to conclude the der spiegel space story i visited with george whitesides at the headquarters of virgin galactic. george was born into the field. his father is a harvard chemist, and prior to become CEO and president of virgin galactic he was the chief of staff at NASA. they build their spaceships out in the mojave desert, but maintain an office right in the middle of old town pasadena, next to a fancy soap store and a patagonia shop. you’d never know it unless you paid special attention to the little spaceship drawn on the doorway outside.

when richard branson got done flying balloons around the world he aimed a bit higher – taking private citizens into space, at a price tag of only $200,000 each. get in line, everybody!

ken bowersox, former astronaut, and astronaut hall of fame member was, up until recently, VP of astronaut safety and mission assurance at space exploration technologies (spaceX) in hawthorne, california. it seems he retired from the company at the very end of 2011. what he’s up to now, i’ve no idea, but in his life he’s spent two hundred and eleven days in space. that’s more than seven months. in contrast i don’t think i’ve even spent a collective seven months on vacation in my life, but ken’s hanging out in space.

spaceX was started by elon musk, who, when he grew tired of making money (paypal) decided he wanted to make sports cars instead (tesla motors) and then moved on to spaceships. spaceX’s hawthorne facility is awesome. it’s one of those places i walk into and think “i could spend the rest of my photographic life in this building and probably never get bored.” it’s huge. there are cool things everywhere. hell, even the trash cans are shaped like rocket ships. unfortunately, because of the nature of the work they do it’s also highly, highly restrictive. just getting permission to shoot where we did (in front of the dragon space capsule (above) and the falcon rocket (below)) was really tricky. we had dueling publicists, one said it was okay, one did not. just to be safe, i shot first and asked permission later. there was enough going on that it seemed to work, and ultimately, with the help of the good publicist, permission was granted. (thanks, roger!)

as much red tape as i had to cut through being a photographer, in this case it was far worse being the writer. the client was der spiegel magazine in germany and the writer, being a german citizen, wasn’t allowed within twenty yards of where we were shooting. throughout the facility there were walkways indicated with yellow tape marks. these went right down the middle of the warehouse, avoiding any areas where specific work was being done. apparently these weren’t just helpful navigation -  if you’re not a US citizen you can’t cross the yellow line. period.

when they were showing us around at first i mentioned to roger, the PR contact, that the place looked just like that facility mickey rourke used to build an army of robot drones in ironman 2. he said “oh yeah, that was filmed here. they didn’t really have to change that much around, either.”

this past summer i was very pleased to do a series of portraits for der spiegel magazine on a story about the privatization of space flight. we drove up into the california desert to visit XCOR, a company that makes space ships. more importantly, they make space ships that ordinary people can hitch rides in. well, maybe not ordinary people, but anyone willing to fork over about $95,000 for the chance to get a ride to the edge of space. people like victoria’s secret models. well, to be more accurate, they’re making suborbital spaceships, so they don’t actually go above the earth’s atmosphere. still, they get high enough that the earth looks pretty damn amazing. their lynx spaceship takes off and lands like a jet, on a runway, not vertically, like a rocket. it gets high up enough that you’d have several minutes of weightlessness, and a right to complain about every single other plane flight you’ll ever take in your life.

XCOR is housed inside a giant hangar in a remote neighborhood of mojave where it seems like every building is either abandoned or is housing some tremendously high-tech space gizmo. it’s hot enough outside that you wouldn’t want to leave the air conditioning unless you were going directly into space (where, hopefully, it’s cooler). their facility looks like your neighbor’s garage, if your neighbor was a genius and had way cooler toys than you expected. the vibe inside is very familial. the people who work there love it, obviously. there’s no other reason to live in the middle of the desert. XCOR has a policy where all the employees get rides up to space. how amazing is that? imagine graduating as an engineer and having the option to either work at a desk in some giant company where you probably won’t even have a window,  or going to build rocketships hands-on in the middle of the desert where you are guaranteed a trip to space. sure, it’s hot as hell in mojave and there are no girls around for fifty miles in any direction, but. . . that’s a no brainer.

as we were leaving a couple of the engineers asked if we wanted them to fire a prototype rocket engine for us. i don’t know about you, but whenever someone asks if i want to see a rocket engine i always say yes. this was, of course, a much smaller version of what ultimately goes into their lynx spaceship, but even so, it was very, very loud and very, very hot.

most days i read the paper (on my itelephone) while eating lunch, and most of the time i see an article on a scientific topic it’s written by nick wade. nick is a science and technology reporter for the new york times, as well as an author of many books. nick writes extensively on evolution, biology and genetics.

find his writings in the new york times here.

find nick’s books here.

nick and i have, at one point, sat in the same chair. though i’ve not yet been on colbert, i’m working on it.

one of the nice things about taking pictures professionally is that over a long enough period of time you become acutely aware of the richness of things hidden right under your nose. you never know what’s going on in that nondescript building down the street, perhaps people are in there conducting psychological experiments. it’s a strange thing to get a call from halfway around the world to go and investigate something that was right in front of me. so it was with the eharmony love lab.

i’ve lived in pasadena for almost six years now, and i’ve probably driven past this building hundreds of times. i always figured it was a financial building, or  medical offices, but no. it’s the somewhat creepily named “eharmony love lab”. inside, researchers, led by senior scientist/psychologist gian gonzaga, watch on closed circuit cameras as married couples talk to each other about their problems, or talk to researchers about their problems, or just generally talk about their problems. enough of this and you start to realize that we’re all just a bundle of problems. the researchers take notes. they record video. they look for telltale signs of incompatibility (leaning away from someone, rolling your eyes, contempt, criticism, defensiveness). they look for the somewhat more difficult-to-spot (though much more pleasant) signs of understanding, affection, attraction and empathy. i’ve spent thirty seven years demonstrating conclusively that i have no ability whatsoever to discern the telltale signs of attraction and affection, though i understand it’s got something to do with a woman biting her lip and playing with her hair. apparently, attraction and uncomfortable fidgeting are extremely similar.

gian gonzaga and his team compile all of this data and apply it to eharmony’s matching tests and algorithms in a top secret way that is more closely guarded than KFC’s original recipe (though i suspect that one of the key ingredients is still just salt). ideally all this research will make you, the eharmony hopeful, more likely to pluck your future spouse out of the ether of the internets to live happily ever after. if there are any hiccups along the road to lifelong bliss you can always get your horrible grievances, petty annoyances and frustrations analyzed and picked apart by psychologists for the greater good of other future couples.

something else that professional photography has gotten me accustomed to is the strange way in which fake situations are set up and then quite predictably fall flat in their veracity. as usual, this shoot was scheduled at the last minute, but we were absolutely assured that the love lab would be a hustle and bustle of activity, with lots of things to observe and people to photograph. as it turns out, nobody was there at all. after several hours of waiting (during which time corporal bennett and i amused ourselves by taking pictures on the closed circuit security cameras, demonstrating our obvious incompatibility (see below)), ryan and elizabeth show up. they had met on eharmony a few years earlier, and had just gotten married a couple months before our photo shoot. we did some set up portraits (above) and then they attempted to recreate a lovelab experiment for the benefit of the reporter. in these sorts of cases it’s almost inevitable that the realism of the thing fails. it often feels to me like the publicity industrial complex is fighting against truthfulness any way it can. really, i don’t know that it would have been so fundamentally different had we all been there when they had actual experiments scheduled, but it would’ve been a whole lot more interesting. ryan and elizabeth were very sweet, but they knew they were there for our benefit, and that whatever they were saying or doing wasn’t going to be part of anyone’s research at all. (heisenberg’s uncertainty principle? the observer-expectancy effect? which one of us is schrodinger?)

i probably watch more TV than is good for me. certainly my DVR has more of a backlog at any given point than i can comfortably manage. if i were a different kind of person i’d blame my parents – a showbiz family who, as i was growing up, not only had a television set in every room (including their bathroom), but would sleep with the TV on, too. on several occasions i would attempt to turn it off after they fell asleep, but they’d just simply wake up, turn it back on and go to sleep again. eventually i had to settle for very carefully and subtly turning the volume down. my father claims that he can only fall asleep if there’s something on that he wants to watch.

this week, of course, the big TV news is that lost is finally over. yes, i am a die-hard lost fan. it covers absolutely everything i love about fantastical stories, and everything i hate about real life (i.e., camping, being stuck outdoors). nick warner is a theoretical physicist at USC, but you can find him on the DVD extras of lost’s fifth season, espousing on the physics of time travel. it’s something the producers put together called “lost university”. it consists of warner and a couple other physicists talking about some of the theoretical science that gets woven into the show.

so, is there real science on lost? eh. . .mostly not. just things stretched and used as plot devices or to make characters sound smart, or (my favorite reason) to show a sense of wonder that could come from actual things applied in a fantastical manner. for nick warner, i think that’s the point, too. they’re not discussing lost as a serious scientific treatise, but i think the hope is that the show (and the “lost university” DVD extras) might get people who would otherwise ignore such things to be interested in science. at the theoretical level, physics really could sound indistinguishable from magic to some of us.

warner says that the key factor in deciding whether he contributes to things like this (or anything involving the intersection of science and the entertainment industry) is the question: “will this make me look like an idiot?”

good advice. perhaps i should apply the same thinking to photography.

[and just in case any of you are paying attention and have become annoyed with the subject heading for this (and similar posts). . .yes, i am aware that i've hardly kept up the scientist posts weekly. in my defense it was entirely my intention to do so, and trust me, i've got a long, long backlog of scientist pictures to do it . . . but, you know. . .things get in the way. so they're not going to be weekly, of course, but i'm keeping the damn title. just because.]

steven pinker is a psychologist at harvard who specializes in the evolution of language. in an appearance on the colbert report he was asked to explain how the mind works in five words or less. his answer: brain cells fire in patterns.

he is a charter member of the luxuriant and flowing hair club for scientists. and yes, that’s a real thing, if not entirely serious.

you can see steven’s brain here.

you can see steve’s genome here.

buy steve’s books here.

most of us feel broken in some way. often this feeling is quiet and unseen, but even if we don’t admit it, even if it’s invisible, even if we’re totally wrong, in many of us there’s something that feels a bit incomplete. i don’t think this is bad. i think it builds character. it makes us strive for the things we need, even if we don’t really know what we need. it makes us look for the things that are broken in others and it brings us the capacity for compassion and empathy.

most of the time people feel incomplete in ways that would never occur to anyone but themselves, ways that would remain invisible (i.e., you feel unloved, you feel awkward, you feel clumsy). but sometimes there are very real physical manifestations. when something feels missing because it actually is missing, when it is plain to the world that something is missing, it can be a lot harder. most of us have only our own neuroses to contend with. when you have to contend with the questions and stares and reactions of strangers, that’s another thing entirely.

stefan knauss is a prosthetist. in the simplest terms he helps people to feel less broken, less incomplete. he builds artificial limbs; legs, arms, hands, feet, fingers, ears and eyes with such a degree of precision and beauty and accuracy that when i looked through his portfolio half the time i pegged the real leg for the fake one. stefan brings artfulness and dignity to us when we need it most. his work is equal parts function, art and compassion.

he made his first mechanical hand for a high school science fair twenty five years ago. it’s the one on the left (obviously) in the first picture above. to me that picture represents twenty five years of single minded effort, of striving to complete what feels incomplete.

while i was at stefan’s i met leslie. leslie lost her left leg to cancer eight years ago. some time later stefan made her a new one. after years of wearing long pants and boots to cover up the obvious prosethetic she used to have, leslie now wears skirts and sandals frequently. a casual observer would never know. even though the fact of being able to wear skirts and sandals might seem trivial, the result is huge. sometimes it’s a luxury to be able to keep to ourselves the things that feel broken.

last week i was contacted by a woman named hilary gooding. hilary is a textile artist working on a project involving quilts of prominent scientists with the aim of displaying them in museums in the UK next year. hilary wanted to use one of my 2006 photographs of james d. watson (nobel laureate (with francis crick) for the discovery of the structure of DNA) in her project. it was such an odd request i really had no choice but to say yes, and i admit i’m very curious to see how the finished project will end up.

hilary sent me photos of the result (below). the other people pictured are marie curie, charles babbage, michael faraday and francis crick.

i was raised in an atheist jewish household in two of the biggest (and most liberal) cities in the country. my brother and i never even went to hebrew school. i like to say that we’re more jew-ish than jewish. we love matzo ball soup. we’re expert complainers. but no bar mitzvahs. i have no idea when passover is, no idea if yom kippur happens before rosh hashonah, or which days you get to take off of school. we never went to temple, though there was a temple across the street from our house. my brother, genius that he was, discovered that there was a day camp in the temple where they had arcade games that didn’t require quarters. we snuck in one day, barely making it through one game of pac man before the rabbis discovered us and kicked us out. that was pretty much the extent of our exposure to religion. we tried hannukah one year, but the family collectively decided that doing anything for eight days straight was way too much of a pain in the ass. worrier that i was, i felt that candles were a fire hazard. we mostly celebrated christmas as it was over in one day and everything else was closed, anyway.

as someone who was raised in an environment where nobody at all was religious, where reason and responsibility were valued, it was very shocking to me to encounter religious america as i got older.

ken miller is a professor at brown university, and gained some amount of fame as a key witness in the dover school  board intelligent design trial. he was an especially damning witness against the creationists as he actually wrote the evolution textbook that they were trying to ban. on top of that he is a roman catholic.

ken lectures often to conferences and has been very involved with the promotion of science in education. he’s a great speaker, very funny and very smart. he’s all over youtube, one example of which is embedded below. i’m a total geek for these kinds of videos. i find them fascinating and can watch them all day.

find out more about the dover school board trial here.

see books by ken miller here.

FAQs about evolution here at the national center for science education.