When scientists get together

Sociology, ecology, economics and linguistics in astronomy.

Next month the American Astronomical Society meets in Washington, DC, just across the river from our office in Alexandria, Virginia.  Our astronomer will be attending the meeting and presenting a poster paper.  (He has missed several annual meetings, since they occur in different places across the country and our travel budget is limited; so he has had to relearn various features of the software packages necessary for the poster.  We regret that this sometimes leads to bad language.)

The main purpose of the meeting is for astronomers to meet face-to-face, in part to present their completed research but also to discuss ideas and plans and generally talk together.  Of course they do it routinely, in these days of multiple kinds of swift communication, but setting aside a time specifically for talking means everyone will be available.  And in the same time zone.

For astronomers are generally thin on the ground.  That is, they’re spread out all over the world and there are very few institutions that have more than a handful.  That’s not because astronomers are some sort of apex predator, requiring large quantities of prey; in fact they’re not very dangerous even to each other.  Rather, they’re a sort of luxury good.  All science and engineering students will take physics and chemistry, so there are many physicists and chemists at universities.  Astronomy is an elective.  Physics and chemistry are basic to many other fields; astronomy leads to. . . astronomy.

That doesn’t make the science less worthwhile or interesting in its own right.  In fact, one can make the case that Newton invented his physics (and calculus) to work out the motions of the planets; that nuclear physics came about to explain the power source of the stars; and even now, almost all applications of General Relativity are astronomical.  As an inspiration and laboratory, astronomy is unmatched.  It isn’t, however, the basic structure for other sciences or subjects.

A consequence of being thin on the ground is the overwhelmingly international nature of astronomers.  At one observatory, while our astronomer worked there, he could count eight different nationalities among the ten offices on one side of the building.  So most astronomers are accustomed to travel long distances, both to meet together and to work.

One would expect that the forthcoming meeting would, thus, be conducted in a Babel of languages.  That’s not the case.  Almost everything in astronomy is done in English.  There are important publications in Russian and French that our astronomer has used, several important observatories are located in Spanish-speaking countries, and of course each astronomer will speak his or her own language.  But perhaps because astronomers come from so many different countries, it is convenient to have a single language in common, and nowadays that’s English.

Our astronomer will report on the meeting in due course.  At the moment, he is converting a dozen graphs from one file format to another in order to satisfy his poster-making software.  In that area, at least, there is no common language.