Faculty’s interests go beyond Y2K

(This story originally appeared in the Winter 1999 edition of On Wisconsin, the UW–Madison alumni magazine. For more information about On Wisconsin and other alumni services, visit the Wisconsin Alumni Association.)

Either the millennium will dawn, or it won’t. Either the world will be thrust into a computer-crashing, humanity-crushing chaos, or it won’t. Either life will go on, or it won’t.

We really have no way of knowing what will happen when the calendar turns over on January 1, 2000. For every prediction, there’s an antiprediction. For every person toasting the new millennium, there’s another one pointing out that the millennium doesn’t actually begin for another year. The only thing we can say with absolute certainty is that we’ll trade in a one with three nines for a two with three zeros. And maybe it’s as simple as that: all the hoopla – the hype about millennia that has seemed to last a millennium on its own – is just about the fact that the year 2000 has a bunch of zeros. But zeros can be cool.

So you want a lot of zeros? How about the eight zeros found in the year 600,000,000? If the year 2000 fills us with wonder for its flat-out evenness, then 600,000,000 should be infinitely awesome. And for Sean Carroll, it is. While pop psychologists dwell on the short-term paranoia of 2000, Carroll is transfixed by what happened to the planet between six hundred million and seven hundred million years ago, when evolution had barely taken a step and the future of the animal kingdom was buried in the DNA of a few primitive organisms.

Reaching that far into the past isn’t easy. Barely any fossils exist from the period, and Carroll’s only guide to learning the secrets of evolution lies in the genes of creatures that can trace their roots to that time. So why does he persist? “We’re drawing a picture of something no one else has seen,” he says.

If you were to climb into an intellectual time capsule and surf the eras, you’d find a lot of UW–Madison professors with interests strewn across the time continuum. Their curiosity has led them through millions of years, from far-off prehistoric epochs to equally far-off visions of the future.

As the year 2000 draws near, we thought about asking various faculty members about its significance. But we decided that the landscape where they tread is far more fascinating. They’re uncovering secrets about our past and paving passageways to people and places that are both foreign and familiar. For them, 2000 is just another year, one entirely apart from the time in which their imaginations live.

So join us on an impossible journey through time, as we visit a few of our faculty and their favorite years.

In the Beginning . . .
Looking deep into space, as UW–Madison astronomer Jay Gallagher recently told Astronomy magazine, “is like trying to look through a Seattle rainstorm. You stand there and stare a little more closely, and squint, and try to tell whether that thing off in the distance is a barn or a truck.” But when he fixes his eyes on the fuzzy features in deepest space, Gallagher gets a glimpse of ancient history.

Like most people who study space, Gallagher would love to know how we got here – how diffuse gases came together to form a galaxy that churned out stars and planets and begot our solar system. With the aid of the Hubble Space Telescope, Gallagher has been able to peer sharply at places so far away that what he sees today actually happened around ten billion years ago.

Such time travel offers UW–Madison astronomers a glimpse of the universe in infancy, possibly within one billion years of when the Big Bang is believed to have banged. And with WIYN, a high-powered, ground-based telescope shared among UW–Madison, two other universities, and a national research center, they are exploring properties of the most ancient stars in our neighborhood – celestial archaeology that may hold the key to understanding our own corner of space.

600,000,000 years ago
It takes imagination to envision Earth during the pre-Cambrian period, before a sudden evolutionary change overhauled the animal kingdom and created the variety of creatures we know today. “The fossil record prior to the Cambrian is so scant that nobody knows the origin of animal life,” says Sean Carroll. But the molecular biologist is changing that.

By studying the genetic structure of animals whose ancestors lived six hundred million years ago, Carroll has uncovered a startling fact: the genes that control the formation of limbs, appendages, and other seemingly modern animal features were all present a very long time ago, existing in a worm-like creature that may be the common ancestor of all animal life.

Until Carroll’s work, most people believed that animal diversity was the result of repeated evolution – that animals kept inventing new genes to grow claws or fins or whatever suited their purpose. But Carroll’s research tells us that what separates man from a fruit fly is merely the way remarkably common genes are expressed.

65,000,000 years ago
When Craig Pfister hikes the buttes and prairies of the American West, his mind drifts to a time when this was the land of giants. A veteran of more than a dozen digs in search of dinosaur bones, Pfister has helped to unearth two of the UW–Madison geology museum’s rarest trophies. His 1995 expedition recovered bones from a triceratops and a tyrannosaurus rex, both of which had been buried for some sixty-five million years.

Restoring the fragile bones is the next challenge for the museum. While the T. rex may be too brittle for display, the triceratops will eventually join a thirty-three-foot edmontosaurus skeleton as the chief attractions at the museum, which, thanks to director Klaus Westphal, Pfister, and a score of staff and volunteers, is building a dinosaur collection of Jurassic proportions.

4000 B.C.
Climate models are often used to forecast future conditions, but John Kutzbach ’60, MS’61, PhD’66 and Zhengyu Liu have discovered an interesting world of information by pointing that technology toward the past. By modeling the conditions of six thousand years ago, the climatologists have been able to understand the forces that shaped the environments and societies of the time. Their data show that slight changes in the earth’s orbit altered the seasonal cycle of solar radiation, which brought about a period of stronger monsoons in North Africa and South Asia. These factors explain why, at that time, North Africa wasn’t the desert we know today, but was instead a vast grassland dotted with small lakes and fishing communities.

800 B.C.
If you think that all is deathly quiet on the classics front, meet Barry Powell. The professor has kicked up major dust clouds in recent years with his theory that modern writing began with one ancient Greek. Powell, backed up by archaeological evidence, traces the roots of the modern alphabet to an unknown fan of Homer who, so moved by the lyrical oral poetry, tried to write it down. It’s such a controversial notion that scholars are still debating it. There’s one point on which they agree, however: whatever hatched the Greek alphabet – the first to capture the sound of words – set into motion the titanic thrust of Western civilization.

200 B.C.
Although the hymns and poems that form the heart of Hinduism had been passed on orally for possibly one thousand years, it was during this period that they began to be transcribed. And because they were written in Sanskrit, many UW–Madison students and faculty now train themselves in the ancient language so that they might plumb the lyrical and spiritual works for themselves.

800s
Beginning at this point in history and continuing for several centuries, Vikings invaded and settled parts of northern England, where centuries later, Howard Martin MA’67, PhD’71 would grow up speaking a language deeply colored by their presence. Now UW–Madison’s dean of continuing studies, Martin has maintained a lifelong fascination with the Viking influences on his native country, writing several papers on how English has been infiltrated with Old Norse influences. (The words law, skin, skirt, flat, and anger are just a few examples.)

1200s
In his history of science courses, David Lindberg argues that today’s students owe a great deal to their peers of the thirteenth century. It was then that students in Paris and Oxford began reading the works of the Greek masters, which had been lost from Western thought for more than eight centuries. Preserved by Islamic scholars who valued Aristotle’s teachings on medicine and science, the texts eventually found their way into Latin translation, and thus into the minds of thirteenth-century students. The resulting intellectual eruption gave life to all kinds of academic disciplines – from physics to philosophy – and paved the way for Galileo, Copernicus, and a chorus of scientists and thinkers who were inspired to wonder why.

1492
One of the most memorable years in history – how does the school rhyme go? – 1492 symbolizes a period of European exploration and, some would say, exploitation. No figure from the era is more enigmatic and controversial than that of Christopher Columbus. Helping to demystify Columbus is Margarita Zamora, a professor of Latin American literature who has surveyed Columbus’s writings to paint a fuller picture of the man who sought to find the New World. Rather than debate whether Columbus “discovered” America in the modern sense, Zamora considers a wider definition of discovery – a process of knowing that she says still influences our thinking today.

1532
When Spanish explorers arrived on the coast of South America in this year, they found the land dominated by the Inca Empire, a civilization that accomplished remarkably advanced feats in engineering and architecture. The Europeans and their diseases brought about an end to the empire, but anthropologists such as the UW’s Frank Salomon find plenty of enduring reasons to study Inca culture. One example: Inca villagers have long used elaborately knotted cords, called khipus, to record dates, measures, and other numeric data. Not only have the khipus preserved thousands of years of history, but they’re Y2K-compliant, more than we can say about our “advanced” information storage.

1700s
Around this time, American colonists stopped eating, and started dining. The differences are subtle – using forks instead of hands to eat, cooking meals instead of meats – but important in the eyes of Ann Smart Martin, a professor of art history. Studying those artifacts is her specialty.

Martin notes that as Americans began to shake off their coarse life of survival and to engage in finer living, they gained a taste for the material possessions that would complement their new social standing. Through America’s teapots and silverware, Martin traces evidence of the lives and aspirations of the people who owned them.

1776
Few documents have meant more to American history than the Declaration of Independence, and few people know more about it than Stephen Lucas. A communication arts professor, Lucas has spent most of the past two decades immersed in the politics and rhetoric of pre-revolution America, searching for the forces that came together to form what he considers “arguably the most masterful state paper in Western civilization.”

1845
For people who study potatoes – and there are nearly twenty on campus – 1845 is a seminal year, marking the outset of the biggest and most catastrophic crop failure in modern history. As a result of the Irish Potato Famine, more than one million people starved to death, and another two million fled en masse, remaking the demographics of the United States and Canada.

If there can be any good from a tragedy of this scale, it may be that because of the events of 1845, we have learned much about the fragile potato. By intensely studying the famine’s culprit – an organism known as Phytophthora that causes a fast-spreading blight – plant pathologists have learned how to control and manage potato crops, and they have now created a genetically disease-resistant tuber that, once it’s ready for market, should prevent any return of the villainous Phytophthora.

1900
Lest we forget the underappreciated role of these slime-gathering squares, UW–Madison keeps a collection of more than one thousand historical hankies. Many dating to the turn of the century, they remind us that there weren’t always disposable tissues. In fact, cloth handkerchiefs of old often held loftier roles than just nose-clearing. Many women’s handkerchiefs were emblazoned with diet advice or even French lessons – a reminder that Victorian women were rarely without their reminders of social graces.

1932
This year marked the beginning of the federal government’s Tuskegee Syphilis Study, making it a natural focal point for Vanessa Northington Gamble’s attempts to bring historical perspective to the role of race in medicine. Continuing for forty years, the Tuskegee study denied syphilis treatments to four hundred African-American sharecroppers, supposedly in the name of medical experimentation. Largely through Gamble’s efforts to bring redress for the shameful episode, President Clinton issued a national apology for Tuskegee in 1997.

The study, Gamble says, is an important metaphor for African-Americans, and it may help to explain why many reject the advice of medical institutions. While winning the symbolic apology does nothing to erase the past, she notes that it may be “a start toward rebuilding trust.”

1951
In this year, the still-infant television industry rolled out a new weekly comedy series called “I Love Lucy.” Journalism professor James Baughman, who is writing a book on fifties television, says that the CBS show marked a turning point in the medium, which many observers thought would broadcast primarily live events. But, sensing the popularity of taped serials such as “Lucy,” the networks “discovered that reruns can be economically viable,” Baughman says. That lesson governed television programming for decades, until the emergence of cable in recent years has forced networks to deviate in small ways from the weekly lineup.

1980
The boycott by the United States of the Olympic Games in Moscow demonstrated the inexorable link between sports and international politics. That dramatic Cold War gambit piqued the interest of historian Alfred Senn, who was living in Moscow at the time. Senn began exploring the political significance of the modern Olympics in a popular history course, and this year he turned his findings into a book, Power, Politics, and the Olympic Games.

The Here and Now
History needn’t always be so . . . musty. Sometimes the past can be a lens for seeing events of our own time. Professor Colleen Dunlavy uses research on the development of business and technology to help inform our understanding of the way things are today. She is writing a book, for example, about the history of shareholder rights, in which she documents how small shareholders once held greater voting power than they do today. By looking back, she hopes to suggest that present-day circumstances – such as wide public investment and mass communication made easy through the Internet – might warrant a more democratic way of doing business.

The Land Beyond
We’ve already met professors who put important experiences of the past under the microscope to search for understanding. But there are others who train their minds on the indistinct future. They spend their days trying to foresee the world ahead, to divine how they might make it better.

These are people who are solving problems before they even emerge, like Glenn Bower MS’84, PhD’92, who is helping a team of engineering students convert a Chevrolet Suburban from a gas-guzzling behemoth into a vehicle that runs on clean, alternative fuel. Or Judith Kimble, a biochemistry professor who is part of a team studying the way human organs grow and form, with the hope that one day researchers will be able to develop transplant organs in the laboratory. Or Jake Blanchard, a nuclear engineer who is developing micro-scale nuclear batteries to power a breed of intricate tools that don’t exist yet, but will.

And, although her primary intent is to question the need for all the prognostication whirling about the dawning of the new millennium, dance professor Li Chiao-Ping is compelling us to think about what lies ahead with Fin de Siecle, a “futurist ballet” that ponders our obsession with technology and speed.

The End
Finally, a wild card. Paul Boyer doesn’t really fit neatly into our time continuum. He doesn’t know when the world will end, but he’s interested in people who think that they do.

From the Millerites, who predicted the return of Jesus Christ in 1843, to present-day prophecy believers who say the end is coming any day now, many people have, at one time or another, felt the hot breath of the apocalypse on their cheeks. Boyer, a history professor and author of a book on prophecy belief, has studied this kind of thinking, and he cautions against dismissing believers as misguided. “They’re not simply a group of kooks on the fringes,” he says, pointing out that belief in a divinely foreordained end of the world is actually quite widespread. “Most people aren’t obsessed with it,” he says, but the underlying tension about our future has colored the way people have perceived the threat of nuclear war, conflict in the Middle East, and the globalizing economy.

And, lest we forget, Y2K.

As you might imagine, Boyer is busy keeping tabs on the worldwide hullabaloo. He’s even looking forward to New Year’s Eve. “When your car’s odometer flips over to one hundred thousand miles, it’s a meaningless moment in a way,” he says, “but it’s still exciting to look at all those zeros.”