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February 12, 2004
Science Is Fun
When asked, SETI Institute scientist Brad Dalton states that he spent his childhood in St. Louis , Missouri but admits that he has not yet grown up. Child-like wonder, he believes, is what drives good science. What you never really hear in the media is that the people who do science do it because they like figuring things out and solving problems. Science, he notes emphatically, is fun.
The realization that science is fun came at a critical time in the future astrogeophysicist's school career.
Making The Game
I was just leaving detention when I passed the math lab, he explains. There were these kids in there playing a computer gameStar Trek. The year was 1976, and computer games were very primitive, but no less compelling to the bright seventh grader who was invited into the lab. They were piloting starships! Dalton recalls with enthusiasm.
They showed me what was happening on screen, how the game was played, and invited me to play. I didn't want to play the game, I wanted to make the game.
Excited by the possibility of constructing an entire world inside a computer, Dalton took geometry, which allowed him to create spaceships that would move properly. The motivated young student was encouraged by the school's geometry teacher who tutored the student in advance of his enrollment in the class.
Dalton wrote his first computer game in high school. Already, he'd begun to design virtual worlds while images from ever more distant real worlds trickled in from NASA outer solar system missions.
I took physics one year early in high school, mainly because I wanted my starships to accelerate correctly he recalls, then, Voyager arrived at Saturn one week after we finished studying gravity. Although he had learned about the attraction of bodies, the images of the braided-kinked rings of Saturn were enthralling in their complexity.
I wanted to understand what was going on. All I knew at this point was F equals GM1M2 over R squared, and that wasn't enough! In an aside he notes that years later he would wind up working down the hall at NASA Ames from scientist Jeff Cuzzi, who worked out the resonances in the rings that give rise to the patterns. I'd already fallen in love with science after the rings of Saturnbut then we started working with lasers, and that was it!
Dalton majored in Physics and Computer Science as an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis. In the mid-80s, the combination struck many as odd, and his academic colleagues wondered why he chose to major in two fields with essentially no overlap. Undaunted by advice that ran counter to his intuition, Dalton approached his undergraduate studies with characteristic self-determination. He explains his reasoning, I would walk past the physics labs after class, and you know what? Every one of them had a computer in it.
Making the Reality
Dalton's proficiency with the computer landed him a contracting job at NASA Ames after graduation in 1987. There, he wrote programs which simulated the atmospheres of Mars and Venus, using powerful supercomputers to understand measurements returned from the Viking, Pioneer and Galileo spacecraft.
It was also there that he first heard about the SETI Institute, which administered a project that included modeling of lightning on Jupiter. The researchers, led by Dr. William Borucki (who is currently Principal Investigator of the Kepler Mission) were using computer and laboratory simulations of lightning to better understand the chemical reactions taking place in the expanded atmospheric gas. Dalton joined the project as a replacement for one of the team members, and liked what he saw of the SETI Institute.
After his five years in California , he left for the University of Colorado, Boulder to complete a doctoral program in planetary science. Upon graduation the newly minted PhD found himself back in Mountain View as a NASA post doc. When that position ended, Dalton found himself seeking funding, and targeted the SETI Institute to administer his grants. Everyone knows SETI is cool, says Dalton, plus, I knew I would get more research done with my grant money, praising the Institute's efficiency, which offers scientists low overhead and little red tape, leaving them free to focus resources and time on their science. Dalton joined the Institute in March 2003.
His work today involves spectroscopy, and recent projects include looking for by-products of hydrological processes on Mars that can tell us more about atmospheric evolution on Earth and Venus, synthesizing mineral and chemical compounds predicted to occur on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and characterizing the organic signatures of organisms living in the harsh environment of salt ponds to help us better understand what clues we should look for on other planets.
Dalton frequently describes his work as magic, and is particularly eager to pass along what he has learned about the magic of science to young people. He describes how it feels when he is hard at work simulating worlds. Sure, I'm using a computer, so even the freshest spacecraft data still boils down to a bunch of ones and zeroes deep inside the machine. But, in my head, I'm out there.
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