UNC Chancellor: What the Webb telescope teaches us about ourselves
Since 2019, there’s been a roadside marker just outside of Oxford, N.C. honoring the UNC-Chapel Hill graduate and Granville County native James Webb for his contributions to science and space exploration. As of Jan. 24, there’s another monument to the former NASA administrator orbiting the sun nearly a million miles away from his N.C. hometown.
The James Webb Space Telescope is one of the most ambitious scientific projects of the 21st century, drawing on decades of work from researchers all over the world. If the mission unfolds as hoped, the telescope will peer so deep into the cosmos that it will glimpse light from the earliest moments of our universe, giving astronomers insight into the origins of all known time.
The Webb project is also a brilliant example of how science works in the modern era. As we encourage the next generation of researchers and explorers, there are a few things we can learn from the Webb telescope, even before it beams back its first image.
Science is a team sport, as my colleague Suzanne Barbour, dean of the Graduate School at UNC-Chapel Hill, wrote about how modern research labs work. “Advancing the frontiers of human knowledge has always been a shared endeavor, working best when ideas move freely across borders, disciplines and generations,” Barbour wrote. “That can only happen when we know how to talk to one another and how to work together.”
The Webb telescope involved thousands of astronomers, engineers, physicists, computer scientists and diplomats collaborating all over the world. Engineers in Germany, manufacturing specialists in Alabama, astrophysicists in England and propulsion specialists in California — they all played a role in getting the telescope aloft.
There are hundreds of brilliant individuals involved in this kind of project, but no lone genius can pull off a project of such scale. Organizing and cooperating are vital for advancing the frontiers of knowledge.
Science is risky by design. One of the most remarkable things about the Webb telescope is that despite all the effort, all the time and money, there’s a real chance it might not work.
The mirrors have to line up just right; the sunshield has to perform perfectly; the orbit has to remain stable. The fact that our society creates high-risk, high-reward endeavors is a part of the reason we can make progress in science, medicine and technology.
For every big breakthrough at Carolina, there are incremental advances or outright failures. That’s how knowledge advances, because we learn from our setbacks and try again.
The drive for discovery can unite us. The search for new knowledge — whether it’s life-saving vaccines, more sustainable energy sources, or my own field of preventing neurological diseases — transcends national boundaries and political differences. When the first images from Webb are transmitted to Earth, hopefully sometime later this year, it will be a moment of shared awe across our planet, a reminder that we’re capable of great things together.
At winter commencement, Frank Leibfarth, one of our superstar chemists, talked about finding hope in times of uncertainty. “The one thing that will propel you through the best and darkest moments of your life and career, the one thing you cannot let anyone take away from you, is your curiosity,” he told our newest graduates. “You need to keep that spark alive no matter what the world throws at you.”
As the most powerful telescope ever created settles into position, it’s clear the spark of curiosity is still burning strong. I see it in the work happening at Carolina and in the students we’re teaching. Uncertainty can be hard, and we’ve all endured more than our share of it in the past two years. It can also drive us to ask new questions, to bring up new ideas and to discover unseen worlds.
Kevin Guskiewicz is a neuroscientist, a Kenan Distinguished Professor of Exercise and Sport Science, and the chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
