A somber week, with people wasting no time putting the Boston tragedy in political terms. President Obama unleashes on Congress after a background check amendment to the gun bill goes down in the Senate. At least the latest exploits of Mark Sanford and Anthony Weiner keep NPR's Ken Rudin and Ron Elving amused in the latest episode of the It's All Politics podcast.
UPDATE, 4:08 p.m.: In addition to the institutions mentioned below, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has announced that admission will be free on Wednesday, April 17.
At least two art museums in Boston, the Museum Of Fine Arts and the Institute of Contemporary Art, have announced that admission on Tuesday will be free as a service to a city still dealing with the trauma of the explosions Monday at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Admission to the MFA is normally $23-25, while admission to the ICA is normally $10-15.
According to its website, the MFA is currently featuring exhibitions of samurai armor, Bruce Davidson's photographs of East Harlem in the 1960s, and Paul Cezanne's The Large Bathers, on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among many, many other offerings. The ICA, meanwhile, has an exhibit featuring San Francisco graffiti artist Barry McGee and an installation by visual artist Haegue Yang that incorporates trees as well as sculptures and collages.
Both museums announced the day of free admission on Twitter in similar terms: The MFA said, "The MFA will be free today. We hope the Museum will be a place of respite for our community." The ICA said, "ICA admission is free for all visitors today. We hope the museum will offer a place of community & reflection." They hashtagged their announcement, "#WeAreBoston."
The decision is reminiscent of one made by some New York museums after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Back then, NPR's Susan Stamberg reflected on the issue of art as a source of comfort after she visited the Phillips Collection in Washington, where the arrival of some of the elements for an exhibition of French paintings had been delayed by the airport restrictions in place at the time. While not all the planned works were there, Stamberg had this to say:
What is on display is a cornucopia of 19th-century beauty — and, yes, comfort. Paintings from museums and collectors in Paris, Orleans, Amsterdam, Boston, St. Louis, Denver — so many places. Paintings by the French masters — bruised pears and an exuberance of flowers by Courbet, two white Manet peonies in close-up that swirl like satin ballgowns. Van Gogh is there: Tahitian oranges that look as if Gauguin painted them with sunset; and moonlight colors some Cezanne apples. Simple objects we all know — plums, onions, a paring knife, shoes — celebrated in oil paint by artists who were making revolution with their quick brush strokes. Seeing them now is a reminder of the ordinary things that make up and pleasure our lives — and, through art, last.
Scientists can't just agree to disagree. It's not because we are stubborn or ornery (OK, maybe we are). It's because the whole point of science is to establish "public knowledge" — an understanding of the cosmos on which we can all agree. That is why there is trouble brewing at the beginning of the Universe.
There is a number, the Hubble Constant, that's fundamental to the study of the cosmos. The problem is, different folks are finding different values for that number and no one yet knows what that means.
Two weeks ago the scientific team running the Planck satellite announced the most comprehensive analysis of their data to date. The Planck mission was designed to study radiation left over from just a few-hundred-thousand years after the Big Bang. This is the famous cosmic microwave background radiation (or CMB) and it's a kind of fossil light, imprinted with all kinds of details about how the Universe evolved. These details include parameters describing the proportions of material in the Universe, like dark matter and dark energy.
One of the parameters that fall out of their analysis is the Hubble Constant (written as Ho) that describes the rate of the Universe's expansion in the current epoch of cosmic history. The Hubble constant is directly tied to finding the Universe's age (though other parameters are needed as well). The Planck analysis yielded a value of Ho = 67.11 kilometers per second per Megaparsec (km/s/Mpc: yes those units are weird but don't worry about them for now). Put it all together and the Planck team finds the Universe to be 13.89 billion years old give or take a few hundred million years. You gotta admit, that kind of precision is pretty impressive.
So what's the problem?
Other teams using a very different set of methods get a very different answer for the Hubble Constant. When Edwin Hubble (you know, that guy with the constant named for him) first discovered the Universe was expanding back in 1928, he did it by measuring how fast galaxies were flying away from us versus their distance from us. The CMB wasn't even a gleam in scientist's eye back then. This direct method — measure the distance and recession velocity of lots of galaxies, then plot up the result — has been getting more refined ever since. These days the best values for the Hubble Constant that come from this approach find something around Ho = 74 km/s/Mpc.
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