Students at 2011 commencement.

Honorees will include three Outstanding Students of the Year: Jahnna C. Morehouse, a Critical Race, Gender and Sexuality Studies major in the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences; Nicole C. Umayam, an English, French & Francophone Studies major, also in the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences; and Chyna Balonick, a Kinesiology major in the College of Professional Studies.

This year’s Commencement keynote speaker is Bryan Kelly, President of the HSU chapter of Associated Students. His topic is “Making a Difference” and the unique qualities of Humboldt State that equip graduates to engage in the world and have an impact.

The Commencement schedule ‘rain or shine’ is: 8:30 a.m. – College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences; Noon – College of Natural Resources and Sciences; 3:30 p.m. – College of Professional Studies.

At the conclusion of each ceremony, a general reception will be held in the Quad below the Bell Tower. The academic departments will hold receptions of their own at various locations, which will be listed at the back of the free Commencement program, accompanied by a campus map.

Commencement 2012 will continue the “Greening Up Graduation” initiative begun in 2010 to reduce the number of single-use bottles, while also minimizing use of disposable coffee cups.

Redwood Bowl will be equipped with water stations to refill reusable water bottles and vendors will be selling discounted water canteens. HSU Alumni Office staff will be selling Commencement memorabilia.

All attendees are urged to arrive early for their respective ceremonies. Continuous shuttle service will be available from Parking Lot FS9 (Harpst and Rossow Streets) and Lots G14 and G15 (14th & Union) for transport to Redwood Bowl. Disabled parking will be available to those with proper license plates and placards, also in lot FS9, which adjoins the Student Business Services Building at the Harpst/Rossow intersection.

Details are at http://www.humboldt.edu/commencement/.

In his new book, “Conifer Country,” Kauffmann provides a natural history and hiking guide to the biodiversity of the region—as seen through the eyes of conifers.

A foxtail pine highlights this view of the Trinity Alps. Photo Courtesy Michael Kauffmann.

The leaves of “Conifer Country,” made from 100 percent recycled paper, contain 29 hiking trails spanning the Klamath Mountain region of northern California and southern Oregon. Each trail acts as a tour of the 35 ancient conifers that live in the area. And the book itself, Kauffmann says, is a project 10 years in the making.

Roughly a decade ago, Kauffmann moved to Humboldt County to pursue his teaching credential. After a few of weeks living in and exploring the area the natural beauty hooked him. “I was blown away by what I’d seen in some of my first journeys,” he says. “Luckily I didn’t go up into the mountains and never come back.”

Michael Kauffman is a graduate student in the Biology program. Photo Courtesy Michael Kauffmann.

Kauffmann finished his teaching credential, found work as a middle school science and math teacher, and got involved with the Redwood Science Project at HSU. On campus his work includes promoting science education, developing curriculum for the Natural History Museum and advising future science teachers attending HSU. Currently, he maintains his position with the project, teaches a science course for future teachers, and has nearly finished his master’s degree in Biology. He also spends three days a week teaching with the Fortuna Elementary School District.

The completion of this book satisfies requirements of Kauffmann’s Master’s degree and is an example of the kind of work coming out of the new pathway in the Biology Department.

Professor Jeffrey White, Kauffmann’s advisor, says projects like this provide unique opportunities for students and the community. “I am very excited to be a part of this new option that trains and financially supports students in the art of communicating rigorous science to broad audiences,” says White.

As an educator, Kauffmann began to notice the disconnect between his students and the natural world. This realization, coupled with his own love of backpacking, led him to write “Conifer Country.” In addition to writing the book and creating the range maps and engaging descriptions for all the region’s conifers, Kauffman snapped each photograph and designed the book’s layout. Although created with a wide audience in mind, the book is geared toward people who want to get outside, learn about the Klamath Mountains, and develop a better understanding of the natural world.

Of the 29 hiking trails highlighted in “Conifer Country,” Kauffmann says, the most popular is Canyon Creek. This demanding, 11-mile round-trip hike near the town of Junction City, Calif., showcases 14 different conifers. Among them is the rare Brewer spruce, which only exists in the Klamath region.

“Conifers are often windswept and charismatic,” Kauffmann says. “I like to think of the mountain conifers as the crowning jewels of the Klamath.” By telling the stories of these ancient trees, Kauffmann is also telling the story of how they came to be in the region, why they survive in the places they do, and their relationships to all the wild things that live here.

In addition to providing a natural history lesson, Kauffmann hopes to foster a connection between people and the natural world. “I wanted to connect people to nature by helping them have a more authentic experience with it,” he says. “If you’re engaged with the natural world, you’re going to care more about it.”

“It’s an exciting way for people to understand northern California and southwestern Oregon, get outside, get to know some plants and animals, and have fun.” More than anything, he says, the book is another way to help people say, “Wow.”

“Conifer Country,” will be available in mid-May through Backcountry Press. Pre-orders are available now until May 10th with a 20 percent discount on the cover price. For more information, visit http://backcountrypress.com/store/deals.html.

The book will also be available for purchase in mid-May at the HSU Natural History Museum.

These inconspicuous documents, however, contain the work of linguist Li Fang-Kuei. The information, nearly a century old, may hold the key needed to complete efforts to sustain the Wailaki language.

L to R: Student Perry Lincoln, Professor Victor Golla, students Nikki Martensen and Brandy Hurtado pour over notebooks containing remnants of the extinct Wailaki language.

As part of her Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity Fellowship with the Department of Anthropology, Hurtado is part of a team creating a digital archive of the notebooks. In addition to scanning and digitizing the original collection, the team will transcribe the information to the best of their abilities. The resulting information will be made available to scholars through the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley. Hurtado also plans to present this documentation to local tribes.

The Wailaki people are the descendants of the southernmost Athabaskan tribe of southern Oregon and northern California. Today though, there is no federally recognized Wailaki tribe and, according to Victor Golla, the language is basically extinct except for re-learners studying the language from notes.

Golla is a professor of Anthropology and Native American Studies at Humboldt State. He is also an expert on American Indian languages including the Athabaskan language, Hupa. In this line of work, it’s not uncommon to see the winding paths languages take to survive.

Perry Lincoln is another student on the team documenting Li’s notes on Wailaki. “Those people that kept language alive were the people who slipped through the cracks,” he says. Lincoln is of Wailaki descent and a member of the Round Valley Indian Tribes, a federally recognized confederation of tribes, which includes the Wailaki. In the Cultural Resources Facility, Lincoln is transcribing Li’s delicately written notes into a lasting digital archive. His interest in American Indian languages led him to Golla four years ago. But Lincoln could recall a time when tribal languages didn’t merit much concern or attention.

“I didn’t think of language as being ‘lost,’” he says. “My wife’s mom and dad both spoke Hupa and so did a few other elders.” But as the generation of fluent speakers aged and passed away, Lincoln realized how quickly a language could be lost. “Within one generation. That fast.”

While languages can be nearly wiped out in as little as one generation, it took almost 100 years and a circuitous journey for the notebooks containing the documentation of the Wailaki language to make their way back to the Pacific Northwest. It’s a story that begins with a Chinese linguist in the 1920s.

Li Fang-Kuei studied linguistics in his native China. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago in 1927, Li traveled to northern California to study the American Indian languages of the Mattole and Wailaki. It was thought at that time that these Athabaskan languages were historically related to Asiatic languages, and would therefore share tonal aspects.

Wailaki is a descriptive language, which Li documented through stories and questions that elaborated on the grammar used in the stories. Wailaki speakers would sit with Li, while he transcribed, pausing now and again to clarify. For instance, if someone mentioned a running horse, Li would pause to ask for the translation if it was plural, if the horse was stationary, if the horse was female if the horse was young. He would then ask questions about how to use the phrase in other tenses or in different conditions.

By the time he finished his research, Li wasn’t able to find support for the claim that tone was an important aspect in Mattole or Wailaki. However, his five student notebooks contained detailed notes on the linguistic structures of the languages. “If we only had one chance to document the language, we’re very lucky it was Li,” Golla says. “He allows us to understand the grammar and not simply vocabulary. That alone puts it heads and shoulders above other sources.”

By 1937, Li returned to Beijing to teach. His work on the Mattole language was published as part of his Ph.D. dissertation in 1930 with the University of Chicago. Before he could publish his documentation of Wailaki, however, Japanese advance troops had begun to create tension in China, especially around universities. Just ahead of World War II, Li fled China and returned to the United State, bringing the Wailaki notebooks with him.

“These notes were unpublished and irreplaceable,” says James Roscoe, director of the Cultural Resource Facility. “He got them out.”

Upon returning to the United States, Li found a position at the University of Washington in Seattle, teaching Chinese. It wasn’t until Li retired to Hawaii in the 1970s that academic interest in the Wailaki notebooks was revived.

During his retirement, Li continued to lecture at the University of Hawaii where he met two young, enthusiastic students with an interest in American Indian languages. “You had an elderly teacher and two eager undergraduates interested in an unfashionable subject,” Golla says. “They became a close-knit group.”

One of those students, William Seaburg, was interested in archiving and librarianship. With Li’s help, he was able to secure a position with the University of Washington to organize and archive the collection of noted linguist Melville Jacobs for the Jacobs Foundation. Before he left for Seattle, Li also entrusted Seaburg permanently with the Wailaki notebooks.

Seaburg earned his degrees in Anthropology and Librarianship and later became a tenured professor at the University of Washington. Still, he kept the notebooks in his personal possession until he and Golla, a professional colleague, decided the notebooks should be brought to Humboldt State.

“Bill said he’d like to see the notebooks made available to people interested in working with these languages,” Golla says. “But neither of us could think of a safe way to transport this valuable, absolutely unique material. Can you imagine if it was lost in the mail?”

The problem was resolved last December, when Jamie Roscoe volunteered to drive to Seattle and take personal charge of the manuscripts. Now safely in the CRF office, under lock and key, Hurtado and her colleagues are working them with on a daily basis. The letter of transferal signed by Seaburg grants Professor Golla legal custody of the Li materials until HSU’s digitization project is finished. After that, arrangements will be made to house the originals in the Bancroft Library or some other permanent archive with an extensive collection of materials on California Indian languages.

The delicate, yellowed pages are stored in pH neutral envelopes and handled with special gloves to protect the paper from skin oils.

During their sojourn in Arcata, the Li notes are being looked after according to the highest standards of manuscript curation. The delicate, yellowed pages are now being stored in pH neutral envelopes and were handled with special gloves to protect the paper from acids found in skin oils as Hurtado and others created the high resolution, archival quality scans. In addition to the notebooks themselves, Hurtado is documenting the notecards that contain Li’s original, preliminary analyses of the structure of the Wailaki language. Currently, she, Lincoln, and fellow student Nikki Martensen are among those transcribing the contents of the notebooks and notecards into digital documents.

While Hurtado’s ultimate goal is to preserve the historically and culturally significant documents, Lincoln’s ultimate goal is to secure revival. “My dream is to have a class teaching whatever we can find.”

“Documents aren’t the language; they just document it,” Golla says. “But for American Indian languages in general, this collection is very good. People could create a new use—a revitalization—of Wailaki from these notebooks. And that is significant to people, because part of reviving language is redefining who you really are.”

For the past four months, Arriaga has been helping promote the event through an internship with Marimba One, the custom marimba manufacturer. Using skills she learned in class, Arriaga created a local marketing strategy and compiled a database of potential partners for the Arcata-based company, which is hosting the international celebration.

Over the course of the semester, she also prepared an assessment of the company’s social media strategy and created an industry-specific blog.

“I’ve used a lot of marketing skills and learned a lot about importing and exporting which is really neat,” says Arriaga, who is considering a career in international business.

Arriaga is one of fourteen students participating in an academic internship class—BA 482—offered for the first time this semester by the School of Business. The four-credit course matches students with a local business, where they spend ten hours a week gaining hands-on career experience.

The class is part of a broader effort to expand internship opportunities in the School of Business. That got a boost recently with a $400,000 gift from the Patricia D. & William B. Smullin Foundation, which will fund 150 paid business internships starting in Spring 2013.

Tiana Arriaga (‘12, Business and French) is helping assess social media strategy and organize an international marimba festival through BA 482, an internship class offered by the School of Business for the first time this semester.

Business School Lecturer and Internship Director Shari Duron designed the course and established a pool of organizations interested in participating. She paired fourteen students with an internship based on their career goals and the needs of the company.

“Not only do the students get an academic experience that relates to their career, enhances their breadth of knowledge and increase their marketability, it’s also of great value to the community,” Duron says.

At the beginning of the program, students work with Duron and their internship coordinator to develop a project with an identifiable outcome. They receive mentoring from Duron and their internship supervisor throughout the 16-week period.

Projects range from a feasibility study of the rock and gravel business at the Karuk Community Development Corporation to inventory assessment for local hair care company Jessicurl.

“They have a lot of options based on their interests,” Duron says.

In addition to mentoring, students meet several times a month to share their experiences and discuss ways to overcome challenges. Later this month, they’ll present their experiences at a final reception.

To be eligible, students must be juniors or seniors in good academic standing. They must also submit an advisor or faculty member recommendation, resume, and application and conduct an in-person interview. Most are business majors and all have taken relevant coursework.

Laura Rich (’12) is a recreation major minoring in business who is interested in a career in public health. This semester, she interned with the City of Arcata’s Community Development Department.

Rich used her background in health and business to develop the city’s first-ever quality of life indicator study. The survey compiles data on seven factors—demographics, health, education, economy, the natural environment, the social environment and public safety—to determine a community’s overall health.

“It taught me a lot about health and how your community has a huge effect not only your physical well being, but also your overall quality of life,” says Rich, who plans to apply to medical school.

After the Zelstman Marimba Festival next summer, Arriaga would like to get a master’s degree in sustainable business management.

“I think this internship and HSU has definitely inspired me to pursue that,” she says. “I’ve learned about environmental standards and ethics. Eventually, I’d like to help businesses go green.”

A baby hummingbird—weighing less than five grams and no more than a few weeks old—feeding with its mother.

The scene became even more compelling when the fledgling suddenly spread its wings and flew, leaving its nest for the very first time.

“It was amazing,” recalls Scheerer, who was there on a film shoot for the California Environmental Legacy Project (CELP), a statewide initiative co-founded by HSU Biology Professor Jeffrey White designed to increase public awareness about the environment.

For the past year, Scheerer and a handful of HSU students, alumni and crewmembers have visited five natural habitats—Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, Point Reyes National Seashore, Lassen Volcanic National Park, Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook State Park, and Redwood National and State Parks—to film the local wildlife and scenery.

Left to Right: Film Professor David Scheerer, alumnus Timothy O’Malley, and graduate student Will Goldenberg (‘12, Wildlife Management & Conservation) film in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park for the California Environmental Legacy Project.

Later this year, they’ll produce a media package for every site—a short film and five to ten podcasts—describing the scientific, geological and cultural history of each location.

“How did these places come to be? How did the largest trees on earth, for example, come to be living on the Franciscan mélange, home to the most unstable soil on earth?” Scheerer asks.

The project is part of the California Environmental Legacy Project (CELP), a statewide initiative funded by a $3 million National Science Foundation grant and other contributions that brings together scientists, educators and media professionals from around the state to improve public understanding of the environment. Co-founded by Principal Investigator and Executive Producer Jeffrey White, the project includes online educational materials, site-specific films and a two-hour documentary on California’s environmental history to air on PBS this fall.

“The goal is to get people to understand nature in a way that they are either connecting with it for the first time, reconnecting, or are inspired to continue connecting,” Scheerer says.

Graduate student Will Goldenberg (’12, Wildlife Management & Conservation) is a production assistant and assistant cameraman who’s worked on the project since 2011. Last spring, he helped conduct a tram shoot in the Redwood Forest. Crews mounted a camera on a cable between two trees and it captured footage while zipping through the forest.

In August, he travelled with Scheerer to Lassen Volcanic National Park, where they recorded geothermal features like hot springs and boiling mud pools. In January, they encountered a herd of Peninsular Bighorn Sheep in the Borrego Desert, an endangered species that has inhabited the area for thousands of years.

During their most recent trip, they hiked to a remote cave in the Anza-Borrego to film pictographs—or rock drawings—sketched by the indigenous Kumeyaay, people native to the southwest United States and northwest Mexico. They also witnessed the annual migration of the Swainson’s hawk from Argentina to Canada.

Emmy-award winning cinematographer Rick Rosenthal (‘67, Zoology) behind the camera at a recent shoot in the Anza-Borrego Desert.

One of the highlights, Goldenberg says, was working with Emmy award-winning cinematographer Rick Rosenthal (’67, Zoology), who accompanied them on the trip.

“It was a huge opportunity to see how he did this type of work,” says Goldenberg who is considering a career in wildlife cinematography.

Over the next few months Scheerer and his team will turn 100 hours of raw footage into five, 15-minute movies and 25 podcasts. Each documentary will include interviews with scientists, park officials and visitors, an original score and computer generated images. The films will be available online next year, Scheerer says.

“”I think a lot of people somehow think of the natural world as separate from us,” Scheerer says. “Our goal here is to remind people that we are part of the wild, that this is where we come from and that these stories are our story.”

For more on the California Environmental Legacy Project.

Kevin Smullin Brown and Carol Anne Smullin Brown shake hands with Lucky Logger outside the College Creek complex.

The gift creates the Smullin Undergraduate Business Internships. It will fund hands-on work experiences in businesses, non-profits, and government in Humboldt, Del Norte, and Trinity Counties. The goal is to provide valuable work experience while also helping the local economy.

“The Smullin Foundation is pleased to be able to make a difference for undergraduate business students and North Coast communities through providing paid internships,” says Carol Anne Smullin Brown, the President and Executive Director of the Foundation. “It is a privilege to support Humboldt State.”

The gift is a major boost in the University’s efforts to expand and reinvigorate its School of Business. It follows closely on the heels of a $500,000 gift to the School, given anonymously last year. The two gifts are the largest ever to HSU’s School of Business.

With this significant donor support and new investment by the University, the School has changed considerably in just the last year.

The School has been able to hire three new faculty members for the current year, and has hired two more for next year. The curriculum is being revised to create a strong core business program with a special focus on entrepreneurship and sustainability. Internship programs and other hands-on learning efforts have been expanded, and there are new initiatives aimed at involving the business community, including this spring’s inaugural “Professor for a Day” program.

The Smullin Foundation has a long history of supporting students at HSU. It also supports The Smullin Scholarship Fund, established in 1987, which now provides scholarships to eight students each year to help cover their university fees.

“We are so appreciative of the Smullin Foundation, for all that it has done for Humboldt State,” says HSU President Rollin Richmond. “This gift will make a tremendous difference for our students, while benefitting our local community as well.”

Carol Anne Smullin Brown and her son Kevin Smullin Brown, who is also on the Board of the Foundation, visited the campus last fall to meet some of the Smullin Scholarship recipients. They also learned more about the School of Business, and were impressed by its plans to grow and to expand hands-on learning opportunities.

John Lee, Dean of HSU’s College of Professional Studies which houses the business program, says the Smullin gift will provide just the type of support and experiences that will help students succeed.

“Creating more academically rigorous and practical hands-on learning experiences is a primary goal of the School of Business, which is why we have recently created a formalized internship program,” Lee says. “This generous gift from the Smullin Foundation will provide significant support for students, especially those who might not be able to afford to enter into an unpaid ‘for credit’ internship.”

Check out the story and view a video defining Ultimate lingo. »

Ayesha Mattu (left) and Nura Maznavi are co-editors of a new collection of short stories, “Love, InshAllah, the Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women.”

Co-editors Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi will read from their collection of 25 Muslim American writers. The contributors share the eternal search for love in their accounts of college flirtations, singles’ experiences, arranged marriages, sexual liaisons, same-sex relationships and erotic romances, among others.

“Love, InshAllah” has been featured on NPR and the BBC and in The New York Times and Washington Post. Critics have praised the stories for their unique voices, which express not only the sexuality of American Muslim women, but also “the universality of the human condition, especially when it comes to something as magical and complicated as love.”

Firoozeh Dumas, author of “Funny in Farsi” and “Laughing without an Accent,” says “Love, InshAllah” inspires women of all backgrounds “to claim ownership of their bodies, desires and dreams.”

Mattu is a writer, photographer and human rights consultant who resides in San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in The Huffington Post, the International Museum of Women and the award-winning blog, “Rickshaw Diaries.”

A Chicago native, Mattu was named a Muslim Leader of Tomorrow in 2009 by the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations and the American Society for Muslim Advancement, a New York-based non-profit founded in 1997 by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf to foster religious harmony and interfaith connections between Muslims and the West.

Maznavi, born in Pittsburgh, is a writer, civil rights attorney and Fulbright Scholar who has worked with migrant workers in Sri Lanka. She was reared and lives in Los Angeles and has advocated on behalf of prisoners in California. She is at work on a screenplay and several short stories.

Mattu and Masnavi met over coffee six years ago in San Francisco and solicited love stories nationwide for their book. They received more than 200 submissions.

The April 3 reading is sponsored by the Humboldt State Library, the HSU MultiCultural Center and the Department of Critical Race, Gender and Sexuality Studies. It is free and open to the public. Disability accommodations can be arranged at 707/826-5656.

Photo Courtesy of Dan Long
A green laser beam shoots at the bright moon from the telescope dome (off screen), indicated by the sign that reads “3.5 meter Telescope.”

We might have to alter, dramatically, our assumptions about how the universe functions and our notions about its size and shape. We might have to come up with a whole new scientific vision of the history of the cosmos and how it evolved.

If this sounds akin to science fiction or theology, it isn’t. Scientists are working busily to determine if in fact gravity “misbehaves” in light of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The Department of Physics and Astronomy at Humboldt State is part of the research, which is funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation.

The project is called APOLLO, not to be confused with the U.S. manned missions to the moon a half-century ago. Now APOLLO stands for Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation.

Apache Point is a 10,000 ft. peak in southern New Mexico with a good atmosphere for “seeing” into outer space. It is home to an ultra-sophisticated telescope with an 11-foot diameter mirror that scientists use to fire green laser pulses at the moon. Operations began in mid-2005.

APOLLO measures the round-trip travel time of the light pulse to within a fraction of a billionth of a second. That corresponds to about one millimeter of precision in the range to the moon, some 238,000 miles distant.

The laser beams bounce off suitcase-sized retro-reflector arrays placed on the lunar surface in the mid-20th century by Apollo astronauts and by two French-built, Soviet-launched unmanned landers. The laser data are analyzed and then transmitted to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena for further scrutiny and interpretation. HSU physics professor C.D. Hoyle, together with project leader and professor Tom Murphy of UC San Diego and colleagues at JPL and other institutions hope to have an initial key finding in a year or two.

The idea is to gauge from the laser shots the relative acceleration of the earth and moon toward the sun and the shape of the moon’s orbit.

What does this have to do with gravity and the nature of the universe?

Photo Courtesy of Tom Murphy
A laser lights up the primary, 11-foot mirror.

Here the plot thickens and Hoyle explains. As the Earth and the moon orbit the sun, they are in a perpetual state of falling toward it. This calculation stems from a basic precept of Einstein’s theory of gravity called the equivalence principle. In everyday life, the equivalence principle means that a rock and a feather dropped in a vacuum will accelerate equally in a gravitational field.

On that basis, Einstein’s theory predicts a very precise shape for the moon’s orbit as seen from Earth.

But if the shape of the moon’s orbit were to deviate from Einstein’s prediction, either his theory of relativity would be proved inexact or some other kind of force (or forces) might be acting on the two bodies, such that they do not accelerate at precisely the same rate.

The APOLLO laser shots at the moon, thousands of them and thousands more to come, are an attempt to measure possible deviations in the lunar orbit.

In Hoyle’s words, “The equivalence principle is fundamental to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and if we detected a violation of it, it would throw off our understanding of how the universe works.”

Deviations in the lunar orbit would fuel notions about new, mysterious forces, such as “dark energy” in the cosmos. Dark energy might be a repulsive or negative gravitational force or it might be a property of empty space, which is not “nothing.” Einstein discovered that it is possible, in effect, for more space to come into existence. In theory, empty space can possess its own energy.

These ideas are highly theoretical explanations of the puzzling effect that seems to cause the universe to expand at an accelerating rate. That acceleration itself could inflect the shape of the lunar orbit.

Hoyle underlines that the moon’s orbit is not just a simple circle. It is subject to a host of gravitational forces other than the Earth’s, including those of all the other planets and asteroids in the solar system.

“To some extent,” he says, “our Apache Point laser ranging is a way to probe the curvature of space-time in the Earth-moon system, as well as measuring the equivalence principle. The fact that all objects exist in this curved space-time is the reason that they all fall the same way. So the equivalence principle and modeling gravity as a curvature of space-time are inextricably tied together in the theory of relativity. If we were to observe some breakdown of that, it would change profoundly how we view the universe.”

For example, dark energy, which appears to be a form of repulsive gravity on a gargantuan scale, may act over short distances and change the shapes of celestial orbits at extremely subtle levels.

“If that were true, we’d have to come up with some other explanation to describe gravity,” says Hoyle. “We could even be mistaken in our assumption that we live in four dimensions of space-time. Notional modifications of the moon’s orbit arise from string theories, which suggest the possibility of extra dimensions. If we were living in a five-six-seven-eight dimensional cosmological reality, that would imply a number of things—including the possibility there are multiple universes parallel to ours.”

The possibility of more than one universe is a popular notion these days in theoretical physics, despite the fact there is no evidence for it.

“But if you did determine there to be some modifications of the moon’s orbit, it could be due to multiple universes,” Hoyle says. “It could affect our estimates of the age of the universe. It might be somewhat younger, or older, than the currently projected 13.7 billion years. If gravity were shown to behave differently than we believe it does, it might radically change how we interpret the history and evolution of the universe. We’d have to come up with a new theory of gravity.”

Evidence of a breakdown in relativity is crucial to scientific understanding because it might be a clue to why Einstein’s theory and the concept of quantum mechanics do not agree mathematically. That divide is one of the biggest puzzles in contemporary physics and astrophysics. “Verifying a breakdown in relativity might be a clue to how to merge the two concepts, either via string theory or something else,” says Hoyle. The quantum theory of matter claims that “empty space” is in fact full of so-called “virtual” particles that form and disappear in a continuing cycle.

The collaborative work with JPL in Pasadena centers on how well the APOLLO data fit with Einstein’s model. The study involves a lot of interplay between theory and experiment. It also requires making allowance for a host of influences on the measurements. Weather, tides, changes in the Earth’s crust, atmospheric effects, ground water fluctuations, the pressure of sunlight on the moon’s orbit (it throws the moon’s orbit slightly off center, by 3.65 millimeters), even continental drift must be compensated for in the laboratory.

“You have to wade through a lot of variables and that takes time,” says Hoyle. “The tide deflects the crust of the earth enough in New Mexico that it is measurable in our experiment. But possibly in a year or so we’ll have our first measurement of the equivalence principle. We need enough cycles of the moon to build confidence in your measurements and there are only about 12 of those a year.”