American Scientist

Actually, she’s not really retiring, but it just wouldn’t be right to use the word “changing.” That, after all, would imply that she is somehow replaceable. Not so. After 18 years with American Scientist, 16 of them as its editor, Rosalind Reid has officially stepped down from the editorship. Those rascals at Harvard, having first enticed her to extend her fellowship there from four months to eight, have now hired her away as acting executive director of the Initiative in Innovative Computing. Give them credit: They know how to pick them.

Her accomplishments speak through the pages of 108 issues of this publication. Still, it’s worth reflecting on the fruit these processed trees have borne. On the wall just past her former office hang 20 awards documenting the respect American Scientist generates in the magazine world. Invitations to be the first journalist in residence at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at U.C. Santa Barbara and to her just-finished fellowship at Harvard point more directly to her personal acumen and charisma.

Ros brought me aboard 15 years ago, and together we hired all the talent you see listed at the bottom left of this page. Over those years, during far-too-rare reflective moments over something potable, we agreed that if we’d done anything right, it was to hire well. In that spirit, I am hoping to keep her hand in the editorial mix as alternating editor (with Felice Frankel) of “Sightings,” the first example of which appears on page 348. So, a big thank you goes out for everything she has done and will do. And bon voyage!

During a recent discussion about science literacy—or lack therein—one commentator observed that the average nonscientist has little understanding of how science works. Thus the confusion about what words such as hypothesis, theory and testability mean to scientists. I then told the story of a poignant example of the scientific process, one that features in Nader Haghighipour’s article “Binary Stars with Habitable Planets.” He relates how a planet orbiting a stellar pair was discovered, undiscovered and rediscovered. It’s a classic tale of how science works and why it works so well.

Twenty-five years ago, no one even knew of an extrasolar planet, let alone one that orbited a binary system. Then, in 1988, Bruce Campbell of the University of Victoria, along with Gordon A. H. Walker and Stevenson Yang (both then at the University of British Columbia) reported measurements of variation in the radial velocity of the star gamma Cephei A. The data seemed consistent with the existence of a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting this star.

Like all good scientists, Campbell, Walker and Yang continued collecting data to test their conclusions. By 1992, their skepticism led them to retract the 1988 paper, stating that the observed oscillations seemed more likely to be caused by activity in the star’s chromosphere. Thus in 1995, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the Observatoire de Genève became the first to definitively observe an extrasolar planet orbiting a sunlike star, 55 Pegasi.

Like all good science stories, though, this one didn’t end there. Campbell, Walker and Yang, along with Artie P. Hatzes of the Thüringer Landessternwarte Tautenburg and others, kept on looking, and by 2003 they had changed their minds once more. Based on more and better data, they concluded that gamma Cephei A does, indeed, host a planet about twice the size of Jupiter. Not only did Campbell, Walker and Yang miss out on unveiling the first planet orbiting a binary system, they would have been the first discoverers of any extrasolar planet. To quote Kurt Vonnegut, “So it goes.” We wouldn’t have it any other way.