I. The movie and its impact
D. From space travel to time travel
I. THE MOVIE AND ITS IMPACT
A. A SCIENCE FICTION DEPARTURE
"2001: A Space Odyssey" is a pivotal movie that greatly differed from the science fiction movies that preceded it, according to Michael Porte, UC professor of communication and expert on mass media. "It was made lovingly with beautiful images and wonderful music that is superior in every way" to its science fiction predecessors, he said. Porte agrees the film is one of Kubrick's best films, but admits he found parts of the movie boring and "sort of overdone." He said: "It's not a typical movie at all. It's very confusing. That's one of its problems." When it comes to Kubrick, Porte prefers a black-and-white film the director made about WWI, "Paths of Glory."
Contact: 513-556-4473
B. MASTERPIECE WITHOUT CANVAS
Stephen Gebhardt, UC adjunct professor of communication, shows a number of Kubrick films, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, in his spring quarter class, Film As Art. "A friend of mine, Dan Richter, was the -- 'moonwatcher' or -- 'principal ape' in 2001. He received an onscreen credit for choreographing those sequences." "I loved 2001 because it was so formal and had great strength in its imagery. Kubrick's style was very formalist in an industry that would rather not spend the time developing this vision. He shoots his imagery the way a painter sees his canvas. He created his special effects by developing a whole new way of shooting film in an age that did not have the supercomputers to do special effects."
Contact: 513-241-8866
C. HISTORICAL MOMENT
"For people who appreciate films, '2001' will always stand up and have historical significance for how it blended music and imagery," says pop culture expert Rebecca Borah, UC assistant professor of language arts. "However, for people who are used to watching today's films that rely heavily on special effects, it won't hold up very well," she believes. Borah says back in the 1960s when "2001" was released, we thought we'd be much farther ahead in the space race by the century's end. "We've found that we're much more limited. We can't get computers to think fast enough to make living in space safe for humans. We don't like the idea of sending unmanned spacecraft because we have this romantic image of man exploring planets, a human doing the exploration instead of a device. Plus, we've sent machines into space and they didn't work. There were the problems with the Hubble telescope and the Mars explorer."
Contact: 513-556-1792
D. MUSICAL MILESTONE
It's hard to imagine "2001" the movie without the background music. That now-famous musical theme is actually the opening passage of "Thus Spake Zarathustra," an 1894 symphonic poem, by Austrian composer Richard Strauss. Strauss, a world-class talent (and ego), was severely criticized when he came to Cincinnati in the 1940s for his earlier Nazi sympathies, said Simon Anderson, UC professor of music education at the College-Conservatory of Music. The music -- "one of the most successful of all film scores -- marvelously captures the good-versus-evil drama unfolding on screen," said Anderson. "It's nearly perfect, because the original symphonic poem was composed for that very purpose -- to offer in musical terms, Fredrich Nietzsche's literary treatment of that disturbing duality in human behavior." Adds Anderson: "The rest of the classical music in the film score also fits, scene after scene, and it all makes for a spectacular film score."
Contact: 513-281-0670
II. DECIPHERING THE STORY
A. TIMELESS MESSAGE
The story behind "2001," now more than three decades old, still speaks to us today, says William Godshalk, UC professor of English and an admirer of the Kubrick film and the Clarke novel (which was first a short story called "The Sentinel.") "It's a story of evolutionary break-throughs," ranging from the apeman picking up his first tools after touching a black monolith sent by extraterrestrials to the Star Child -- a new level of humankind. "It came at an interesting time when people were about to land on the moon. It was certainly an interesting time in terms of our plans for space exploration. It didn't seem like space was so science fictional any more."
Contact: 513-281-5927
B. RELIGION WITH A FRANKENSTEIN TWIST
Jonathan Alexander, UC assistant professor of language arts, says "Arthur C. Clarke's and Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey,' like much of the 20th century's great science fiction, is both a secular parable of evolution and an enticement to consider our origins and our future possibilities." To him, the monolith and the Star Child are icons of a guiding force, resonating with mythic, religious images and emotions. "The monolith parallels, perhaps, the tables of divine law given to Moses, and the Star Child is the virgin birth of the interstellar godhead." Hal, as a product of humanity, is the dark parallel to the process of creation, for he contains our flaws as well as our intelligence, and he is thus the Frankensteinian reminder that the creation of intelligent life is best left in more capable hands."
Contact: 513-556-1769
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III. ART MEETS SCIENCE
A. THE ART OF THE SPACE RACE
Benjamin Britton, UC associate professor of fine art and creator of MOON, a virtual reality artwork that re-creates the first lunar landing, points out that the 1960s space race and "2001: A Space Odyssey" had a huge impact on design and art. "The Beatles began wearing round glasses in the shape of the globe. Robert Rauschenberg created silk-screen prints on the space race. These are just some early examples," he said. More recently, art and artists have literally been going into space. The first sculpture in space, "Cosmic Dancer," by Arthur Woods was unveiled on the Mir Space Station in 1993 to evaluate the importance of adding art to an outer space experience. Cosmonaut Alexander Polischuk started the work gently twirling. "Then, he rolled himself up in a ball and twirled beside the sculpture. For a time, that scene was broadcast every night on German television." Britton added that a painting student and a dancer have both gone aboard NASA's shuttle simulations. "The zero-gravity oil painting got kind of messy," he recalled.
Contact: 513-556-0283
B. ARTISTS AID SCIENCE
Does art flow from science or science flow from art? According to astronomer Roger Malina, executive editor of the art, science and technology publications, the Leonardo Journals, artists have played a vital role in space exploration. Malina is the director of the Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Astrophysics (CEA), Berkeley, Calif., and one of three organizers of an annual international gathering for artists, musicians, scientists and engineers active in the space business. "What scientists and engineers do is a result of the artist's work. Artists articulate our desires and our dreams. The dreams come before the science," he explained. An example: author Jules Verne influenced science in the first half of the 20th century. "His 'From Earth to the Moon,' brought about a whole change of perspective as to who we are and where we're going." According to Malina, artists have always accompanied voyages of discovery, including Charles Darwin's historic voyage to the Galapagos Islands, which helped to shape his theories on evolution. These artists helped others to understand the experience. The same will be true for future space flights."
Contact: Roger.Malina@astrsp-mrs.fr
IV. EVOLUTIONARY DETAILS
A. NO BONES ABOUT IT
Research over the past 30 years has debunked the view that early humans were bestial, violent and aggressive as the opening segment of "2001" suggests. According to University of Cincinnati paleoanthropologist and skeletal biologist Lynne Schepartz "Early humans were opportunistic feeders. They were gatherers of plant materials, and they scavenged meat by waiting for aggressive animals to leave a kill before feeding from it rather than fighting off a predator." Schepartz adds that the most common early tools were probably of perishable material for carrying infants or gathering food, not bone, as "2001" suggests. These perishable tools would not necessarily leave traces for researchers to find today. "We know this based on primates and their use of tools in the wild. We've learned so much more about our own behavior and that of the Great Apes."
Contact: 513-556-5780
B. STONES NOT BONES
John Fleagle, professor of anatomical sciences, State University of New York at Stony Brook, dismisses the suggestion implied by the "2001" monolith that intelligent life from elsewhere enlightened early man on the use of tools. "If an outside force gave the spark for human use of tools, it gave it at the same time to chimpanzees, orangutans and all our relatives on the evolutionary tree," he said. "Rather, the fact that chimps and others use tools indicates that tool use evolved biologically." He has two other quibbles with the opening sequence, which shows an apeman beating a tapir with a bone tool. First, there are no tapirs in Africa. Secondly, the best evidence suggests that the earliest tools used by ancestors of modern man were most likely made of stone. Even so, the symbolism of the bone tool flying up from the apeman's hands and transforming into a space ship is right on target, according to Fleagle. "We went from butchering animals with rocks to using tools for space travel all in just 2.5 million years. That's remarkable."
Contact: 631-444-3121
V. FROM REEL SCIENCE TO REAL SCIENCE
A. SPACE TRAFFIC CONTROL
As air traffic controllers rely more and more on computers to control commercial flights, University of Cincinnati Professor Gary Slater is looking ahead to the days of space traffic control. Slater, department head in aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics, has spent many years helping the federal government develop safer computer systems for air traffic control. He says "The principal danger now, and for the foreseeable future, is the danger from colliding with space junk left in orbit by satellites and rockets. It is very likely that the same type of software being developed to avert mid-air collisions of aircraft could also be adapted to avoid collisions of spacecraft with space debris." Slater added that just as with aircraft, the greatest danger is in landing and take-off or docking with another spacecraft like the Space Station.
Contact: 513-556-3223
B. WHAT'S AHEAD FOR NASA?
UC alum and NASA engineer James Lester knows that the biggest challenge for extended manned space flight is the time element involved. Lester worked on NASA's TransHab project, an inflatable habitat designed for tips to Mars or beyond. He doesn't expect a manned Mars mission for about ten years or so. However, he and other NASA experts know the long space flights will be hard on the human body and the human psyche. "An astronaut's health is most important in space travel," said Lester. "Astronauts exercise at least 2 hours every day, so they don't lose muscle and bone mass. There are machines like modified bikes and modified treadmills for exercise due to the lack of gravity. There are also studies that involve centrifuges. These are spinning bodies that would simulate a gravity field that the astronauts could work and live in. Having a partial gravity field would help in maintaining astronaut's health." Training together helps astronaut crews develop a psychological edge in space. "Being together on a day to day basis for long periods of time beforehand astronaut crews become like a family. You may not like everything about everyone, but you learn to adapt and be happy."
Contact: james.d.lester1@jsc.nasa.gov
C. THE UNPREDICTABILITY OF PREDICTIONS ON SPACE TRAVEL
Trevor Williams, an associate professor of aerospace engineering who works with NASA on issues related to satellite orbits and safety in space, says Arthur Clarke was definitely right about one prediction he made. Clarke believed that most predictions are too optimistic in the short-term and too conservative in the long run. "Most everything about human spaceflight is somewhat behind what was predicted in the book and film," said Williams. "There was an orbiting hotel reached by a (Pan Am!) clipper, a large permanent lunar base with regular flights out to it, and interplanetary flights with humans. None of this has yet come about. On the other hand, the whole field of small, low-cost spacecraft (e.g. "swarms" of nanosatellites) that is very active now was not predicted in the book. So maybe we are behind in the 'big' flights but ahead in the 'small' ones. Plus, the uses of space in ordinary life (communications, TV, weather forecasting) are probably more pervasive than anyone, even Arthur C. Clarke, really predicted."
Contact: 513-556-3221
D. FROM SPACE TRAVEL TO TIME TRAVEL
Despite recent advances in understanding the science of time, physicist Brian Meadows assures us we will never travel back to see what the 2001 apeman was really doing. "You cannot make time run backwards, so time travel to the past is not possble." There are, however, many interesting phenomena associated with time and space travel. "The faster you move, the slower your clock seems to run - as observed by a stationary observer. You can never reach the speed of light, but if you could, then your time would slow to a stop!" Traveling near the speed of light would be advantage to a space traveler, according to Meadows. "It would help you reach the distant stars - perhaps hundreds of light years away. In effect, your clock (relative to that the distant stars) would run slower giving you more time to get there."
Contact: 513-556-0531
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