The Little Book of Black Holes by Steven Gruber and Frans Pretorius

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

Occasionally, when I am at the library, I find a science related book to bring home for my 12 year old son. He is very much into science and technology, and finds these books fun, even when they aren’t exactly aimed at kids. In this case, this book was on the new books shelf and looked interesting. He read it first, and I thought it looked worth a read. Having read it, I am sure the math parts (and some of the science) were a bit over his head - but I have learned that he picks up a surprising amount from books like this. I am sure I will hear about it later.

In general, I am fascinated with astrophysics and astronomy, even if my limited math skills (I never did get to calculus) make some of the specifics hard to grasp. Previous selections include Phil Plait’s excellent and accessible Death From The Skies and David Weintraub’s more detailed How Old Is The Universe? In this connection, I should also mention The Hunt for Vulcan, about the way that an anomaly in Mercury’s orbit led to the discovery of relativity and a new theory of spacetime. In many ways, this book takes up the topic where the previous one left off.

This book is fairly short, and focused on one particular topic: Black holes.

One of the paradoxes of black holes are that they (by definition) cannot be “seen” in the traditional sense. Since light (electromagnetic radiation) cannot escape the event horizon, one cannot “see” the object at all. Instead, their existence is shown by two things: math, and their effect on objects we can see.

It was interesting that the math came first. One of the most amazing things about the universe is that it was written in the language of mathematics. Indeed, many discoveries have postdated the mathematics necessary to understand them. (Love and Math by Edward Frenkel is a fantastic book on this subject.) In this case, the existence of objects with the characteristics of black holes was mathematically predicted as early as the immediate aftermath of Einstein’s theories of relativity. Our technology, however, wasn’t yet able to provide the observational evidence.

Later, as our telescopes got better, and especially after we put them in space, we were able to observe the gravitational effects of black holes. Specifically, we were able to observe binary systems where the only explanation that worked was a black hole. (And later, the calculations of how galaxies like our own worked showed that a supermassive black hole was necessary at the center.)

More recently - and practically - evidence of gravitational waves and gravitational redshift (both predictions of general relativity) has been proven thoroughly. In fact, GPS has to take into account special and general relativity AND gravitational redshift in order to be accurate. A rather small force turns out to mean a lot even at short distances.

This book takes you through the theoretics, the observations, and some really, really crazy theoretical physics at the end. After all, despite the event horizon and all, black holes DO leak energy, and the way this works is pretty dang mind blowing.

The book is written by Steven Gruber and Frans Pretorius, both of whom are physics professors at Princeton. It is no surprise that they know their stuff. But they also write quite well, explaining tough concepts in an understandable way, without talking down to the reader. Gruber also wrote The Little Book of String Theory, which might have to go on my list.

Whether you start with this book really depends on your existing knowledge. If you glazed over at “event horizon,” this is probably not the place to start. Get a copy of Death From the Skies - or maybe a high school level astronomy textbook. If event horizons are okay, but you can’t remember what pulsars, quasars, and neutron stars are, you might want to read How Old is the Universe? to get a better overview of stellar objects in general. That book will also help with the math and physics of how we know there is an expanding universe, how we judge distances, and how we use math and observance to figure stuff out.

But, with a good background, this book is really quite fascinating. As some have pointed out (particularly in the wake of Stephen Hawking’s death), we haven’t ever “seen” a black hole, but we have strong evidence that they exist, and that they have specific characteristics and effects on the rest of the universe.

The Hunt for Vulcan by Thomas Levenson

Source of book: Borrowed from the Library

This book was recommended by my friend “Hester,” who wrote about it here. The book is the story about how math found the planet Neptune, and predicted a planet between Mercury and the sun, which turned out not to exist. Instead, the difficulties presented by Mercury’s orbit eventually led to the development of Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, and a revolution in how we think of space and time. 

The marriage of math and astronomy dates back millennia, with the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Chinese of particular note. As long as we have gazed at the heavens, it appears, we have attempted to make sense of what we can see. The Ancients are sometimes unfairly maligned by people who do not know their history. A great example of this is the claim that it was Columbus who proved the earth was round. Actually, the ancient Greeks not only knew the earth was round, but calculated its diameter to an astounding degree of accuracy given their technology of measurement. Likewise, theories of heliocentricity date back pretty far before Copernicus - they just weren’t widely accepted until later.

So, the planets have always been known, and it was clear that they all followed a similar path in the sky (what we call the ecliptic.) Their paths were also regular and predictable. However, given the limits of human eyesight, only five (plus earth) were known.

With the acceptance of heliocentricty, and Newton’s insight into the mathematics of gravity, the eliptical orbits of the planets were eventually calcuated.

Credit for the discovery of Uranus goes to the Herschels, a brother-sister team who spent years mapping the sky while looking through a home-built telescope. Eventually, they found an object that moved, and didn’t resolve to a point under magnification like a star. It was either a planet or a comet. Further observation and calculation established the orbit of Uranus.

Except there was a problem.

The orbit didn’t fit the math. Something was wrong. Was it Newton? Or was there something affecting Uranus’ orbit.

In one of the most famous scientific triumphs of all time, Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier calculated the orbit and mass of Neptune based purely on the anomalies of Uranus’ orbit. When he finally convinced an astronomer with a powerful enough telescope to look in the correct place, boom! There it was.

Le Verrier then turned toward the problem of Mercury, which likewise had difficulties with its orbit. As measurements had grown more accurate, it was obvious that Mercury too was not obeying Newtonian physics properly.

But despite Le Verrier’s calculations and many attempts at spotting something, anything that would affect Mercury’s orbit, nothing could be found. (This book describes at length the process of searching near the sun during eclipses - which sounds really cool.) There should have been something there, but there wasn’t. At least if Newton was correct.

It would be later that Einstein, working on his own theories about the union of space and time (analogous to matter and energy in being dimensions of the same basic substance), realized that relativity would indeed affect the orbit of Mercury. In fact, because Mercury was closest to the sun, a rather large mass, it would be affected more than any other planet. Newton’s laws of planetary motion and gravitation weren’t exactly wrong, but they were incomplete.

(One recommendation I give to anyone wanting to understand the difference between being wrong in an absolute sense and being just relatively more or less wrong is this fantastic article written by Isaac Asimov. Hat tip to my cousin the professional math geek for sending it my way years ago. It is a great rebuttal to those who claim that since science has gotten things wrong in the past, that we should never trust science when it conflicts with, say, religious dogma. Yes, Newton was wrong in a sense. But he was more right than those who came before, and what is certainly NOT going to happen is that science is going to suddenly decide that the universe revolves around the earth.)

I’m a sucker for books like this, which give the fascinating history of science. I have loved science as long as I can remember, and have devoured it since I was a kid. (I still own the Growing Up With Science encyclopedia set that I read cover to cover several times as a kid. I also recommend David Macauley’s The Way Things Work as an excellent resource for kids.) Just in the last few years, I have particularly enjoyed Sam Kean’s books on a variety of scientific subjects, Thomas Suddendorf’s The Gap, David Weintraub’s How Old is the Universe?, and Phil Plait’s Death From The Skies. Actually, my subject index has a whole category for science, if you want some great suggestions. For the history of science - including a lot on the Herschels - I highly recommend The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes.

There are a few lines in the book I want to mention. The first is from the introduction, which points out that science doesn’t advance in the idealized way that it is often thought to. Old theories are often held onto longer than they should be. The reason for this is that a “powerful, or a beautiful, or perhaps simply a familiar and useful conception of the world” will not be abandoned until two factors are in place: an utter compulsion (the theory fits so badly that it can no longer work), and a real alternative. This second is crucial as well. Newtonian physics weren’t perfect - but they worked for almost everything - certainly anything we needed to engineer here on earth. (At least until we invented GPS, which requires that the software account for both special AND general relativity…) And, until Einstein formulated a theory that worked better, it was no use to just jettison an imperfect theory altogether. This is really the problem that Young Earth Creationists cannot acknowledge. While we have an imperfect and incomplete understanding of geology and astrophysics and evolutionary biology, what we do have fits the observable evidence far better than the theory of a 6000 year old universe. It isn’t enough to just point out gaps and flaws - you have to formulate a viable alternative theory that accounts for the evidence better than what we have. And no, “just so stories” do not count.

Another interesting passage was about Einstein’s difficulties in getting observations to test his theories. Because he lacked the time away from his day job - and the experience and equipment for observations - he sent some professionals to Crimea to observe an eclipse. On the one hand, the weather didn’t cooperate. On the other, this little conflict called World War One started, and made the politics of getting his assistants back to Germany quite difficult. (It ended in a prisoner exchange.) So let’s just say Einstein wasn’t a fan of war.

“That man can take pleasure in marching in fours to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. Heroism on command, senseless violence and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them.”

He also had misgivings about technology - something the 20th Century proved too well to be true, not so much about technology itself, but humanity’s proclivities toward violence.

“Our whole, highly praised technological progress and civilization in general can be likened to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.”

It is easy to see how he might say this in the middle of what was by any measurement a senseless and horrific war, and one which would lead to another in a couple of decades.

One final bit which really made an impression on me was this one:

Science is unique among human ways of knowing because it is self-correcting. Every claim is provisional, which is to say each is incomplete in some small, or, occasionally, truly consequential way. But in the midst of the fray, it is impossible to be sure what any gap between knowledge and nature might mean. We know now that Vulcan could never have existed; Einstein has show us so. But no route to certainty existed for Le Verrier, nor any of his successors over the next half century. They lacked not facts, but a framework, some alternative way of seeing through which Vulcan’s absence could be understood.

The author here is mostly right. He is right about how humans are functioning now. But there is some history here which is beyond the scope of the book - and his point here.

Once upon a time, science and religion were more intertwined. At one point, priests were scientists, and the cutting edge of science was furthered by religion. However, as Petr Beckmann points out, there is a tension here, because science takes work, whereas mumbo-jumbo is cheap to produce - and people tend to pay the same for it.

But as a consequence of the intertwining, religion has sometimes been more like science, where all knowledge - including theological knowledge - is provisional, acknowledged to be incomplete (perhaps “through a glass, darkly…”), and subject to revision upon further exploration and investigation. It was a humility about our knowledge which is completely lacking in modern Evangelicalism, which truly believes it knows everything there is to know about everything.

One of the things I did this year during my lunch breaks was listen to Christine Hayes’ excellent lectures on the Old Testament. (The open course is essentially free from Yale.) One of the points she made early on was that in the Ancient Near East, religious texts were considered authoritative, not because they were unchanging - but because they were changeable. It was the very nature of an authoritative religious text that it would be revised and reinterpreted to suit changing information and cultural needs. That is why the stories of Israel’s history in Samuel/Kings differs so widely from that in Chronicles. Different time period, different theological perspectives. It is why there is argument and discussion of different issues from interracial marriage to the meaning of life just within the Old Testament, to say nothing of the conflict between Old and New.

In this sense, religion was at various times - and could be again - a form of human knowledge that resembles science and in a good way. If knowledge is again less ossified and subject to revision and reinterpretation based on new discoveries about the universe, about human nature, about societies and culture, it can too become self correcting, rather than a perpetuation of the injustices and prejudices of the past. A little humility about what we know, don’t know, and especially how we use our (lack of) knowledge to help or harm others.

Anyway, with that digression, I recommend this book for some fascinating history and as a starting point for thinking about what we know and how we know it.

Eclipse

The kids and I traveled to see the total solar eclipse last month. I actually wrote this up right after we got back, but waited to publish it on my blog until the version I wrote for the Res Ipsa Loquitur (our County Bar Association magazine) to come out first. None of my pictures turned out, but my eldest daughter’s did.

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Technically speaking, eclipses aren’t all that rare. A total solar eclipse (where the sun is completely blocked by the moon) occurs, on average, about every 18 months. However, each eclipse is visible only from less than 1 percent of the earth’s surface, so the chance of seeing an eclipse from any given location is much more rare. In fact, a given location will see an eclipse once in more than 100 years. That’s an average, not a hard number, so it could be more or less, depending on the rather complex mechanics of the earth, moon, and sun.

The continental United States hasn’t seen a total eclipse since 1979, when I was too young to have appreciated it. Also, it was over the northwest only, and it was mostly blocked by clouds. I follow astronomical events - we view the Perseid meteor shower most years, for example, and watched the last few lunar eclipses. We also attended the Astronomy Festival at Bryce Canyon National Park back in 2014. Thus, I put the 2017 solar eclipse on my schedule a couple of years ago, and made plans to see it. After all, the western US won’t see another total eclipse until 2045. If I am around, I’ll probably plan to see that one too. (The eastern US will get one in 2024 - plan ahead now…)

The path of totality went across the United States from northern Oregon down to South Carolina. The path itself is less than 100 miles wide, so it was important to find a spot within that narrow band so that we could see totality. I selected eastern Oregon for three main reasons: first, it was close enough for us to drive rather than fly; second, it had a high statistical likelihood of clear skies; and third, it was in the middle of nowhere, so we would (I hoped) avoid some of the crowds and traffic. Fortunately, all three proved to be true, and we had a great opportunity to see this phenomenon.

We camped in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, in the Elkhorn Mountains, just outside of the path of totality. We then drove a few miles south, to the Crane Flat staging area, which was set up by the Forest Service. Let me say that the Forest Service did a phenomenal job in preparation. They had information and swag at various locations along the main highways, and they set up the viewing areas with toilets and catering, and generally kept things running smoothly. They also were great with the kids, answering questions, and listening to their stories.

Morning dawned on Monday with brilliantly clear skies and pleasant cool temperatures. Unless you knew the eclipse was coming, there was no indication that anything was out of the ordinary. Then, around 9:15 AM, it began. Using the glasses to protect our eyes, we saw just a bit of a nibble out of the disk of the sun. The moon was moving in. Within a few more minutes, the sun looked a bit like the Death Star, then like Pac Man.

At this point, the sun still seemed bright, and the day warm. But soon, as the eclipse reached fifty percent coverage, it started to change. With half the light, it started to cool off, and the day wasn’t as bright. But, because the sun was still relatively high, rather than at the horizon, it felt much different from a sunset.

As more and more of the sun was blocked, it rapidly got colder and darker. And yet, the shadows weren’t right. Dusk should have long shadows, not short ones, and the sky should turn red and yellow, not deep blue. It was a peculiar feeling.

Picture by Ella Swanson

The eclipse approached totality, with only a sliver of sun left. It was darkish, like dusk, and at 5000 feet elevation, it was getting noticeably cold. Most of the viewers put on jackets or sweatshirts. Totality started just after 10:15. The last sliver of sun seemed to disappear fast. The last wink of light at the edge created the “diamond ring” effect for just a couple seconds, then totality. Cheers erupted from the forest around us from people camping just off the road.

Diamond Ring, Picture by Ella Swanson

A total eclipse doesn’t create total darkness. Instead, the light is kind of like dusk, but oddly lurid. The reason why is that the sun’s corona provides as surprising amount of light. During the eclipse, the corona becomes visible to the naked eye. I must say, this was the most magical part of the eclipse, seeing that corona in person for the first time. In addition, a couple of solar flares could be seen. It was thrilling to realize either could have swallowed the earth many times over. The scale is just huge.

Totality, with a great view of the corona and a solar flare at the very top. Picture by Ella Swanson.

All too soon, totality was over. At our location, it lasted about a minute and a quarter. The “diamond ring” reappeared briefly, then the crescent, and the light gradually came back to full and the temperature warmed over the next half hour. It was over so fast, the event of a lifetime, but it was unforgettable. The kids and I drove a thousand miles each way to see it, and it was worth it to experience the event together.   

How Old Is The Universe? by David Weintraub

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

“I do not feel obligated to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended to forgo their use...He would not require us to deny sense and reason in physical matters which are set before our eyes and mind by direct experience or necessary demonstrations.” ~ Galileo Galilei (1615 CE)

To a degree, this book is a follow up selection in my self-education regarding astrophysics. A couple of years ago, I read Philip Plait’s excellent and thrilling Death From The Skies, which uses the idea of “things which could destroy our planet” to give an overview of astronomy and astrophysics. While an overview, it doesn’t get too in depth about specifics, which makes it a good introduction to the average reader, rather than a scientific text.

How Old Is The Universe is likewise not a scientific textbook, but it goes much further into the math and physics - so much so that it probably would help to brush up on geometry and physics a bit before reading it. And maybe a bit of chemistry too for good measure. High school level is probably okay, but this book will stretch it a bit.

This is not to say this book is boring. Quite the contrary. While not exactly a page turner, it is written in an accessible style, and the author does a fine job of bringing the difficult stuff down to the level of us mere mortals. I particularly found his analogies to be helpful in explaining some of the higher concepts.

I began this post with the quote from Galileo for two reasons: first, it opens the book itself. Second, it encapsulates my view of science and its relation to theology. I have never been able to believe that God intentionally created a “fake” universe, one where appearances flatly contradict the “reality” we are supposed to believe in spite of the evidence. That would seem to make God a liar, and a cheater to boot.

I mention this specifically because my particular theological tradition has spent a tremendous amount of energy and political capital trying to deny the overwhelming evidence in favor of an old earth and an older universe. I discussed this in more detail in my post on Young Earth Creationism, here.

One of the biggest lies that YEC feeds you is that the scientific establishment is one giant conspiracy. Supposedly, “everyone” knows that the earth is really 6000 years old, but they deny it because they want to sin (usually by having sex) and the truth interferes with that desire. I know, that’s what I was taught.

Of course, this is a huge slander against the tens of thousands of conscientious scientists who have followed the evidence to the conclusions they have reached, not out of some rebellion against God, but because that’s what the evidence shows. This group also contains many Christians who do not believe the evidence conflicts with faith, just with certain theologically driven conclusions.

Galileo himself was one of these, and yet he was punished brutally for going against current dogma. Even St. Augustine cautioned against giving theology priority in scientific matters, specifically warning against making literalism a stumbling block to acceptance of reality.

Unfortunately, the perceived theological need to take everything in the Bible literally, and as literally true in all details has led to an abandonment of this principle and open hostility toward science of all kinds.

(I want to specifically mention the denial of the biological reality of intersexuality, which I wrote about here, as a clear example of perceived theological needs trumping reality.)

Peter Enns put it best:

Theological needs – better, perceived theological needs – do not determine historical truth. Evangelicals do not tolerate such self-referential logic from defenders of other faiths, and they should not tolerate it in themselves.

One of the best things about this book is that it gives the history of the discoveries that have led scientists to understand the age of the universe. Discoveries that seemed at the time to have nothing to do with the question turned out to be vitally important. Furthermore, it isn’t just one area of study that leads to the conclusion, it is multiple unrelated pieces of evidence which agree about the age of the universe. The pieces weren’t assembled by any one person, or at any one time. Rather, they came together over the last 250 years as the result of many thousands of scientists around the world working on different pieces, building on the work of those who had gone before. To many of them, the results were a surprise, the age determined unexpected. Many times, an unexpected result caused a wholesale revision of their assumptions.

These are not the things of a conspiracy, but of a process of discovery. And the more information that is gathered with ever-more-sophisticated tools, the more solid the conclusion has become.

The author begins the book with a quick look at ancient beliefs about the age of the universe, ranging from “the universe is eternal and unchanging” to “the universe was created on October 23, 4004 BCE, at 9:00 AM.” The last, of course, came from the work of James Ussher and John Lightfoot. The former came from Aristotle. As the author points out:

Aristotle’s logic and reasoning were elegant, sophisticated, powerful, and regrettably also wrong.

Therein lies the rub. Theological and philosophical systems often have elegant, harmonious, and persuasive symmetry, so to speak. But they can often be dead wrong. Aristotle’s perceived philosophical needs didn’t fare so well when they ran into reality, and neither did Ussher’s theology.

I do want to mention a few things that I particularly liked. First, Weintraub doesn’t make the mistake many earlier writers did of glossing over the contributions of women to the field. While notable women such as Henrietta Leavitt and Annie Jump Cannon are becoming better known, it is only in the last few years that the truth regarding the mathematical calculations before the age of computers has been stated: the mostly male astrophysicists who get credited with discovery relied on veritable armies of female “calculators” to do the work of measurement and calculation necessary to process the data. So much for women being bad at math.

I also should mention that this book did a better job of explaining the concept of expanding space than any other I have read. I knew this was a key concept of modern astrophysics, but I hadn’t quite realized why it was important or how it came to be accepted as an explanation. I won’t attempt a recap of it here, because I would probably butcher it. Read the book if you want to find out.

Because the book is presented as much as a history as an answer to the question, the concepts build on each other much like they did in real life. But this also means that the math and the concepts get progressively harder as the chapters go on. By the end, those of us without science degrees tend to find our heads spinning a bit. But that is good. It’s good to be stretched, and be forced to think and make links between concepts of chemistry and physics and algebra.

The universe turns out to be the greatest puzzle of all time, with clues hidden everywhere. I can fully understand why astronomers consider their particular area to be the most fascinating thing to study possible.

I am strongly considering getting this book for a reference, and I will definitely be recommending it to friends who want to know why I believe what I do about the age of the universe, or understand better what we have discovered about the wonders of this world we find ourselves in.

The Perseid Meteor Shower

I have intended to write this post for a couple of years now, but keep getting busy in early August, and just haven’t gotten around to it.

I have, for as long as I remember, enjoyed looking at the stars. Particularly on a clear, pleasant night, with enough time to just wander and stare.

Unfortunately, growing up in Los Angeles, there weren’t too many of these nights. Summers were poor for stargazing, because of the smog and the marine layer that tended to haze things up even in the valleys. California gets nearly all its rain in the winter, so any given night could be cloudy then. However, there were good nights starting in the fall, when the Santa Ana winds would blow dry air from the desert and clear out the haze. Sure, the light pollution of the city still made it impossible to see the Milky Way, but you could at least get a good view of some major constellations. This would continue throughout the winter, before spring brought back the marine layer.

This is why, until a few years ago, when we started camping in earnest, my knowledge of the summer constellations lagged far behind that of the winter ones.

I can point to a few other important celestial events that made an impact. When I was around 11 or so, we waited in line at Griffith Observatory on a cold winter night to look through the 12 inch refracting telescope at the Orion Nebula. (For what it is worth, this is the most looked through telescope in the world, even though it is fairly small even by recreational standards these days.) It made an impression on me at the time, and I have never forgotten it.

Sadly, even though Halley’s Comet came through in 1986, the best I was able to see was a fuzzy blob, dim on the horizon. I wish I could have gone to a better viewing location. If I make it to 2061, I am finding the way somehow to view it with a decent telescope.

Fortunately, I got the opportunity a few years later to see two amazing comets when we lived in the mountains. Hyakutake in 1996 was the first, and I remember getting up with my parents early in the morning to view its curled tail before dawn. The most memorable, definitely, was Hale-Bobb the next year. It stretched so far across the sky, and was visible even at dusk.

It is another comet, however, that has been the source of a decades long fascination of mine. Comet Swift-Tuttle was discovered in the 1800s. It last made an appearance in 1992, but it was very dim - you needed a clear night and binoculars. It won’t be back until 2126, when it is expected to be pretty bright. Although no threat to the earth right now, it has a slim chance of eventually hitting us. But the next time it is even close enough to monitor won’t be for 2000 years, so it is unlikely to be a factor for any of us.

But what Swift-Tuttle did do is leave a trail of dust and rock behind it on each of its passes around the sun. The earth passes through this trail every year in its orbit, leading to a predictable mid-August meteor shower:

The Perseids. 

 Photo by NASA of the 2015 Perseids. It must be nice to have the equipment to do a multi-exposure time-lapse.

The Perseid shower first came to my attention when I was in 6th or 7th grade (I forget), when a friend invited us to go watch. At the time, we were trying to buy a little acreage up in the mountains, so we sat out on the land and watched the meteors until the wee hours of the morning. I never forgot that night, even though I never really remembered when the shower was. (This was in the pre-internet days…)

Later, I did try to watch a few times, and after we moved to the mountains, I did stay up a couple of times. After I got married, my wife and I drove up to the clear air and snuggled in the back of my little truck and watched. Then the kids came, and I wasn’t able to do it.

I restarted the tradition roughly nine years ago, when I started camping with my older kids. I would load them up on marshmallows and hot chocolate, put them in their sleeping bags, and sit out under the stars with a jacket and a glass of wine and watch the show. Eventually, they began to watch with me.

We haven’t done it every year. Some years, it is during the full moon, alas, and you can’t see much. Others have been amazing. A couple of years, we were traveling somewhere without clear skies, and didn’t really get a chance to watch. But when the show is good and I can get free, I head to the mountains and lie back to watch the heavens revolve around me.

My very most memorable year, however, was 2013. A group of us guys took a backpacking trip up to Big Pine Lakes in the Eastern Sierra Nevada. This place is so spectacular that we actually did it two years in a row. I think it is still the most amazing place I have ever hiked. 

 I took this picture of 4th Lake on our trip. The Palisade Crest is in the background. It contains several 14,000+ foot peaks, and California's largest glacier, which we hiked to the next day. We watched the meteors from the rock on the right midground.

Anyway, timing worked out so we could go up during the Perseids. During a new moon. So essentially spectacular conditions. We camped at 4th Lake, at about 11,000 feet, and spent half the night on this rock hill watching the meteors. I swear, you could almost touch the sky. The Milky Way was almost painfully bright. We saw a nice fireball the first night, followed by a steady stream of streaks. The world was still and quiet, the night was cold but not too cold, the air was so clear that you could pick out details in the constellations that were invisible from most other places. It was just an amazing experience.

This year, like most, I will “just” be going camping in the nearby Sierra Madre mountains, at one of our favorite places. I am hoping some friends will join us, to share the experience. But if not, for another night, I will be out there bundled up, watching the heavens open once again.

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The Perseids take place over a 3-4 day period in mid-August. Because this is a leap year, the peak is early on the morning of August 12 - it is either the 12th or 13th each year. The shower tends to last for a few days, so if you miss the peak, try the next night.

This year is supposed to be a good one, with higher than average frequency. (About one per minute is a decent rate most years.) Unfortunately, the moon will be up for the first half of the night this year. Best to wait until midnight or so, and watch until dawn. Where we go, the mountain will block the moon to the west before that, so that should help. Best in any case to plan to be up a lot of the night.

For more information, space.com has a good summary and guide to the various meteor showers.

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I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a couple of books by one of my favorite astronomers and authors, Phillip Plait. I read the first during our trip to Bryce Canyon National Park for their astronomy festival - seriously, put it on your bucket list! The second debunks a lot of astronomical myths, from astrology to misconceptions about how tides work. Plait’s books are a lot of fun - and full of information.

Death From The Skies

Bad Astronomy

I also recommend Plait’s video series, Crash Course Astronomy, available for free on youtube. We are using it for part of our homeschool science curriculum right now. I have learned a lot from it - and I already had a pretty decent knowledge of science.

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If you liked this post, you might also enjoy my series on the National Park System.

Bad Astronomy by Phillip Plait

Source of book: I own this.

If you haven’t already discovered Phil Plait, you really should. Seriously. Plait has worked as an astronomer (including research work on data from the Hubble Space Telescope), teacher, and writer. I read his other book, Death From The Skies a couple of years ago, and it was outstanding. I have even introduced kids to that book, because it is - in addition to an entertaining read - a fairly good basic introduction to astronomy and astrophysics.

I also should recommend Plait’s excellent video series, Crash Course Astronomy. These videos take the viewer from moon phases through neutron stars, black holes, and dark energy in a tour of the universe in 46 episodes. I plan to use them for my kids when we next do an astronomy unit. 

Bad Astronomy is actually Plait’s first book, and grew out of his blog by the same name where he debunked bad science and pseudoscience in the area of astronomy. These range from his opening chapter on balancing eggs on the equinox to bad science in movies. Along the way, he discusses questions such as why the moon looks bigger near the horizon, whether toilets swirl different directions in the northern and southern hemispheres (no), astrology, young earth creationism, whether the moon landing was faked (no), and which common idioms are actually based on truth.

Plait tackles two related phenomena in this book. The first is a general lack of scientific knowledge in the United States. It isn’t just that we do not know our science, but that we think it is okay to be scientifically illiterate.

To illustrate this point, Plait describes a news broadcast back in 1994 when Matt Lauer read a story about an experiment that the space shuttle was conducting in space. The experiment wasn’t that complicated (dragging a shield to clear small particles, then conducting tests in that ultra-vacuum environment), but Lauer clearly was just reading without having a clue what he was talking about. The other persons on the broadcast, Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel, made a joke about it. As Plait points out, these are three of the most famous journalists -  household names everyone knows. “Think about that for a moment: three of America’s most famous journalists, and they actually laughed at their own ignorance in science! How would this be different if, say, the report had been about Serbia, and they laughed at how none of them knew where it was?”

This is the problem. It is “cute” to be scientifically ignorant. (Also to be ignorant in math  - and the two are related.) I have found it frustrating when discussing topics which involve science, from “alternative” medicine scams to the age of the earth, that many, many people do not know basic high school level science, and don’t care. Shouldn’t this be as embarrassing as not knowing how to read?

The second phenomenon is that of blind acceptance of ludicrous claims. Plait is a big advocate for “scientific skepticism,” the practice of questioning whether claims are supported by actual empirical evidence. Don’t confuse this with philosophical skepticism (questioning our ability to have any knowledge of the world),  methodological skepticism (dating from Descartes, a doubting of one’s beliefs as a method of thinking about them), or even religious skepticism. I am, I am suspecting, a bit of a rare bird, because I myself am a big fan of scientific skepticism but am also a religious person. I believe my type was more common in the past, but things have gotten polarized as of late, alas.

Just for fun, I should mention that in addition to Plait, I am a fan of Mythbusters, the television show that tests urban myths and other claims using the scientific method. But scientific skepticism isn’t just a modern phenomenon. Sir Thomas Browne (17th Century), Michel de Montaigne (16th Century), Antoine Lavoisier (the chemist who named the elements oxygen and hydrogen), and Benjamin Franklin. The key essence of the philosophy is “prove it.” But it isn’t just skepticism. Scientific skepticism also fights against pseudoskeptics, like AIDS denialists and others who pretend to just be “asking questions” while really pushing an alternative to scientifically established facts.

Chief among these at this time are the anti-vaxxers, who Plait has done his best to debunk.

The point of Bad Astronomy isn’t to mock those who believe silly things. If anything, Plait is more generous, granting a certain sort of common sense to some myths. After all, things often do look a certain way, until one applies the scientific method to them. (For example, holding a pencil eraser against the moon at arm’s length demonstrates that the moon is the same size wherever it is.) One can particularly see this in Plait’s approach to young earth creationism. Here in the book - and also on his blog - he states up front that he is non-religious. But he doesn’t attack religion. In fact, if all my religious friends were as generous toward atheists as Plait is toward religious people, the world would be a far better place. Plait limits himself to debunking the scientific claims. His problem is when YEC believers misuse and misstate science to “prove” their points.

I have no intention of discussing their arguments based on the Bible. I leave that to experts on religion and interpreting various ancient texts. I also have no desire to insult, denigrate, or argue against anyone’s religious beliefs, as long as they do not use scientific data incorrectly to support these beliefs.

And then he goes on to tackle a few of claims made by YEC advocates, showing that they leave out crucial information, lie about what the data says, and fail (or refuse) to acknowledge any evidence that contradicts their beliefs.

I’ll admit that I firmly agree with Plait on this. I once embraced the YEC viewpoint. What changed for me was when I got far enough along in my science education to start evaluating the claims. I had already embraced an old earth by the time I graduated high school. Once the internet became available to me, I was able to search out additional sources, and the whole thing fell apart. There were too many outright lies in the YEC information. (Similarly, despite my family’s embrace of “alternative” medicine, I found that the materials often couldn’t even get high school chemistry right. It was obvious at some point that the whole thing was a highly lucrative scam.)

In a way, then - and this is the lawyer speaking too - what this world needs is a lot less credulity and a lot more skepticism. This political season has been ample demonstration of that fact, with so many willing to just accept what someone says without thinking it through and checking out the actual facts.

In summary, then, what this book does is make a compelling argument for actually testing and looking stuff up before accepting claims. Depending on one’s prior knowledge, this book could either be a revelation, or just a confirmation of one’s own research. In my case, I did learn some things. For example, I had not thought through exactly why there would be no visible stars in photographs of astronauts on the moon. (It’s all about photography and how bright the astronauts were in direct sunlight.) There are lots of fun tidbits for everyone. However, I think that the real strength of this book is going to be sharing it with my kids and with others who wish to understand why some things are simply not credible. One hopes it can be an antidote to the culture of “post first, question later - or probably never.”

And maybe, one can only hope, it can at least convince a few people that scientific illiteracy isn’t funny.

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A few random things:

Seriously, Death From the Skies is really great. One of my 11 year old friends read it and discovered a thirst for more knowledge about relativity and astrophysics. Science is great stuff!

On a related note, Crash Course Astronomy is very, very good. I thought I had a pretty decent grasp of the basic concepts, but Plait includes so many things discovered just since we put the Hubble in orbit that prove the universe is even more amazing than I knew. Plait has that rare and invaluable gift of taking complex topics and making them understandable without dumbing them down. Obviously, this isn’t a graduate level physics course or anything, but for those of us outside of the scientific world, it is a great introduction to important concepts.

Also, Plait’s blog (Bad Astronomy) is now hosted by Slate Magazine. It is worth following for the astonishingly beautiful photographs of the universe he posts.

I also cite Plait to my friends who think all atheists are abrasive like Richard Dawkins. (No diss on Dawkins’ scientific work - he’s legit. But he is abrasive, and even other atheists consider him sexist.) Plait has such a sense of wonder that his love for his topics is contagious. He also is great at keeping his focus on things that can be proven or disproven, a distinction that all of us of whatever faith or no faith should keep in mind. There is far more we have in common anyway.

I read this book during our recent camping trip at Pinnacles National Park. Although I didn’t do a post about this particular trip, I have written several posts about past trips. Pinnacles is fairly close to where I live, and it is a truly magical place. From the soaring condors, so close to extinction when I was a kid, to the atmospheric talus caves, to the rocks and spires of a volcano, extinct for 20 million years, and displaced from a part of itself by 180 miles due to the movement of the San Andreas Fault. I have written about it a few times before, and you can find those posts here, on my National Parks and Monuments page. The geology of Pinnacles was one reason I rejected Young Earth Creationism. The natural history of the rocks is visible, and the forces necessary to drag the plates so far would have been too cataclysmic to have occurred instantaneously. 

This too is on point - particularly in light of the history presented in The History of Pi. Recently, this person was elected to the Texas Board of Education. Fact: I am a Christian. Also Fact: this is disturbing to me beyond belief, that someone who so flagrantly denies the validity of empirical evidence would be put in charge of determining curriculum. Phil Plait is right about the widespread acceptance of scientific ignorance. 

I have to mention this as well: Plait gives a shout out to the a number of great sources for further information. Among these is none other than Nick Strobel, who teaches Astronomy and other stuff here at our local junior college, Bakersfield College. The kids and I have attended some of Strobel’s lectures at the planetarium. He is great with kids, and an educator in the best sense of the word. My wife took a unit from him on the physics of Star Trek back when she was in nursing school. For anyone who believes the community college system - or state schools in general are inferior, I submit Nick Strobel, and many other outstanding educators who devote their lives to doing the hard work of individual education in places that give them no glory and often inferior pay. These are the good guys, and what they do for humanity deserves far more credit than it gets. (For what it is worth, Strobel is also in my camp on the YEC debate. He is a Methodist who vehemently objects to the teaching of literalist/fundamentalist doctrine as science.)