Science and solidarity
Prince Turki al-Faisal regaled MIT's Arab scientists with the tale of Ibn Baja, a medieval Andalusian astronomer who carefully calculated the precise moment of a lunar eclipse, then convinced a crowd he had caused the event with a sad song on his oud, an Arabic guitar.
The anecdote from Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States brought knowing laughter from a roomful of highly accomplished scientists well acquainted with science's ability to evoke awe in the uninitiated.
Those honored at a banquet Saturday organized by MIT's Arab Students' Organization were celebrated not only for accomplishment but for work as cultural ambassadors.
''We have to smooth things over between our two worlds through person-to-person relationships," said MIT student Abdulrahman Tarbzouni, a previous winner of the organization's science and technology awards. ''Every one of us is an ambassador."
The Lifetime Achievement Award went to Charles Elachi, who heads the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA and is vice president of MIT's rival, the California Institute of Technology. The Lebanese-born Elachi works on remote sensing, a space exploration field devoted to geographical mapping. Among his honors: an asteroid named after him, 4116 Elachi.
His acceptance speech was accompanied by a PowerPoint and video presentation on the challenges of landing a space rover on Mars. ''It is incredibly difficult," he told the crowd at Boston's Omni Parker hotel. ''If you step outside your house and hit a golf ball toward Saint Andrews in Scotland, you would have to land a hole in one. And, to make things more difficult, the cup is moving at incredibly high speeds."
The undergraduate winner, Amjad Afanah, is an acoustics specialist working on voice-recognition of Jordanian Arabic. ''Inshallah [God willing] it may be used in the future to synthesize Arabic speech from scratch," Afanah said.
Afanah and Ahmed Ghazi received awards from the organization and $1,000 scholarships. Elachi and Hisham Kissab got plaques made that feature the student group's Arabic banner alongside MIT's university seal.
At the heart of the evening was a sense of intimacy from a group of people who combined a love of science with a shared Arab heritage. As Prince Turki reminded, ''At one point the Arab and Islamic world was at the forefront of global civilization," revolutionizing fields such as mathematics, optics, and astronomy.
A 2003 United Nations Human Development Report showed just how far behind today's Arab world has fallen in achieving an innovation-friendly ''knowledge society" as measured in scientific publications and patents for new inventions. The Arab world produced 26 scientific publications per million people, as compared with 1,878 for Switzerland.
An evening with the MIT group suggested that, even as Middle Eastern states struggle to bridge the education gap, a small but thriving Arab ''knowledge society" exists today at MIT and other local universities. ''It's really an issue of giving young people the opportunity to get a high-level education," Elachi said. ''The US provides that, and hopefully one day the Middle East will too."
After watching Elachi's presentation on Mars landings, MIT electrical engineering professor Munther A. Dahleh said, ''I feel extremely inspired. I'm going to go home tonight and rent a couple of 'Star Trek' movies."
