I Hear it Often
The other day on the way home from San Francisco, I was waiting for a plane in Chicago and got to talking to a woman who was on the same flight with me. We swapped information about what we each did for a living, and eventually she came around to what I think of as The Question: “Why do you like astronomy?”
It’s a variant on a question that one of my professors asked me when I was in graduate school and told her that I wanted to take a minor in telecommunications engineering. She looked me right in the eye and, with a dismissive wave of her hand, asked: “Why do you want to take that geeky shit?”
The answer in both cases is the same: because it fascinates me. It’s science and it presents me with ways of knowing things about the universe (in the case of astronomy) and things about the technical aspects of communication (in the case of telecom) that I just don’t get in my every day reading. Considering that I was majoring in science writing in grad school, I’m kind of surprised that my former prof asked me that. But then again, she was a political writer, and there was (and is) no way I’d want to write about politics, so I guess it all evens out. I couldn’t imagine being fascinated with writing about the ins and outs of political campaigns, but it meant something to her much the same way that science does to me.
So, science is a way of knowing what’s happening in the cosmos. It gives us rules (like the laws of physics, for example) that can be applied to help us understand why a planet spins on its axis, or the wind blows or the ocean currents flow the way they do, or any of a billion, billion other topics that comprise scientific understanding. It’s totally cool to be standing on the edge of knowledge like that, open to the possibility that a new piece of data will come in that explains some aspect of a supernova explosion that we didn’t know about before. Or, that helps us understand just how it was that amino acids arranged themselves in a configuration that helped life arise on our planet.
The other day, I told my airport companion some of that and she looked a bit blank at first. Sometimes that happens, and the next thing out of their mouths is a statement like: “Oh, I never was any good at science.” But, this one surprised me. She started asking other questions, stuff that I suspect she’d never had a chance to ask before because…. well, probably because (given her lifestyle and experiences) she’d never met a scientist before or a science writer who could explain things to her. And she asked good questions, which is the essence of being a good scientist (and journalist, for that matter). Those kinds of conversations are fun, and they teach me as much about what interests people about science as I (hopefully) teach them about astronomy.
For all you non-chemists in the crowd, did you know that life on Earth began with a sort of “starter yeast” of carbon-bearing compounds and other species of molecules that came from space? It’s true.
the ones that died to produce the Helix Nebula (left, a planetary nebula formed when a star like the Sun died) or the progenitor star that created the Crab Nebula (right) blew up more than 7,000 years ago. Near these two objects, clouds of gas and dust are scattering the chemical precursors of life. Someday perhaps they’ll combine to create new life forms.