Biography of Ronald E. McNair (Ph.D.) - NASA Astronaut

Each year, NASA and members of the space community remember the astronauts lost when the space shuttle  Challenger  exploded after launch  from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida on January 28, 1986.   Dr. Ronald E. McNair was a member of that crew. He was a decorated NASA astronaut, scientist, and talented musician. He perished along with the spacecraft commander, F.R. Dick Scobee, the pilot, Commander M.J. Smith (USN), mission specialists, Lieutenant Colonel E.S. Onizuka (USAF), and  Dr. Judith.A. Resnik, and two civilian payload specialists, Mr. G.B. Jarvis and Mrs. S. Christa McAuliffe, the teacher-in-space astronaut. The Life and Times of Dr. McNair Ronald E. McNair was born October 21, 1950, in Lake City, South Carolina. He loved sports, and as an adult, he became a 5th-degree black belt karate instructor. His musical tastes tended toward jazz, and he was an accomplished saxophonist. He also enjoyed running, boxing, football, playing cards, and cooking. As a child, McNair was known to be a voracious reader. This led to an often-told story that he went to the local library (which served only white citizens at the time) to check out books. The tale, as recalled by his brother Carl, ended with a young Ronald McNair being told he couldnt check any books out and the librarian called his mother to come get him. Ron told them hed wait. The police arrived, and the officer simply asked the librarian, Why dont you just give him the books?   She did.   Years later, the same library was named in Ronald McNairs memory in Lake City.   McNair graduated from Carver High School in 1967; received his BS in Physics from North Carolina AT State University in 1971 and earned a Ph.D. in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976. He received an honorary doctorate of Laws from North Caroline AT State University in 1978, an honorary doctorate of Science from Morris College in 1980, and an honorary doctorate of science from the University of South Carolina in 1984. McNair: the Astronaut-Scientist While at MIT, Dr. McNair made some major contributions in physics. For example, he performed some of earliest development of chemical hydrogen-fluoride and high-pressure carbon monoxide lasers. His later experiments and theoretical analysis on the interaction of intense CO2 (carbon dioxide) laser radiation with molecular gases provided new understandings and applications for highly excited polyatomic molecules. In 1975, McNair spent time researching laser physics at   E’cole D’ete Theorique de Physique, Les Houches, France. He published several papers in areas of lasers and molecular spectroscopy and gave many presentations in U.S. and abroad. Following his graduation from MIT, Dr. McNair became a staff physicist with Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California. His assignments included the development of lasers for isotope separation and photochemistry utilizing non-linear interactions in low-temperature liquids and optical pumping techniques. He also conducted research on electro-optic laser modulation for satellite-to-satellite space communications, the construction of ultra-fast infrared detectors, ultraviolet atmospheric remote sensing. Ronald McNair: Astronaut McNair was selected as an astronaut candidate by NASA in January 1978. He completed the one-year training and evaluation period and qualified for assignment as a mission specialist astronaut on space shuttle flight crews. His first experience as a mission specialist was on STS 41-B, aboard Challenger. It was launched from Kennedy Space Center on February 3, 1984. He was part of a crew that included spacecraft commander, Mr. Vance Brand, the pilot, Cdr. Robert L. Gibson, and fellow mission specialists, Capt. Bruce McCandless II, and Lt. Col. Robert L. Stewart. The flight accomplished proper shuttle deployment of two Hughes 376 communications satellites, and the flight testing of rendezvous sensors and computer programs. It also marked the first flight of the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) and the first use of the Canadian arm (operated by McNair) to position EVA crewman around Challenger’s payload bay. Other projects for the flight were the deployment of the German SPAS-01 Satellite, a set of acoustic levitation and chemical separation experiments, Cinema 360 motion picture filming, five Getaway Specials (small experimental packages), and numerous mid-deck experiments. Dr. McNair had primary resp onsibility for all of the payload projects. His flight on that  Challenger mission  culminated in first landing on the runway at Kennedy Space Center on February 11, 1984. His last flight was also aboard Challenger, and he never made it to space.  In  addition to his duties as a mission specialist for the ill-fated mission, McNair had worked up a musical piece with French composer Jean-Michel Jarre. McNair intended to perform a saxophone solo with Jarre while on orbit. The recording would have appeared on the album Rendez-Vous with McNairs performance. Instead, it was recorded in his memory by saxophonist Pierre Gossez,  and is dedicated to McNairs memory. Honors and Recognition Dr. McNair was honored throughout his career, beginning in college. He graduated magna cum laude from North Carolina AT (‘71) and was named Presidential Scholar (‘67-’71). He was a Ford Foundation Fellow (‘71-’74) and a National Fellowship Fund Fellow (‘74-’75), NATO Fellow (‘75). He won the Omega Psi Phi Scholar of Year Award (‘75), Los Angeles Public School System’s Service Commendation (‘79), Distinguished Alumni Award (‘79), National Society of Black Professional Engineers Distinguished National Scientist Award (‘79), Friend of Freedom Award (‘81), Who’s Who Among Black Americans (‘80), an AAU Karate Gold Medal (‘76), and also worked up Regional Blackbelt Karate Championships. Ronald McNair has a number of schools and other buildings named for him, plus memorials, and other facilities. The music he was supposed to play onboard Challenger does appear on Jarres eight album, and is called Rons Piece.   Edited by Carolyn Collins Petersen.

Problems of Cheating in Modern Society Essay

Is Modern Society More Tolerable to Cheating than Before? It is true to say that cheating on one’s spouse exists as long as there is marriage; and of course every generation is completely and utterly sure that the age it lives in is the worst in what concerns morals, human relationships and social life in general. Strangely enough, but people seem to like complaining about such things. It is hard to say whether cheating nowadays is more wide-spread than before, for there hardly can be any reliable information on this matter either from modern times or from the ages past, as cheating isn’t generally the thing that one strives to make public. Some people do everything to persuade us that it was better â€Å"then†; some people do everything to persuade us that â€Å"then† was just the same as â€Å"now†. Yet, some things changed, no doubt. Technological progress made cheating much more easy than it was in the ages past; cell phones and the Internet makes communications simple and confidential, unless someone tries to investigate them directly. And, of course, public opinion ceased to be strictly against cheating. Many people treat it extremely easy, condescendingly or even approvingly (at least until the moment they are cheated on themselves). There are even specialized dating websites for married people on the Internet. And it is strange, really. Even if people consider Christian (and almost any other) morals to be outdated, do they consider business agreements to be just as outdated? And what a marriage is if not a business agreement of a kind, with its terms and conditions? Why a person who infringes this contract should be treated in a different way from somebody who swindles his or her business partner? It is a picturesque example of doublethink, one of many that may be encountered in modern world.

The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky Free Essays

string(55) " the symbol of decay and degeneration of human person\." Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, born in 1821, was a great Russian prose writer. He was born in Moscow and studied at the St Petersburg Engineering Academy. His first published work was a translation of Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet, which appeared in 1844. We will write a custom essay sample on The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky or any similar topic only for you Order Now Two years later his first original works, the short stories Poor Folk, The Double were published, later followed by other short prose pieces. (Leatherbarrow, 47-48) In April 1849 Dostoevsky was arrested for suspected revolutionary activity and condemned to death, or at least was taken to the scaffold and to the last moments before execution before the true sentence of four years in prison and four years as a private in the Siberian army was read out. He was released from the army in 1858. The result of his imprisonment was the change of his personal convictions: he rejected the socialism and progressive ideas of his early years, and instead adhered to the principles of the Russian Orthodox Church and belief in the Russian people. Another immediate fruit of his imprisonment experience was his remarkable House of the Dead that appeared in 1861. Other novels followed which display a profound understanding of the depths of the human soul. Notes from the Underground of 1864 sets rational egoism, which proffers reasons for treating others as instruments, against irrational selfishness which treats others as enemies. Crime and Punishment of 1866, The Idiot of 1868, and The Devils (also translated as The Possessed, written in 1871) led up to his great achievement, The Brothers Karamazov, completed in 1880. With the Slavophils, Dostoevsky venerated the Orthodox Church, and was deeply impressed by Staretz Amvrosy whom he visited at Optina. (Leatherbarrow, 169) But his sense of goodness was neither facile nor naive. He saw human freedom as something so awesome that most people are ready to relinquish it. This is epitomized in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. In his speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, Solzhenitsyn quoted Dostoevsky, ‘Beauty will save the world. ’ The Brothers Karamazov is Dostoevsky’s final novel, completed only two months before his death. It was intended as Dostoevsky’s apocalypse. Its genre might best be called Scripture, rather than novel or tragedy. (Bloom, 5) This novel is the synthesis of Dostoevsky’s religious and philosophic search. The scene of the novel is laid in a sleepy province in the family of the noble, the Karamazovs. A sleepy province had always been for Russian writers the source of characters of integrity, pure passion and spiritual relations among people. However, Dostoevsky presents the life in such province in different light. Spiritual decay had penetrated into patriarchal up-country. From the very early stages of the novel’s writing Dostoevsky underwent several influences. The first was the profound impact the Russian philosopher and thinker Nikolai Fyodorov had on Dostoevsky at this time of his life. According to Fyodorov’s doctrine Christianity is a system in which â€Å"man’s redemption and resurrection could be realized on earth through sons redeeming the sins of their fathers to create human unity through a universal family. † (Sandoz, 221) The tragedy of patricide in The Brothers Karamazov acquires more poignant coloring as Dostoevsky applies a complete inversion of this Christian system. Thus the sons in the novel do not attain resurrection for their father. Quite to the contrary they are complicit in his murder, and such turn of events is for Dostoevsky a metaphor for complete human disunity, breakage of the mentioned spiritual relations among people. As already noted religion and philosophy played a vital role in Dostoevsky’s life and in his novel in particular. Nevertheless, much more personal tragedy changed the way the novel took later. In 1878 Dostoevsky stopped writing the novel because of the death of his son Alyosha who was only three-years old. This tragedy was even more difficult to endure for the writer as Alyosha’s death was caused by epilepsy, a disease he inherited from his father. Dostoevsky’s desolation could not escape being reflected in the novel; one of the characters has a name Alyosha. The writer endued his character with the features he himself aspired to and would like to follow. Though very personal experience had a profound influence on Dostoevsky’s choice for theme and actions that dominated the external of the novel, the key problem treated by this work is human disunity, or breakage of the spiritual relations among people. In comparison to previous novels social split-up is accruing, getting more distinct the relations between people are becoming more fragile in The Brothers Karamazov. â€Å"For everyone nowadays strives to dissociate himself as much as possible from others, everyone wants to savour the fullness of life for himself, but all his best efforts lead not to fullness of life but to total selfdestruction, and instead of ending with a comprehensive evaluation of his being, he rushes headlong into complete isolation. For everyone has dissociated himself from everyone else in our age, everyone has disappeared into his own burrow, distanced himself from the next man, hidden himself and his possessions, the result being that he has abandoned people and has, in his turn, been abandoned. † (Dostoevsky, 380) This is how the situation with the Russian society of the 1870s is defined by the novel character, Starets Zosima, who is especially close to the writer. The Karamazovs family in Dostoevsky’s novel is Russia in miniature – it is absolutely deprived of warmth of family ties. Unvoiced hostility relates the father of the family, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, and his sons: the eldest – Dmitry – the man of spoiled nature, Ivan, the captive of loose manners, Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov, a child of shame, lackey by his position and in his soul, and a novice Alyosha, who is making his best to reconcile hostile clashes that finally resulted in a dreadful crime of patricide. Dostoevsky shows that all participants of this drama share responsibility for the tragedy that had happened, and first of all, the father himself, who is, for the author, the symbol of decay and degeneration of human person. You read "The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky" in category "Papers" The contemporary society thus was infected with a serious spiritual disease – â€Å"karamazovshchina†. The essence of â€Å"karamazovshchina† lies in the denial of all sacred things and notions that sometimes ranges up to frenzy. â€Å"I hate the whole of Russia, Marya Kondratyevna. † – confesses Smerdyakov. – â€Å"In 1812 Russia was invaded by Emperor Napoleon 1 [†¦] and it would have been an excellent thing if we’d have been conquered by the French; [†¦] Everything would have been different. † (Dostoevsky, 281-282) The same Smerdyakov â€Å"As a child [†¦] had loved to string up cats and then bury them with full ceremony. He would dress up in a sheet, to represent a chasuble, and chant while swinging some imagined censer over the dead cat. † (Dostoevsky, 156) â€Å"Smerdyakovshchina† is the lackey variant of â€Å"karamazovshchina† and it demonstrably uncovers the essence of this disease – perverted passion for expressing humiliation and desecration of the most sacred values of life. As it is said in the novel â€Å"’people do love the downfall of a righteous man and his degradation’†. (Dostoevsky, 415) The main bearer of â€Å"karamazovshchina† is Fyodor Pavlovich who enjoys constant humiliation of the truth, beauty and good. His carnal relation with a foolish Lizaveta Smerdyashchaya, the result of which is the lackey Smerdyakov, is a cynical desecration of love. Fyodor Pavlovich’s voluptuousness is far from being a mere animal instinct and unconscious behavior. His voluptuousness has an idea to engage in controversy with the good. Karamazov is quite conscious of meanness of his intentions and deeds, and so he derives cynical satisfaction in humiliation of the good. He is always longing for spiting upon a sacred place. He consciously makes a row in Starets Zosima’s cell and then goes with the same intention to the abbot to dinner: â€Å"He wanted to take revenge on everyone for his own tricks. [†¦ ] I can’t hope to rehabilitate myself now, so I’ll spit in their faces and be damned! I’ll not be ashamed of myself in front of them and that’s that! ’† (Dostoevsky, 109) A distinctive feature of â€Å"karamazovshchina† is a cynical attitude towards the nation’s bread-earner – Russian farmer: â€Å"The Russian people need thrashing† (Dostoevsky, 282). According to Karamazov’s psychology all higher values of life has to be overridden, dragged through the mud for the sake of frantic self-affirmation. There is a father Therapon living together with the saint Starets Zosima in a monastery. Outwardly this man is striving for the absolute â€Å"righteousness†, he leads an ascetic existence, exhausts himself with fasts and prayers. But what is the source of Therapon’s righteousness? What is its inducement? As it turns out then, his inducement is the hatred to Starets Zosima and desire to surpass him. Katerina Ivanovna is very kind to her offender, Mitya, all because of smoldering hatred to him and of a sense of wounded pride. The virtues turn into delirious form of self-affirmation, into magnanimity of selfishness. With the same selfishness and same magnanimity Grand Inquisitor â€Å"loves† humanity in a tale contrive by Ivan. In the world of Karamazovs all relations among people are perverted, they acquire criminal character since everyone here is trying to turn those around into â€Å"marble pedestal†, the pedestal for one’s selfish ego. The world of Karamazovs is the world intersected by the crime chain reaction. Which one of the sons is father’s killer? Ivan did not kill, however, this is he who first formulated the idea of permissibility of patricide. Dmitry didn’t kill Fyodor Pavlovich either; he teetered on the brink of crime in a fit of hatred to his father. Fyodor Pavlovich was killed by Smerdyakov, but he only brought to an end Ivan’s ideas and passion that overfilled Dmitry’s embittered mind. In the world of Karamazovs the definite moral boundaries of crime cannot be restored – everybody is, to certain extent, guilty of murder. Potential delinquency reigns the atmosphere of mutual hatred and exasperation. Every person individually and all people together are guilty, or as Starets Zosima says â€Å"As to every man being guilty for everyone and everything, quite apart from his own sins. † (Dostoevsky, 379) â€Å"Remember especially that you may not sit in judgement over anyone. * No man on this earth can sit in judgement over other men until he realizes that he too is just such a criminal as the man standing before him, and that it is precisely he, more than anyone, who is guilty of that man’s crime. † (Dostoevsky, 402) â€Å"Karamazovshchina†, according to Dostoevsky, is a Russian variant of the disease, suffered by the all European societies; this is a disease of civilization. Its reasons are the loss of moral values by a civilized man and the sin of â€Å"self-worshipping†. The upper classes of Russian society, following the progressive classes of Western European society, worship their ego and consequently decay. The crisis of humanism comes, which in Russian conditions acquires forms which are particularly undisguised and defiant: â€Å"If you want to know, – argues Smerdyakov, when it comes to depravity there’s nothing to choose between them and us. They’re all blackguards, but there they walk about in patent leather boots while our scoundrels go around like stinking beggars and don’t see anything wrong in it†. (Dostoevsky, 282) By Ivan Karamazov’s formula: â€Å"for if there is no God, how can there be any crime? † (Dostoevsky, 395). The sources of Western European and Russian bourgeoisie were considered by Dostoevsky to be not in economic development of society but rather in the crisis of modern humanity, caused by â€Å"strenuously self-conscious† individual. (Lambasa et al. , 118) Thus it can be concluded that Karamazov’s decay, according to Dostoevsky, is the direct implications of isolation, solitude of a modern civilized man, it is the consequence of people’s loss of feeling of great universal relation to the secular and divine world that is superior to the animal needs of human earthy nature. Repudiation of the higher spiritual values may bring a man to indifference, loneliness, and hatred to life. This is the path kept by Ivan and Grand Inquisitor in the novel. Works Consulted Bloom, Harold. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s the Brothers Karamazov. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Karamazov Brothers. Trans. Ignat Avsey. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994 Lambasa, Frank S. , Ozolins, Valija K. , Ugrinsky, Alexej. Dostoevski and the Human Condition after a Century. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. Leatherbarrow, W. J. The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002 Sandoz, Ellis. Political Apocalypse: A Study of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2000. How to cite The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, Papers