Nothing else matters today. Nothing except what is going to happen in the very last episode of Battlestar, which has been running since 2004 and now culminates in a two hour extravaganza. We know the Battlestar is about to jump into the Cylon colony to rescue Hera, the human-Cylon hybrid child, and to make a last stand with guns blazing…what the frak is going to happen?

This thread is for you, nerds of the universe….

Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy posted this terrific piece that started off my Saturday with a smile.  It reads like The Onion, though I also can’t find the original source. Take a look and see if you agree that author Michael Haber might be onto something…

Emboldened by their success in declaring Pluto not a
planet, the International Astronomical Union determined this week by a
close vote that February is too short to be considered a true month. It
has, however, been granted the newly created status of “dwarf month.”
It shares this dubious distinction with several other calendar time
spans, including Labor Day Weekend, Christmas Vacation, and the Time
Between When You Were Supposed to Get Your Oil Changed and When You
Actually Did.

“It only seems fair,” said IAU President Ron Eckers. “February
reaches a peak size of 29 days, averaging only 28 days for 75 percent
of the time. Recent research has shown that other periods, such as the
Time Between When You Were Supposed to Get Your Oil Changed and When
You Actually Did, often exceed this meager time frame. In fact, this
erratic behavior only strengthens our case that February does not
belong in the same classification as the eleven ‘true’ months.”

Eckers also warned that the crop of 30-day “so-called” months should
be careful to maintain their number of days. “They’re already cutting
it pretty close in my book.”

I LOVE all things space–arguably more than the next girl. For years I wanted to be an astrobiologist. Infinite possibilities and the ultimate opportunity to explore the unknown. And it’s no secret to readers that I adore Carl Sagan and Cosmos, which fostered a love and appreciation of science in so many of us.

All I’m saying is, just perhaps–for the time being–we might be better off spending the kind of figures currently invested in large scale BIG ‘what if?’ projects on more proximate concerns. No doubt the mission of Kepler is really cool, but why rush to search for planets like ours when it behooves us to focus efforts on preserving life as we know it here.

My exuberance over the possibility of an eventual planetary census is tempered as this week I’m hearing about university cuts to every budget and program possible. And as college tuition continues to rise, high school students are emailing me that their education feels ever more elusive in an unprecedented economic crisis. I understand that these projects have been in the pipeline for a long time, that they seek important answers, and have the potential to change everything. But, they also might not succeed. Kepler cost close to 600 million dollars and overruns even put the mission in jeopardy at one point.

In 2009, we need to balance budgets so that we’re doing a better job to foster the next the generation of scientific leaders who are going to pursue the coming decades’ BIG ideas. And we must additionally put a fair share of support into the projects that will preserve what we’ve got at home on Planet Earth. As I wrote recently, in a climate of limited budgets, I’d rather see funding for more immediate global concerns like improving agricultural yield, preparing for climate change, and mitigating the impacts of ocean acidification. And no, it’s not comparing apples and oranges. It’s dollars and a collective future. A glance at the number of digits in NOAA’s budget and you’ll understand what I’m getting at–something’s wrong when such a vital agency is so overlooked that it’s never even been authorized by Congress.

I want more than most anyone to explore the cosmos, it’s just not our highest priority from my perspective. That said, with Kepler’s Friday launch set to examine more than 100,000 sun-like stars in the Swan and Lyre constellations, you bet I’ll be watching and listening with great interest.

Mark your calendars for the launch of ASU’s new Origins Initiative on April 6, 2009. Tickets go on sale next week and the event will be broadcast live online. It looks like a terrific line up including Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Brian Greene, and new Director, (and Science Debate co-founder) Lawrence Krauss.

The Origins Symposium will inaugurate the new Origins Initiative at ASU, which will be a University-wide transdisciplinary endeavor supporting research building on key areas of strength at ASU including: the origin of the universe, origins of stars and planet, the origins of life, human origins, origins of consciousness and culture. It will focus on specific topics and different times, and also build transdisciplinary bridges. A key component of Origins will also involve public outreach and education, as well as exploring new paradigms for undergraduate education.

I’ll admit PZ’s post yesterday featuring a cosmic cephalopod sleeping overhead in the Carina Nebula was both daunting and impressive…  but never fear friends, a heroic starry sea cucumber keeps vigilant in the Crab Pulsar and continues to protect us from its merciless tentacles.

Man, Copernicus has been kicking my butt. All the star tables, geometry, etc were turning me in to a pumpkin. So I pulled down a secondary source–Kuhn’s The Copernican Revolution–and night became day. I honestly think one of the reasons that Kuhn’s later and more famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, had such a dramatic impact is that the author wrote and expounded so clearly.

I don’t know what I was expecting from Copernicus, but Kuhn’s book (so far) helpfully explains the relationship between the highly technical and the broad and general in the Copernican Revolution. As he puts it:

The Copernican Revolution was a revolution in ideas, a transformation in man’s conception of the universe and of his own relation to it. Again and again this episode in the history of Renaissance thought has been proclaimed an epochal turning point in the intellectual development of Western man. Yet the Revolution turned upon the most obscure and recondite minutia of astronomical research. How can it have such significance?

It’s the “obscure and recondite” in Copernicus that has been bringing me down. But Kuhn gives me a paradigm through which to think about it–he explains in detail the nature of the “two sphere” model of the universe of pre-Copernican times, and by the end I myself had temporarily ceased to be a heliocentrist, for so powerful and sweeping is the prior worldview once you get inside it. It works pretty darn well. It predicts the solar and star movements and seasons, and is in many ways more aligned with common sense.

I’m still waiting on Kuhn’s precise explanation of how the “obscure and recondite” in Copernicus brings it all toppling down–but I know it involves the planets. Anyway, it’s a little disappointing to need a secondary source to grasp the original, but I’m not proud. More soon…

I’ve been thrilled at the comments I’m getting in response to my posts on Nicholaus Copernicus. See for example here. So I’ve thought of a plan to invite blog readers to join me throughout the next several months as I push through a large number of other texts like De revolutionibus.

For the remainder of this week, the primary reading will be Copernicus. (I still have a ways to go to finish.) Secondary readings will be Owen Gingerich’s The Book Nobody Read and Thomas Kuhn’s The Copernican Revolution.

After that, here’s the schedule I’m working from, and will strive to keep to–with Amazon links to the book versions I’m using wherever possible, and some questions included as well:

(more…)

[Copernicus: Yet Another Pluto Hater?!?]

In my last post, I talked about the “radically strange” in Copernicus; today, let’s go on to catalogue the “strangely modern” aspects of the work:

Strangely modern: The idea that the heavens are immense compared to the puny little Earth. Copernicus put it this way:

I also say that the sun remains forever immobile and that whatever apparent movement belongs to it can be verified of the mobility of the Earth; that the magnitude of the world is such that, although the distance from the sun to the Earth in relation to whatsoever planetary sphere you please possesses magnitude which is sufficiently manifest in proportion to these dimensions, this distance, as compared with the sphere of the fixed stars, is imperceptible.

Speaking of “modern,” I’d argue that pretty much the same message comes across in Monty Python’s “Universe Song,” from The Meaning of Life:

(more…)

In my last post I remarked on how “radically strange–and yet strangely modern” I expected the 1543 work that kicked off the “scientific revolution” to be. Now that I’ve read the first two books of De Revolutionibus, I can say, boy was I right.

This is the first of several posts about my experience of reading Nicholaus Copernicus in the original (er, translation). So first, let me point out the things I found “radically strange” about the work, with the “strangely modern” to come in the next post:

Radically strange: Instructions for how to build an astrolabe. Vast tables of star locations, and huge tracts of astronomy/geometry that I didn’t understand. I had never done this stuff before; I don’t know how much some people get in high school, but I sure didn’t get any. Eventually I Googled “obliquity of the ecliptic,” and then everything became a lot more clear.

Radically strange: The idea that circles are more perfect, more Godly, and more simple than “eccentric circles and epicycles”; so Copernicus’s way of doing things must be right. God himself justifies this incursion, this attempt to unseat the ancients. Copernicus isn’t throwing off tradition; he’s bringing it back where it went astray. As he puts it: “In the center of all rests the sun. For who would place this lamp of a very beautiful temple in another or better place than this wherefrom it can illuminate everything at the same time?” And again: “All these things proceed from the same cause, which resides in the movement of the Earth…How exceedingly fine is the godlike work of the Best and Greatest Artist!”

Radically strange: This book has no ending; no grand conclusion–no kicker. It delivers its big punch in Book I, and then essentially, all the rest is a technical treatise applying the idea that the Earth moves to recalculating a ton of astronomical stuff. At the close, there is no farewell, no thank you very much, no, “I rock.” It just stops.

Here are some questions I have:

1. The book gets really impenetrable at points. I wonder how many contemporaries could actually read and fully understand it.

2. And when it comes to all the technical stuff about how the planets rotate, the precise degree of the obliquity of the ecliptic and so on, I can find much easier explanations–and probably more accurate figures in some cases–just by Googling. So what is the added value of reading the original text? (Devil’s advocate question.)

Some other observations: There are strong echoes of Darwin here. You might say that The Origin of Species was to natural history what De Revolutionibus was to astronomy; so it is interesting to note that Copernicus, too, waited decades to publish, working and working, strengthening his theory, fretful of upsetting everybody’s worldview. Like Darwin, Copernicus relates that “the scorn which I had to fear on account of the newness and absurdity of my opinion almost drove me to abandon a work already taken.” So this work was kept hidden “not merely for nine years, but for almost four times nine years.”

Another observation in this first blog post on Copernicus: As reading him raises a host of new questions, it has also made me order more books–namely, Thomas Kuhn’s The Copernican Revolution and Owen Gingerich’s The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicholaus Copernicus. Both sound intriguing. I’m waiting for their arrival. Meanwhile, back to the star charts….

P.S. Best phrase from Copernicus so far: “Dare to imagine some movement of the Earth.”

Sane people right now are celebrating Valentine’s Day.

I am holed up trying to read Nicholas Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres (De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium). Having been an official student of the history of science for two weeks now, and not feeling particularly satisfied with my progress, I’ve decided it is far past time for me to cast aside Ptolemaic and Aristotelian things, and enter the modern world.

I’ll have plenty more to say about the experience of reading Copernicus once I’ve gotten somewhere. And after Copernicus, it’s Galileo. But for now, here’s an invitation: Anyone care to read along? The image links to the version I’m working from, a paperback with an introduction by Stephen Hawking.

If you ever wanted to experience how radically strange–and yet strangely modern–the granddaddy of the scientific revolution’s great work is, now’s the time!