Today’s Wall Street Journal has a brief editorial ($) about a recent triumph of a disciplined, rationalist mindset that deals with the universe as it is, not as we wish it were:
Over the weekend the world was treated to a spectacle that was literally out of this world: Color pictures and audio recordings from the hazy, windy, orange-tinged surface of Titan, largest of Saturn’s moons. These come to us courtesy of the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe, which landed intact after a two-week descent from its mothership, the NASA satellite Cassini.
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It is fitting the spacecraft bear the names they do. Christiaan Huygens discovered Titan in 1655. Giovanni Cassini discovered four more of Saturn’s moons and correctly surmised the composition of Saturn’s rings in the 1670s and ’80s. Both men were not merely astronomers but also mathematicians and technologists. Above all, they were disciples of rationalism, skepticism and the scientific method, children of the Enlightenment.
So too, it might be said, are the scientists and engineers in Pasadena, California and Darmstadt, Germany, who have now put humanity’s footprint on Titan. …
(Emphasis added.)
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