Astronomy Schashtronomy

I think I figured out why I don't really care about astronomy. In my family you cannot suggest an axiom or a rule without three reasons, so I guess I will present three reasons why I don't like astronomy. By the way, I will not split hairs with the field of astronomy. Since I know so little, I claim the author's prerogative to lump into astronomy everything from astrophysics, cosmology, quantum physics, etc.

First, astronomers just don't know squat about our universe. I am officially assigning the technical definition of "squat" as 10^-9. Astronomy is arguably the oldest accept discipline, and yet they only know one billionth about what goes on outside our world. Oh, and I don't want to hear anything about early astronomy being astrology either. It was an accepted lifestyle for a chosen few to sit out all night somewhere in the Arabian desert and try to understand the movement of those points of light. They may have assigned mystical principles guiding them, but they were still trying to figure out the cycles and patterns of the sun, moon, planets, stars, and occasional comet.

Some try to dismiss early "astronomy" because of it's superstitious roots. In the same breath they may mention how well the ancients could accurately predict solar and lunar eclipses and comets that skip a few generations. Well, you can't have that both ways - it was all a form of astronomy, regardless of the motivation. It took about 2,000 years to predict the patterns of the planets accurately, and then another 1,500 to explain why and how it works. So, astronomy will interest me more when the knowledge rate gets up to a respectable percentage, like 10%. (I think Physics and Chemistry are there. Biology is probably at 5%, and Geology may have reached 20-30%.)

The second reason for disassociating myself from an interest in astronomy is equally unfair. Basically, because astronomers know so little about the universe, theories just seem to come and go like fashion styles. It does not matter how silly it sounds (the universe is made up of little strings right now) - astronomers will defend the currently accepted and applied theories as if they had a total lock on the knowledge. If you don't like String Theory, just wait a few decades and the astronomers will catch up with you. In fact, we really don't even know why gravity works. We know how it works, thanks to a few principles outlined by Newton, Kepler, and others, most of the universe seems to follow along nicely (unless a black hole is involved, which somehow bends or writes its own rules). I do respect that astronomers usually admit when they are wrong (S. Hawking's losing a famous bet recently comes to mind), but their dignity and respect are preserved because the general public does not know the difference between the dismissed theory and its successor.

So, with a few of those bricks soundly planted in the cathedral of knowledge regarding gravity, astronomers are at a loss to explain what keeps the galaxy together. The galaxy should be denser or something, so someone invents dark matter that must be out there throwing the scales off, but keeping things together. I cry foul, but this is a seemingly accepted practice in astronomy. Imagine a molecular biologist trying to explain genetic mutation thus: 'Genes in a cell mutate on a slow but almost predictable rate. Nearly 99.99999% of the time, the Doosies and the Launchies say "NO" to mutation. However, once every 100,000 cell divisions, the Doosies and the Launchies say "YES" and the genes mutate.'

Third, and finally, I dislike the field because of our fixed perspective. Now, I admit that this is totally unfair, but astronomy will be more interesting when we can see the universe, or even our galaxy, from a different location. Imagine that we are in a cell of a human body, somewhere around the elbow. It takes a while to recognize that there are other cells, and then a theory comes along to suggest that we are on the wing of a collective "body" of cells. Later, someone notices that if we look outside of our "body," we can even see other human bodies walking around. Every picture of the human body is seen through a perspective of looking along the arm and around organs in the chest cavity, etc. You can see how difficult it is for astronomers, and they have done a phenomenal job with what they have. But, give them a spaceship that travels at hyper-light speeds and give us a picture of our galaxy from another angle! We think we know what parts of our galaxy look like, but they are ALL from a tiny point.

As you can see, my objections are really not fair. I don't begrudge astronomers and their currently published theories mostly because they know they have very little of the knowledge down. An astronomer who claims to know how the universe works is probably a shaman, and not an astronomer at all.

My last observation did not need to make my "three reasons" clause, but may be worth noting. Something that really tickles me about this field is the divergent mix of both left- and right-brained people. Maybe the right-brainers are held captive by the limited knowledge and react by calling items "red giants" and "white dwarfs." The left-brain inventory of astronomical designations like M275 and NGC2863 causes the right-brain brethren in the field to suggest names like "horse-head nebula" and "running man nebula." Oh, and then we had that whole "eye of god" image that went around the web a few years back - but I will not blame this on astronomy.

--gh