The Science Project

Sputnik was truly the shot seen around the world.

That ultimately caused the US to quadruple down on defense spending, but it also incited us to get to the Moon. In the midst of our fears over geopolitical catastrophe, we set foot on another celestial body for the first time ever.

In the midst of this Cold War competition, technological progress was the most highly coveted of all a nation’s attributes. That meant scientific progress had to happen first, since new tech is most frequently driven by new discoveries.

My parents have both told me about how they remembered watching Sputnik travel through the night sky. Everyone tuned into the radio knew where to look and when, so it was a real collective experience that had a profound impact on the American psyche. Seeing a potential nuke that could travel through space was beyond disconcerting.

By the time my folks were in middle school—sixth grade was just a year away for my mom, and two years off for my dad—science fairs were already rolling out everywhere across the US. The idea was for kids to compete against one another for a prize, usually sponsored by a big tech firm of the day (IBM, Westinghouse, Bell Labs) or NASA.

This was a way for scientific talent to be identified relatively early on, then put to good use for reasons of national security, more or less. Sure, kids were sold on the idea that science and technology were cool, but this was all about American dominance and survival.

Now by the time I got to middle school, things were notably different in some ways, but also eerily similar in others. Instead of the Sputnik shock my parents had received, we had the Challenger explosion.

On January 28th, 1986, we rushed back from recess to watch the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. The reason why this was notable for us fifth graders is that one of the passengers on board was a teacher, just a regular person elevated to the status of astronaut.

This was a big deal to us kids! Honestly, though, any excuse to watch a rocket launch was cool with us.

We were late. When our teacher turned the TV on, all we could see was smoke in the sky, and the newscasters were busy trying to make sense of what had happened. The Challenger had blown up in the sky, right in front of the nation (and the world).

In my own memory, this is the beginning of the end of my childhood. Puberty was right around the corner, and so was middle school. There are other good candidates for this milestone, like when Optimus Prime dies in Transformers the Movie, or when we moved from the neighborhood where all my childhood friends lived over to a different ‘hood, but the Challenger Explosion represents a stark reminder that the world is dangerous, and death can happen to anyone.

In spite of the somber mood at NASA and its reverberations throughout the scientific community, scientific progress went on at a blistering pace. Even as fewer rockets were being shot up into space, more and more experiments were taking place on Earth.

The 80s were incredibly vibrant and exciting for science nerds like me. I recall at least one science fair I got to be a part of. Each kid would make a project and then enter it into the contest, and winners could go on to a bigger, regional contest.

I thought my entry was pretty good, and I think I actually had some good ideas—but my execution and presentation left a lot to be desired.

My thesis was to ask the question: can light be refracted by a magnet?

I had recently read something in a library book on physics I had read during my lunch break, maybe—this was before we had a regular D&D or Werewolf game going at the library, so science books were one of my likeliest targets on any given school day. The book might well have been Einstein’s Relativity, which I highly recommend if you’ve never read it.

Whatever book it was, the idea of gravity and electromagnetism being somehow related—unified in some hidden way—had struck me as profound and incredible. I knew that Einstein had pointed out that gravity bent light, and I was excited by the intoxicating possibility that these two forces might have more in common.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the unification of physics is something I would enjoy learning about for the rest of my life, and it turns out that I am in very good company. The unification of forces and simplification of rules is like the Holy Grail in physics. Einstein himself obsessed over this goal for his entire life.

Anyway, my project sought to run an experiment to determine whether light could be refracted by a magnet. I had the idea to use a laser, but my networking abilities were primitive at best, so I had to settle for a powerful flashlight. Actually, I’m not even sure if the flashlight I had to use was particularly powerful, but it did have the key characteristics of being available and free.

I needed a medium so that you could see the beam of light, since light going through the air is invisible to us. I made some red Jello—home ec class had really come in handy—so I could see whether the powerful magnet I chose would bend the beam any. Now when I say the magnet was powerful, you can imagine that it was more that the magnet had those same choice characteristics that the flashlight had.

I took careful photos with my available, free camera, and tacked these up onto a foam board triptych I had created by using strong tape as hinges, I think. The specific details are lost to my memory hole, but what I can say for sure is that the beautiful flashlight beam showed no conclusive evidence of being manipulated by a magnet.

I was careful to point out that a null result did not mean a failed experiment, and I was proud of the work that I had done. I had not done much to unify physics, but I had run a reasonably thoughtful (if inadequate) experiment to test an idea with rigor.

I can’t recall the specific projects the other kids made, but they were appropriately ambitious, not really biting off too much more than they could chew. There were things like electrical circuits the judges could flip or fiddle with, and while my foam board was neat and tidy, it was really boring in a sea of interactive displays.

I think I learned a few valuable lessons by doing the science project. For one thing, lofty ambitions need to have a way to stay grounded. For another, presentation really, really matters—it can be better to have a less ambitious goal and to focus more on how you show or tell people about it.

Even still, I had a great time thinking through this puzzle as a kid, and even while I hadn’t really solved the universe’s deepest puzzle, I had followed my own curiosity with rigor and vigor. I was proud of my science project!