Tag: astronomy

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It’s a Big World, After All

“Space is big,” Douglas Adams once wrote in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

Don’t look now, but he may have understated the case.

Remember the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble that sent back amazingly clear star field images last year? Well, it’s back for another round. Astronomers studying those images have found six tremendous galaxies dating back about 13.1 billion years … which means the early universe was about 100 times bigger than we thought.

“We’ve been informally calling these objects ‘universe breakers’ — and they have been living up to their name so far,” astronomer Joel Leja told CBS.

Another put it even more simply to the press: “We just discovered the impossible.”

Now, depending on your perspective, this might not seem like such a (pardon the phrase) big deal. After all, it’s not something that’s going to instantly clean the atmosphere, bring peace on Earth and lead the Broncos back to the Super Bowl. Lots of stars? So what?

But from another angle, it’s huge. Not only does this add to our knowledge, it forces us to revisit it. We had an idea of how quickly galaxies come together. Now it looks like we were being too modest. And if so, old ideas need to give way in the face of new information.

That’s a basic tool of science. It’s also something we’re not terribly good at in our day-to-day lives.

Previously in this column, I’ve mentioned what I call the Paul Simon Rule, derived from a verse in his song “The Boxer”:

Still a man hears what he wants to hear,

And disregards the rest.  

Put simply, we’re a stubborn bunch. Sometimes that’s been our saving grace as a species as we outlast war, disaster and the rise and fall of Jerry Springer. But it also means that we tend to hold onto ideas long past their sell-by date.

Why? Because staying with what we “know” is comfortable. Certainly more comfortable than having to rearrange our mental furniture and maybe even acknowledge we were wrong.

Take a look at the last Super Bowl. A thrilling, down-to-the-wire game exploded into controversy because of a holding penalty that basically killed the Eagles’ chance for a comeback. And even after the player in question admitted he had been holding, it didn’t really change anything. Fans had already staked out their positions on whether it was justified or a joke, and nobody was budging.

At our core, we are storytelling creatures. We’re happiest when things fit a pattern. And if the story fits what we already believe, well, then we’re golden. Studies have suggested that our reasoning originally developed to win arguments rather than to find facts, especially since we’re so often better at seeing flaws in someone else’s logic than our own.

So when something comes along that forces us to rethink, it’s a big deal indeed. Even more so when we succeed. It’s a moment of humility that moves us forward, allows us to learn, opens up new worlds that we might not have considered before.

In its own way, those moments rebuild a universe at record speed. Maybe even faster than those ancient stars.

Let them happen.

You might just find that they give you space to grow.

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Venus, If You Will

Look! Up in the sky!

Well, actually, I hope you didn’t. I know you value having eyesight and all.

Most of my friends know that I’m a certified space geek. On Tuesday I had an awful lot of company. Around the world, people were looking through telescopes, watching computer monitors or otherwise doing everything they could to safely watch the “transit of Venus.”

It might not sound worth the effort to some. After all, it’s basically the world’s tiniest eclipse, as Venus moves across the sun like a lost penny across a football field. But as the Franklin Mint likes to remind us, rarity has a certain value. You get two of these transits eight years apart – and then you have to wait more than 100 years for the next one.

OK. So it’s rare. Big deal. So are copies of the Star Wars Holiday Special, right?

Granted. But unless you’re into really bad Wookie fiction, I’d pick the transit any day. For a tiny disc, it tends to inspire a lot of frenzy.

The transits of the 1760s may have been the wildest, as European scientists tried to scatter across the world to see if they could record the event from different points – and, incidentally, find out just how far the Earth was from the Sun. And while it was Captain Cook’s 1769 measurements that helped fix the distance (about 93 million miles, for the record), the struggles of those who didn’t quite make it eight years earlier make even more entertaining reading – entertaining, that is, in the sense of “Boy, I’m glad that wasn’t me.”

“Jean Chappe spent months traveling to Siberia by coach, boat and sleigh, nursing his delicate instruments over every perilous bump, only to find the last vital stretch blocked by swollen rivers,” wrote Bill Bryson in A Short History of Nearly Everything. The swelling was due to unusually heavy rainfall, which the locals in turn blamed on the strange man pointing odd objects at the sky.

First impressions. So important.

These days, no one had to be Indiana Jones to measure the transit, but it was still worth measuring. Last time, Venus helped us find ourselves. This time, it may help us find the neighbors. By watching Venus, we know a little more about how to find planets in other solar system, work out how big they are, maybe even piece out a little more about their atmosphere.

Not bad for a view from the cheap seats, huh?

It’s also very reassuring for a teacher’s son. Most teachers have said at some point that there’s no such thing as a stupid question (and almost immediately get students who try to prove them wrong). I tend to believe something very similar – that there’s no such thing as useless knowledge.

Role-playing games taught me how to calculate percentages.

Children’s mysteries helped me learn how to estimate distance.

Even something as light as studying stage dialects has helped with getting Missy to brush her teeth at night. (It pays to use an outrageous French accent to count how much is left to do, even if the giggles do tend to spatter the mirror a bit.)

When everything fits with everything, anything can be good to know.

So watching Venus dance across the Sun? Why not? You never know when it might come in handy.

You simply can’t planet.