Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [7]
The next day, Brand printed the question onto hundreds of badges and posters and sent them to NASA officials, members of Congress, Soviet scientists, UN officials and anyone else with influence and a publicly available mailing address. Then he set up a stall at the Sather Gate, the famous entrance to the University of California at Berkeley, where he sold the badges for 25 cents each. ‘It went perfectly,’ Brand said. What he means by that is, he was noticed. The university authorities threw him off the campus, an event that was reported by the San Francisco Chronicle and launched him onto the TV news bulletin that evening.
Brand took the campaign on the road, performing ‘street-clown seminars’ on space and civilisation at all America’s major universities. He made the authorities edgy – the country was immersed in the Vietnam War, and even peaceful protests and rallies were always in danger of boiling over. That was why NASA hired an investigator to find out whether Brand and his ‘Whole Earth’ campaign constituted a threat to the United States Government. Years later, the investigator made himself known to Brand. ‘I checked you out,’ he said. ‘You seemed all right, so I wrote them that this was California, where people took strange notions.’
At the bottom of his report, the investigator added a postscript. It said, ‘P.S. By the way – why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?’
Brand’s campaign began in February 1966. By the end of 1967, he recalls, the photos began to appear. Eventually, the Apollo 8 Earthrise photos, with the lunar surface arcing through the foreground, fulfilled everything Brand had hoped to achieve.
The photo taken by William Anders has been called ‘the most influential environmental photograph ever taken’. Whether Brand’s acid trip really did kick off the environmental movement is moot. It is impossible to tell whether the Apollo 8 astronauts knew about Brand’s campaign. Though it is hard to believe they didn’t, they have never mentioned it in any of their publicised discussions of the Earthrise photographs; according to the astronauts, they took those photos as an impromptu reaction to the majestic sight of the Earth from the Moon. Brand was certainly never mentioned in any discussion, but we can assume that NASA would not look kindly on suggestions that the agency was even remotely influenced by the antics of a drug-addled hippy.
The whole episode raises an intriguing question. Can this be how science happens? The Earthrise photo spawned a movement that is now a scientific endeavour – perhaps the most important endeavour that science has ever taken on. Did it really begin in an impassioned and drug-induced moment of inspiration? If so, it would certainly provide a perfect example of how science moves forward.
Ask a scientist what the scientific method is, Medawar said, ‘and he will adopt an expression that is at once solemn and shifty-eyed: solemn because he feels he ought to declare an opinion; shiftyeyed because he is wondering how to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to declare.’ Invariably, the scientist will say something like, ‘Well, you have an idea, then you test it in an experiment.’ It sounds so straightforward. But where does the idea come from? From everywhere and nowhere. From wherever. Anything goes. Science, it turns out, is alarmingly like California: it is a place where people take strange notions.
Albert Einstein is reported to have remarked on one occasion that ‘the secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources’. Though there is no paper trail for the attribution, it makes sense. Fyodor Dostoevsky