establishing astrophysical research stations on the moon, Mars or Ceres, assuming we have the finances and political will ever to do that. TMT will let us see the universe a cosmological instant after its origin. This could lead to understanding how gravity came to exist, how the elements originated and dispersed, perhaps even how time exists and functions or whether we have living company in this cosmos. Mysterious concepts, yes, but with the potential to move science forward for generations.
More down to Earth, the argument that science must step aside for religion misconceives American constitutional and statutory law. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, upon which the legal objections to TMT rest, says that the First Amendment guarantee means that government cannot impose unnecessary burdens upon the free exercise of religion, not that every religious belief held by every person can bring government to a halt. Avoiding improper interference can be achieved by providing security for religious sites, by careful land use properly respectful of religious attitudes toward that land and by other accommodations.
Obviously, the process in Hawaii is complicated by the fact that no one person or group speaks for Hawaiian religious history or tradition, and this will be for the courts to sort out. But it is hard to understand how the religion of perhaps the greatest astronomical navigators of all time, the ancient Hawaiian mariners, is degraded in the slightest by modern science using a deliberately moderate footprint on the mountain top — smaller than some of the existing observatories which will be decommissioned — to unlock even more knowledge of the stars. I, for one, cannot imagine a greater monument to those who crossed the Pacific by following the stars than the construction of TMT.
Arne Werchick is a resident of Kailua-Kona