Getting "the kids" interested in astronomy

Much ink, many pixels, and and a great deal of time and energy have been expended of late on the pressing challenge of getting the younger generation interested and participating in astronomy. Astronomy magazine editor Dave Eicher recently blogged on the topic, noting that The Astronomical League devoted a huge chunk of the March issue of its magazine, Reflector, to the topic. Eicher and Astronomy are among the partners in the Astronomy Foundation, a nonprofit organization that aims to spread interest and enthusiasm for the hobby, particularly among generations X and Y.

All of this has me pondering the trajectory of my own interest in astronomy, considering how possible it really is for adults to get young people interested in anything, and wondering if the crisis of disinterest in science in general, and astronomy in particular, is real.

This sketch of a “Moon probe,” probably
NASA’s Lunar Orbiter, is in my space
scrapbook with other articles from 1966. It
was probably my first astronomy “post” at age 8.

The “about” page of Seattle Astronomy notes that I “grew up following Apollo and the race to the moon, and (have) been a space and astronomy buff ever since.” I was 11 years old when humans first walked on the Moon, just old enough to appreciate the adventure and daring of the race to get there, and too young to grasp the geopolitical implications of it all. I kept a scrapbook of clippings about aerospace news, most of them from the Seattle Times or from The Boeing News which my dad brought home from work. I occasionally put some of my own work in the scrapbook. The sketch and explanation of the “Moon probe” at left may well be considered my first space and astronomy “post.” Drawing has obviously never been my strong suit, but the rocket nozzle on top of my probe bears some abstract resemblance to the NASA Lunar Orbiter, so I’m guessing that’s what I was trying to depict. The drawing is in the scrapbook amidst some coverage of the Lunar Orbiter and Surveyor, all from 1966, so this was my work at age eight.

Clearly I was a space nut. There may well have been some adult encouragement along the way. I was subscribed to a series called the “Science Service Science Program” published by Nelson Doubleday.
Every month I would receive a new booklet on a science topic. The booklets were cool because they came with color sticker photographs that you licked and pasted into them; maybe the first “interactive” media.

Once in a while the series included a plastic model that you could assemble; I recall building a Mercury Redstone rocket. Many of the books were about various topics of space and exploration, as it was the hot topic at the time.

I don’t have any of the Science Service books in my possession. They might well still be at my mom’s house; I envision them right next to the once-priceless collection of baseball cards, reduced to dust by 45 years in a hot/cold attic. I may have to get up there and explore some day. Everything is available on eBay, though, and with a quick search of the auction site I found quite a number of people selling their science books from the 1960s. The brown cardboard cases held maybe a half-dozen booklets. According to an ad I found while searching the Internet, my dad was shelling out a buck a month for the Science Service books.

This lot of Science Service books published by Doubleday was recently
spotted for sale on eBay. I had many of these books as a kid in the mid-’60s.

Another vivid astronomy memory from when I was a little kid involved one of our neighbors, Pete Schultz, who built his own telescope. One time he showed me Jupiter through it, and I could see the planet’s bands and moons. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen! I don’t know how much observing Pete did over the years; we lived in Renton, a Seattle suburb, and the skies were probably never all that dark, though certainly they were better in the mid-’60s than they are now.

Though I had this interest in the cosmos, I did not make much effort to look at it. I could identify the constellations—Orion seemed especially huge when he stood in the middle of our street—and would go out to look at the occasional lunar eclipse. Most of my observing attempts involved comets. I was in high school when Kohoutek came around. The father of one of the guys in my Boy Scout troop had a telescope and set it up so we could have a look. That was a major disappointment; we all remember what a dud Kohoutek was. Somehow comet West slipped right by me. I remember reading about Halley’s Comet in the Science Service books and thinking, in the mid-’60s, that its 1986 return would NEVER get here! I missed Halley, which was mostly visible in the Southern Hemisphere. Later efforts to look at Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp through binoculars were more successful and satisfying. When I was 11 we stumbled upon the Perseid metor shower at a super-dark wilderness site; our scout troop coincidentally was on a backpacking trip during the peak of the shower, and it was spectacular. That was the extent of my astronomical observing.

I can pinpoint the moment that my interest reached the tipping point, astronomy became a full-fledged hobby, and I was turned into a space and astronomy writer. It was 2003, the year of the great apparition of Mars. I was working at the University of Puget Sound, which had developed a new course about Mars exploration, and I wrote an article about the course for Arches, the university magazine. (You can read a PDF version of the article here.) After spending a few days hanging around the physics department with astronomy Prof. Bernie Bates, I suddenly found myself enriching the coffers of Orion Telescopes and spending many a late night out in the cold with my 8-inch Dobsonian and wandering raccoons. My sweetie helped push me over the edge by giving me The Backyard Astronomer’s Guide for my birthday.

That’s my story. I have been a total space geek for about as long as I can remember and was good in math and science in school. I wound up in a humanities field, majoring in broadcast journalism in college, while maintaining a passing interest in astronomy over the years. It wasn’t until I was 45 that a great astronomical observing event combined with the opportunity to hang around with the right academics forged me into an active participant in the hobby. Adequate amounts of disposable income and spare time certainly helped.

So what can we do to get “the kids” interested in astronomy? I’m not certain that anything overt will work. Few tweens, teens, and 20-somethings want to be told what to do, and it’s hard to imagine them attending astronomy club meetings. I’ve been a member of several, and the topics seem to tend more toward high-level lectures about galaxy formation or in-depth talks about techniques of astrophotography or building an observatory. There’s not often much of a WOW factor there. Many young folks may well be buying telescopes and astronomy magazines, but they’re out looking at the stars rather than going to meetings.

I think that the best thing that we can do to interest young people, or anyone, in astronomy is to simply show them something interesting. Give them a look through a telescope or binoculars, or point out an beautiful naked-eye object. This week’s close grouping of Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury will be a good opportunity for this. Comet ISON may well provide another this fall. Get thee to a place where others might be and set up. Many folks will think, “That’s nice.” Others may have no interest at all. But you never know when you might be planting a seed.

Pete Schultz, the neighbor who first showed me Jupiter through his homemade telescope, passed away back in March, just a few days after his 77th birthday. I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately. I don’t know if he remembered giving me my first look through a telescope. But it’s something I’ll never forget, and I hope that he knows on some sort of cosmic level that his simple gesture made a big difference to a little neighbor kid. When my “star stuff” is released back into the universe, I hope that I’ve given just one person that kind of fond memory or inspiration. The seed may not blossom for a half century, and I may not be here to enjoy the flower. But its sweetness won’t be wasted.

Brilliant blunders can be portals to discovery

Mario Livio takes comfort in the gaffes of the greatest scientific minds of all time.

“There is something very reassuring in the fact that even these giants made major blunders,” he said during a talk Wednesday in Seattle to promote his new book. “People would ask me what the book was about; I’d tell them it’s called Brilliant Blunders, and it’s not an autobiography.”

Mario Livio spoke about his latest
book, Brilliant Blunders, May 15 at Town
 Hall Seattle. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

In Brilliant Blunders Livio, senior astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, examines major mistakes by some of the greatest scientists ever: Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Linus Pauling, Lord Kelvin, and Fred Hoyle. He talked about three of the examples during his lecture at Town Hall Seattle.

First, Livio took on Darwin and evolution, which Livio called “the single best idea that anybody has ever had.” Darwin’s blunder, though, was adopting a theory of blended heredity, which was a fairly widely accepted viewpoint of the time. Blended heredity held that the characteristics of a mother and father would be mixed, as one might mix a gin and tonic.

“Darwin did not understand, at first at least, that with blended heredity there is no way natural selection would have ever worked,” Livio said, noting that if you bred black and white cats, within a few generations you would only have gray. “In your gin and tonic, if you mix it with lots of tonic, in the end there is no gin.”

In Darwin’s time Gregor Mendel was coming up with the correct model for genetics, but Livio said Darwin didn’t know of Mendel’s work, and if he had he probably would not have understood it—“Darwin was very weak in mathematics,” he noted—but somehow Darwin had nailed evolution.

“When you have somebody who is a real genius some of the steps along the way may be wrong, but somehow their insight leads them to the correct result,” Livio said.

The next big blunder considered was Linus Pauling’s attempt to come up with a structure for DNA.

“Pauling’s model for DNA had the wrong number of strands, it was built inside out, and there was nothing to hold it together. Worse yet, he tried to hold it together with hydrogens,” Livio marveled. The “A” in DNA stands for acid, which Livio explained means that when you put it in water it should release hydrogen. But in Pauling’s model hydrogen was holding the structure together, so it couldn’t release it.

“Here was the greatest chemist of the world proposing a model the violated the basic rules of chemistry!” Livio exclaimed. He discusses Pauling’s shortcoming at length in the book, but said it may have been a combination of a race to publish and a bit of egotism from previous successes.

“If I work out the basic structure,” Livio surmised Pauling may have been thinking, “all of the other details will work out.”

Finally Livio took on Einstein, whom he called “the embodiment of genius.” Livio noted that when Einstein developed the theory of relativity he assumed that the universe was standing still. But that couldn’t be, because its gravity would cause it to collapse on itself. So Einstein added what Livio called a “fudge factor”—the cosmological constant—to make things balance out.

Then, when Lemaître and Hubble found the universe to be expanding, Einstein concluded he didn’t need the constant and took the term out of his equation. Fast-forward to 1998 and the discovery that the expansion of the universe was accelerating—because of the constant.

“Einstein’s blunder was to take the term out, not to put it in!” Livio said. “If he left that term in he could have predicted that the universe should be accelerating.”

The conclusion Livio draws from these brilliant blunders is that science can be messy and that there’s no straight line to the truth. Goofs are good.

“When you think outside the box you’re likely to make mistakes every now and then,” he said. “If you want to be certain all the time, your progress will be so incremental that you actually may miss the real breakthroughs.”

“This is not to advocate for sloppy science,” Livio continued. “This is just to say that you have to allow for these things that I call brilliant blunders. You have to allow for the possibility of making breakthroughs through processes that occasionally will actually hit upon various obstacles.

“Scientific blunders can be portals to discovery.”

Galileo was a sneak

Galileo still has many folks bamboozled. The narrative persists more than four centuries after he trained his telescope on Jupiter that Galileo’s discovery of the giant planet’s moons proved, despite the dogmatic objections of the church, that Copernicus was right about the sun being at the center of the solar system.

Dennis Danielson

Dennis Danielson says much of that common narrative is false. Danielson is a professor of English at the University of British Columbia. Milton is his professional bailiwick, but he’s got a strong interest in rhetoric and the history of science, which has led him to publish a couple of books on astronomy and astronomers. He’s the editor of The Book of the Cosmos (Basic Books, 2002) and wrote The First Copernican (Walker & Company, 2006). It was during his work on the latter, about Georg Joachim Rheticus, the young German mathematician who was largely responsible for getting Copernicus’s De revolutionibus published, that Danielson developed what he calls a “perfectly discreet, I assure you, love affair with Copernicus.”

Danielson spoke Thursday at the University of Washington astronomy colloquium, and later that evening at a meeting of the Boeing Employees Astronomical Society. He said that in addition to Galileo’s obvious genius in many areas, he was a top-notch public relations practitioner, a successful propagandist, and a bit of a sneak.

Danielson said Galileo wasn’t telling the whole story with his masterwork Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, the publication that supposedly confirmed Copernicus and got Galileo into hot water with the Vatican.

“I really do want to be respectful of Galileo, but he sewed some misinformation, starting right on the title page of his work, that I would propose to you has played into the twisted story of cosmology” and some longstanding misperceptions, Danielson said.

The catch, according to Danielson, is that the title page and the entire Diologo depict the scientific debate as one between the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems. In fact, Ptolemy’s system was well on its way out by the time the Dialogue was published in 1632, and the system drawn up by Tycho Brahe in 1588 was much favored by scientists for many decades to follow. The Copernican model was not really proven for some 200 years.

In fact Galileo’s own observation of the phases of Venus in 1610, 22 years before Dialogue, essentially knocked Ptolemy out of the cosmological playoffs.

“This was in fact striking another blow to the scientific underpinnings of the Ptolemaic system,” Danielson said, “but this demonstration supports Copernicanism only if there is no alternative other than Ptolemy.”

But Tycho’s system was an alternative that also correctly predicted the phases of Venus. Kepler with The Rudolphine Tables in 1627, Riccioli with Almagestum Novum in 1651, and Hooke with An Attempt to Prove the Motion of the Earth from Observations in 1674 all tended to favor the Tychonic system over Copernicus more than a century after “De Rev” and 42 years after Galileo’s Dialogue.

“If the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems truly were the only two great systems of the universe, then you could logically affirm the one by denying the other,” Danielson said. “But Galileo was wrong that those were the two great systems. Not in his day, not in Hooke’s. There was a third, the Tychonic system, which answered most of the criticisms of the other geocentric and geostatic systems without getting into all of those absurd claims about a moving Earth.”

There were other scientific challenges for proving Copernicus. They couldn’t detect parallax, as it turned out the observations were not yet precise enough. Some stars appeared as disks in telescopes, which turned out to be an illusion but argued against Copernicus at the time. Scientists expected to observe a Coriolis effect if Earth rotated, but Coriolis didn’t get around to finally seeing it until 1835.

“The physics that underpinned Copernicanism wasn’t fully developed until Newton,” Danielson said, “and the scientific impediments to a full-scale acceptance of Copernicanism were not removed until the 19th Century.”

Danielson gives Galileo credit for being right in the end.

“His book was powerful. He so firmly planted the idea that there was an A or a B, so established that way of thinking, it became easy for us to forget” that Tycho’s was long the preferred model until Newton came up with the physics that supported the Copernican model.

Lee Smolin says time is real

Seattle is a city full of geeks, it seems, and a bunch of us piled into the dark basement of Town Hall Seattle on a beautiful spring evening Tuesday to hear three talks about quantum mechanics, neutrinos, and the nature of time.

Dr. Lee Smolin was the headliner of the evening. Smolin has kicked up quite a ruckus with his new book, Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. In it, Smolin takes issue with a core notion of modern physics.

“We experience the world in time, we think in time, we act in time; this is so central to our conception of being human,” Smolin said. “But the scientific world view teaches that time is an illusion.”

Smolin added that, in his view, that claim is based on several incorrect arguments.
“Einstein and others who took that point of view are wrong for scientific reasons, and I try to make the scientific case for bringing back time to the center of our thinking and the center of our conception of nature,” he said.

Smolin rejects the notion that a mathematical description of the universe outside of time is the true reality, and that is the “crisis” of the book’s subtitle.

“If the experience of time is not central to reality, then neither are any human hopes and aspirations and the qualities that we so admire like decisiveness and imagination,” he said.

Smolin acknowledged that his arguments live somewhere in between physics and philosophy.

“I think that it’s essential to have the benefit of the history of thought when you’re tackling the deepest and hardest questions that we face, and the nature of time is one of them,” he contended.
The notion that time is an illusion has had its uses over the years, Smolin suggested, but added that the main fallacy of the approach has been what he called “physics in a box”, a method for studying small parts of the universe and then trying to extrapolate universal truths from that study. But he noted that you can’t put the whole universe into a box, and that the observers and the measuring systems in the experiments are typically outside of the box. And he said that even the laws of physics must be evolving, or if they aren’t, then they aren’t science.

“If the laws are truly outside of time then they’re inexplicable to any method that is checkable by science, because science requires experimentation and we can only experiment on things that can be modified,” Smolin said. “So if the laws are outside of time we just have to become mystics.”

The nature of time is a challenging topic for an hour-long talk, and Smolin had to punt a few times, noting that several concepts were topics for another hour, and that much more in-depth discussion could be found in the book.

We’re intrigued enough to grab a copy. You can get yours here.

Two talks by University of Washington graduate students preceded Smolin’s presentation. The talks were part of the UW’s Engage: The Science Speaker Series.

Ironically, Alan Jamison’s talk was definitely physics in the box. He gave an engaging presentation, titled “Cooling Atoms With Blinding Hot Light,” about his lab work to look at the behavior of ytterbium atoms, an element he joked “sits in a dark corner of the periodic table.”

“The first step in cooling atoms,” Jamison said, “is to heat them up.” As they vibrate intensely in the heat, individual atoms break off. Then they cool them down by shining lights on them; ytterbium has a resonance with certain green and purple wavelengths, and they can eventually slow the motion of the atoms down enough to get photos of clusters of them and study their behavior.

More on Jamison’s work at the Ultracold Atoms Group at the UW.

Jared Kofron followed with a talk about “A Massive Problem: A Brief History of the Tiny Neutrino.”
Kofron noted that the neutrino is the smallest particle we know of. “It’s a very strange, mysterious particle that has taught us a lot about the universe.” His talk was an accessible history of the neutrino.
The particle was dreamed up in the 1930s as a way to explain why energy seemed to be vanishing with beta decay. This created something of a panic, and German physicist Wolfgang Pauli proposed the neutrino as “a desperate remedy to save physics.” The notion of a particle that was incredibly penetrating, basically massless, and never observable was not too popular among scientists at first. But it fixed everything.

“Experiments made sense when viewed in the context of the neutrino,” Kofron said. “If you added the possibility that this little guy was carrying off all of the missing energy, all of a sudden the books balanced. From an experimental point of view, this was a real coup, this was a beautiful addition to the theory.”

More about Kofron’s work at the Center for Experimental Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics at UW.

Other books by Lee Smolin: