November 2003 - Page 5 of 9 - The Spacewriter's Ramblings

I went over to one of those big-box bookstores last night looking for a science book. It was something of a hunt to find what I was looking for because this store (part of a chain that touts its nobility and claims it sells everything) hides most of its science books on a few shelves ‘way back in the corner, stashed in like poor stepchildren with the computer books. You almost have to know that they’re there. Kind of a shame actually, considering they have stuff like astrology and crystal power and religion and self-help out in the middle of the store where you can’t help but stumble over their sumptuous rows of books on the subjects.

Note: there’s nothing wrong with having books on those subjects. What I’d like to see is some balance in bookstore selections. While bookstore owners may mutter at us that they only stock what sells, I do think one could make a case for doing a better job selling what one stocks… and being democratic in what one stocks. The cosmos is just too fascinating to closet away the good stuff almost as if the bookstore doesn’t quite know what to do with books on astronomy and space science and geology and biology and other science subjects.

What have we come to that readers looking for good science books have to wander almost fruitlessly through this barn of a store looking for what they want? What message does it send to people when science is hidden away so it doesn’t take away from sales of the almost-soft-porn books about girl pop singers or the latest blockbuster by Tom Clancy or the Nth book in a pictoral series on travel? All those are well and good (mind you, I’m a Tom Clancy fan myself) but it seems to me a little balance is needed — at least at THAT particular store.

Of course, I’m somewhat biased, since my own book is due out on the shelves in the next two weeks — it’s a book about astronomy (read more about it here: Visions of the Cosmos) and I’d sure like to be able to point people to where it can be found in that big store. Thankfully one of my favorite stores, Borders, doesn’t hide their science section, although I do notice that it has shrunk a little bit. Of course, you can always order books through Amazon (I’ve helpfully included a link on the afore-referenced page for my own book — plug, plug).

But, I fear that we are fast becoming a nation that abhors science at the same time we’re living off the fruits of science. Are we sort of like the meat-eaters who love a steak but don’t want to know about how that steak gets from live animal to grill? Or the mushroom-lovers who’d rather not be aware of just exactly what it is that their portabellos and shiitakes are growing in? I hope not, but with the proliferation of books that promulgate nonsense like crystal power and using the stars to guide your destiny and so on, it gets frustrating to see perfectly wonderfully written science works get thrust aside in a given bookstore. I blame people who are afraid of the beauty of math and the magnificence of science for relegating science books to one side. It’s like people who buy computers but don’t bother to read the manual on how the operating system works. Wait. Maybe that’s not a good analogy. I don’t always read those manuals…

Okay, how about this: I’m not religious at all, but imagine a Christian without a Bible, or a Moslem without a Koran, or a Buddhist without the works of Buddha to instruct on the precepts of individual belief systems. Science books provide an explanation of the cosmos. Sure, they sometimes use a language that looks like this:

v = Ho * d

(? – ?o)/?o = v/c

and such stuff scares the holy bejeebers out of those who see only the math and interpret THAT as science. The math is a language and it’s only one of many that describes what happens in the cosmos, from physics to biology to medical science to geology to chemistry. Another way to learn about the cosmos is to read blogs like this one, or webpages like my site or some of the sites I have listed at the left. There’s more than one way to approach science, but I can guarantee you, if you don’t approach it, or worse yet, let bookstores determine how important science books are, you’ll lose out on an amazing dimension of existence!

The great age of planetary exploration began back in the early 1960s with simple (!) probes to the Moon and Mars. Probably the best-known planetary explorers (to the public, anyway) have been the Vikings to Mars, the Mars Global Surveyor, the Mars Pathfinder, the Voyager missions to the outer planets, and the recently-ended Galileo mission. Today we have more spacecraft on the way to Mars, scheduled for arrival in early 2004, and the Cassini Mission to Saturn.

Cassini has not been sleeping on its way out to the ringed planet. Its most recent picture is of Jupiter and as you can see, it’s a beauty! This true color mosaic of Jupiter was made from a series of 27 images taken by Cassini’s narrow angle camera on December 29, 2000. At the time the spacecraft was doing a flyby of the planet and gaining a gravity assist to help it on to Saturn. This is the most detailed global color portrait of Jupiter ever produced. The smallest features you can see in this image are about 60 km (37 miles) across.

My favorite bits about Jupiter are the Great Red Spot — the storm just below the center of the image — and the swirling cloud tops in the belts and zones of the planet. Three Earths would fit comfortably across the spot — it’s that big. The smaller storms would be huge by Earth standards, covering most of one hemisphere in clouds and battering it with high winds.

In the range of strange in this solar system, Jupiter seems weird to us — but when you think about it, four planets in the solar system are gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune). Four are “hardbodies” (Earth, Mars, Venus, Mercury). Pluto is a hardbody with a covering of ice. So, really, Jupiter isn’t all that weird. But, to us on Earth, used to breathable air, reasonable winds (as opposed to the highest windspeeds of around 650 kilometers per hour (about 400 mph)), and a solid surface, Jupiter probably does seem like kind of a colorful, but alien place.

While this is a close-up view from a spacecraft near Jupiter, you can get your own view (just not as detailed) of the planet in the night-time sky. This time of year (November), it’s low in the eastern skies right around 10 p.m., smack in the middle of Gemini. If you can (and you’re dressed warmly enough), wait until midnight, when it’s a little higher in the sky. It will look like a really bright star, but it won’t be twinkling and if you look at it through binoculars or a small telescope, you’ll see that it’s a planet! I’ll write more on it later on this year, but don’t hesitate to go check it out. Here’s a finder map:

The Spacewriter's Ramblings

Monthly Archives: November 2003

(? – ?o)/?o = v/c

On the Road Again

Exploring Science and the Cosmos