-cvj

John, you forgot to mention that bofore the man on the moon there were:

1959 - Luna 2- first probe to land on the Moon

12 April 1961 Yuri Gagarin - first man in space (regarded in Russia as a much more important event than Sputnik)

11 August 1962 Valentina Tereshkova - first woman in space

18 March 1965 - Alexei Leonov - first spacewalk

etc.

I’d call that the entire culture changing, where “change” means that it was significantly affected throughout its many strands - there were major aspects to it that were not there before the event, and where “entire” means so many strands of everyday life for everyday people. This seems to be manifestly so from all the interviews and discussions I pointed to on the NPR programs, and so many more other discussions to be found everywhere.

You can disagree on these uses of the word “entire” and “change” if you wish. I’m not going to argue about that. It’s just silly.

Best,

-cvj

I didn’t say the culture was not even remotely changed; I said it’s not even remotely true that the entire culture changed, which was your assertion…

It was you who linked to a piece about all the music written in response to Sputnik. What it documents is a clutch of novelty songs that never charted, got next to zero airplay, that few were aware of at the time and nobody remembers. The entire culture changed? I don’t think so…

My trope about beer on campus was an allusion to cultural stability in an environment you claimed was radically transformed. I didn’t realize you’d be so concrete in your associations…

Of course it’s true that in an era in which everything was seen through the prism of a bipolar world, there was a certain amount of anxiety about U.S. technical education vis-a-vis the Soviets. If you have data showing a tremendous upswing in university engineering and science enrollments attributable to that anxiety, so be it — but 50 years ago most Americans didn’t go to college and, in terms of the larger culture, this was a boutique concern. Not as narrow as the string theory wars currently underway, but hardly ‘the entire culture’…

Finally, the U.S. had lots of important technical achievements before Sputnik (e.g., at Los Alamos during WW2, the invention of the transistor at Bell Labs in 1948, and so forth) and lots more afterwards. The Soviets ‘beat us’ in 1957 because they focused on a project we’d put on the back burner. When Kennedy made it a priority three years later, we surged ahead and beat them, landing a man on the moon in 1969. We might not have done that if Sputnik hadn’t goaded us, but in the meantime we’d inaugurated coast-to-coast jet air travel (~1962) and color television (1964); started building a 46,000 mile Interstate Highway system, which changed patterns of settlement all over the country; and ended 100 years of apartheid with the civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965. These things really did change the entire culture. Compared to them, Sputnik was a footnote.

Yes… that was one of the hints of my post, however I said (among other things):

“Fear and paranoia are certainly not the ways I’d like to see us come back to recognizing the value and urgency of improved science education…”

I’d like us to arrive at it some other way….

cheers,

-cvj

(However, incidentally, the movies and music were affected, among many other things. Did you actually read or listen to any of the things I pointed to, including the interviews with people from the time? Or are you saying that the things they observed did not happen?)

We could argue about the extent to which there was change, but to say that the culture was not even remotely changed seems a bit strong, to say the least. Have a look at those materials and let us know what you think.

For example… are you saying that the space program had nothing to do with our culture? And if you agree that it does, then are you saying that sputnik had nothing to do with the space race? I’d be curious to read how you separate these things out.

Thanks…

-cvj

Er, no, sorry, that’s not even remotely true. The music stayed the same, movies stayed the same, college campuses were still a beer-sodden dreamscape in those pre-political times. The techtonic changes of the 60s lay in the future, foreshadowed by the gathering civil rights movement (Eisenhower put federal troops into Little Rock the same year Sputnik went up) and, most of all, by the leading edge of the post-war baby boom, which hovered on the edge of puberty as Sputnik passed overhead.