David DeVorkin: When we started thinking about revising the older "Stars" gallery that had opened in 1983, which was an exploration of the study of the Sun and Stars, we felt that the most exciting areas of astronomy were in the realm of cosmology, the study of the formation and evolution of the universe on its largest scale. Frankly, when we started thinking about the revision in the early 1990s, none of us realized just how exciting cosmology was going to get at the end of the millennium. In 1990 the universe was still made of galaxies, and the galaxies were carried along with the Hubble Flow in a general expansion. We had finally captured direct evidence of the Big Bang, and everything seemed to fit together nicely. So we wanted at first to assess the state of our knowledge about what we think the universe is all about, feeling that we would help people appreciate how remarkably consistent and robust our knowledge base had become. But as the decade progressed, the presence, and now dominance, of something called "Dark Matter" has made the whole field far less comfortable with itself.

People who do astronomy are really excited because they feel that they are on the brink of discovering that the Universe is really something very different than what we see with our senses, even applying all the wonderful and fascinating telescopes and detectors that we have invented to date. We could very well be experiencing a time when, walking among us, there is a young person who will be the next "Galileo" – inventing a telescope that can actually "see" dark matter and reveal to us the 95 percent of the Universe that we now think we have detected, but cannot yet fathom. This is why we made the theme "New Eyes, New Universes" one of the guiding principles behind the development of the gallery. As we create new ways to examine the Universe (eyes, telescopes, photography, spectrography, radio telescopes, space telescopes, digital imaging and digital sensing, solid state sensing, etc.) we discover new universes. This has been the situation for the past 400 years. It is likely to be the situation for the next 400 years.

The book was developed because we knew we had to limit our attention in the gallery to western (European) instrumentation (limitations of space, money, etc.) – it is also a gallery about observation, not so much about theory, though the two work hand in hand. So the book allows us to explore beyond the walls of the gallery, to give a wider range of authors a chance to describe the universes they study – the universe as studied by our (European) culture and those studied by other cultures.

We concentrate, as I noted above, not on theory, but on observational clues, observational evidence, which tends to be more accessible to our visitors than mathematical theory. This is why Tycho’s Equatorial Armillary stands at the end of the visual or naked eye section – it represents the instrument that provided that data to people like Tycho and Kepler that showed that the Universe was not Aristotelean. Herschel’s telescope was the first instrument to provide evidence that the distribution of stars and nebulae in space were very different, raising the question of what the nebulae were. The Mount Wilson 100-inch, in Hubble’s hands, answered the question posed by Herschel – that the majority of those nebulae were "island universes" and not stars in formation in our Milky Way, and so on throughout the gallery. These are tangible discoveries that demonstrate that new tools reveal new universes.

I hope that the exhibition will demonstrate that we live at a most exciting time when our whole perception of what’s out there (and is right here too!) is changing in profound ways that were made possible by a robust multi-faceted program of exploring the universe with telescopes on earth, with telescopes in space, as well as with tools like high-energy accelerators, high speed computers, fibre-optic fed detector arrays, interferometers, active and adaptive optics, CCDs, and all sorts of even newer technologies that help us better understand our universe and where we fit into it. We also want our visitors to appreciate that the final word has not been written, and may never be written. The space program is an important ingredient in all of this and a vital one to be sure. But it is not the only way to explore the Universe. So in sum I do hope that our exhibition will stimulate curiosity and public appreciation of the tremendous commitment our society had made to better understanding our place in the Universe.

Absolutely. Everything I stated in the last answer applies to our increased ability to appreciate who we are, where we came from and where we are going. We are part of this amazing universe, so everything we learn about the Universe has bearing on what we think about our very existence and ourselves.

I would probably not use the word "upset" to describe my feeling about scientists or science. I was trained as a scientist and worked as one for a few years before acquiring historical training. The social issues that face science and scientists are, indeed, profound and are at the very core of our existence as a species. We would not be human without science I feel – science in many critical ways defines who and what we are as a physical and biological lifeform. But this means that scientists are also human, and not to be set apart in any way from humanity, its standards and practices. There are scientists I have met who feel this is not the case, because scientists answer to a "higher authority" and are in fact more disciplined and capable than the rest of humanity. This concerns me (but is not "upsetting") enough so that I moved into historical studies, and especially into museum work, to help keep the perceived gap between science and scientists with the rest of humanity as small as possible. My aim is to keep science a human enterprise.

My own, of course, I’m only human. Seriously, such a concept is so far from my imagination, I’m afraid that I cannot provide anything profound here. A large part of the funding would probably be devoted to keeping the gap (both perceived and real) between scientists and humanity as small as possible. This would mean increasing humanity’s interest in fostering and acquiring science literacy and improving science’s interest in reaching out in responsible ways to make science and its products more accessible to the human condition.

What we spend on both is tiny compared to other expenses like military funding, so pitting one against the other is like ignoring the elephant in your living room because the cat and dog are bothering you. Maybe the question needs a bit of rephrasing: instead of choosing one over the other, why not ask why we want to spend money and resources on either one? I strongly feel that if we stop exploring, either in the biological universe that helps us understand and cope with deadly diseases, or in the physical universe that helps us rationalize our existence, we lose something vital in us that makes us human. So, why, indeed, explore space? I, of course, am all for exploring space, but I feel that it can be done in many ways, some more economical than others, and that we should always keep economics in mind when making choices. Given the present state of the world, we need very compelling reasons to develop the technological ability to allow humans to travel in space routinely - like survival, or global security. But I do feel that it is well within reasonable means of nations acting collectively to explore space robotically, using the most advanced and sophisticated technologies we can muster.

I can only answer for myself, and then only at an emotional level – it is the question of our very existence – what IS existence? Of course, our rhetorical powers may not ever be adequate to the task, whether they be artistic, linguistic, scientific or mathematical. Some parts of science and mathematics behave as if this may someday be possible. I am not so sure, but I long ago made the decision to devote myself to exploring the astronomical universe and to understanding how our collective perception of it has changed over time as the most worthwhile way to make a meaningful and satisfying contribution to life. It’s the way I most wanted to spend my life.

It makes me think about existence.