Moon

One of my earliest memories is of my dad waking me up to go back downstairs to watch the footage of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. (For anyone reading who is roughly my age, this would have been on 'Nationwide'.) I wonder if part of the reason I can remember it so clearly was the unprecedented circumstance of being woken up and going back downstairs, to be invited into that grown up time. 

Certainly I'm not convinced that I would have been as impressed then by the feat of men walking on the moon as I am now. At the age of three, the scope of what can and can't be done is not so well defined. As a child you might ask 'Have people ever been on the moon?' without any inkling as to what the answer will be. 

Now, when I look back on it, the whole enterprise seems extraordinary. And yet man's ambition at that time, riding on the back of wartime rocket technology, seemed to know no bounds. First we put hardware into orbit, then we sent up animals, and then people, and then we turned our attention to the moon. First to go 'round it and then, my God, to actually land on it (with additional complication of having to take off again!).

Actually, there's an interesting lesson for me (and other procrastinators) here, as sometimes the scale of the actual goal is what puts me off starting something. Sometimes the secret is to break the job down into parts and then get on with each one without thinking too much about the next until it's time to do it. 

Writing this and thinking about the scale of the achievement of getting men on the moon and understanding the obstacles involved (or at least some of them), makes me think how so many of the things we achieve with science these days are equally clever but more difficult to appreciate. We can all hazard a guess at many of the challenges around getting a man into space but what were the issues around detecting gravitational waves? What does it take to construct an iPad? I've no idea. 

Similarly, I think we're losing sight of what is and isn't possible. Did I read in New Scientist that scientists managed to create a small device that had anti-gravitational facilities? Have they really used two tied particles and the phenomenon of action at a distance to transmit information instantaneously? Was there something to do with teleportation of sub-atomic particles? I can't remember. I can be amazed at what is achieved these days without understanding it and also without any feeling of 'that can't actually be true'.