“Whether it’s the science to slow global warming; the technology to protect our troops and confront bioterror and weapons of mass destruction; the research to find life-saving cures; or the innovations to remake our industries and create twenty-first century jobs – today, more than ever before, science holds the key to our survival as a planet and our security and prosperity as a nation.  It’s time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and worked to restore America’s place as the world leader in science and technology.”

Barack Obama, December 20, 2008

As America rejoins the rational world after many years of magical thinking, a whole generation of young people are growing up believing research is something you do while watching a video on your laptop, while in a little corner of your screen the right answer is supposed to show up on Wikipedia. (Or else, if it doesn’t show up, it doesn’t exist!)

Meanwhile in Atlanta, a skywalk collapsed yesterday during construction, killing one worker and injuring at least 18 others. One would think that with Georgia Tech, one of the nation’s great engineering institutions only 1.4 miles away, that such an engineering folly would be impossible. Did any of those hundreds of young and senior structural engineers pass by the construction site on their way to class and say to themselves — that thing is going to collapse? And how about the engineers on the project? Where had they gone to school?

Which brings me to Eugene S. Ferguson’s book Engineering and the Mind’s Eye (M.I.T. Press 1992) which pointed out that a generation of engineers was being raised without having hands-on knowledge of materials, and that such engineers, who knew structural design only on their computers, were likely to create projects that risked massive structural failure. Witness Charles de Gaulle airport. Witness, even, the unprecedented collapse of the steel and concrete World Trade Center towers, the first of that kind of structure to be destroyed by fire.

By coincidence, I received in the mail yesterday from a research librarian at the Library of Congress the correspondence and diaries of Wilbur and Orville Wright during the critical period of 1901 when the two brothers had first completed their 30 mile per hour wind tunnel and were trying out airfoil shapes in it. Using pieces of tin thickened with solder and wax, the brothers were able to quickly test 48 different wing shapes, and measure their lift abilities, as well as their response to various angles of attack. They were creating, hands on, a complete first version of the science of aeronautics. The result, on December 17, 1903, was the first powered human flight, and the beginning of the American Century.

One hundred and five years later, the President-Elect of the United States of America feels there is a need to announce that we are returning the nation to a course guided by science, which we can also think of as reason. Possibly it is not to late for us to soar once again.