As we mentioned last week, our navigator was out of the office teaching a professor how to use his sextant. Having decades of experience in both the observations and the calculations involved, he certainly has a firm grasp of the subject. But that’s not always the quality you need in a teacher.
One of the advantages of living in the Washington, DC area is the wealth of cultural opportunities. Expositions of science, history and the arts are going on all the time. Our astronomer attended one of these recently, telling the story of how multicolor imaging allowed scholars to read a text that had been erased centuries ago.
Your novel, novella, short story or epic poem has everything:
Shouldn’t you also get the universe right?
Life was more complicated in the old days. Not only were many things more difficult and tedious to accomplish, often you had to work out which of several methods you should use depending on what you really needed done. It’s much easier now. Really.
We turn again to the theme of technology transforming society, or at least one part of it. With the invention of the 35mm still camera about a quarter of the way into the twentieth century, a whole area of life was suddenly opened up to photography. That was not the intention of the inventor, who was only looking for a lighter-weight way to take pictures himself.
Our chief consultant writes:
Some weeks ago I mentioned paradoxers, those people from outside a certain science who come up with some amazing or important result that, sadly, is not accepted by those inside–mostly because it’s not true. I promised to describe the outstanding characteristics of this fascinating species; here are two.
Here on the 100th birthday of General Relativity our science consultants were pondering why Relativity and Quantum Mechanics were so easy for them to accept but so hard for people a century ago. Certainly it’s not because we’re more insightful or brighter scientists–quite the opposite. Nor is it that we’re better at math; again the opposite is true, and these are highly mathematical subjects. We finally concluded that we’re comfortable with the theories because we were told the stories, word-descriptions of what the math means, from an early stage and so the theories never seemed impossibly strange. The stories are important. But it’s also important for both scientists and laymen to understand their limitations.
While attending to his regular workout in the Five Colors S&T exercise room, our astronomer was reminded of his High School geometry class. (We’ll explain the connection later; it has nothing to do with the angles at which his various muscles were applying force.) Everyone was required to take geometry (and pass it), and most were required to do the same with algebra. Yet it’s a truism that very few people actually use those subjects later on, and most forget them immediately. Why, then, do we bother with teaching and learning them? There are several possible answers, to which we’ll add one of our own.
We’ve just gone through the annual ritual of Falling Back, shifting our clocks by an hour to conform to Standard Time. It’s the regular opportunity for scientists to point out, with either smugness or exasperation, that all summer we haven’t really been Saving Daylight; that there is exactly the same amount of daylight regardless of what our clocks read. Sometimes they wander off into explanations of Local Solar Time, Standard Time Zones and, if not quickly stopped, bring up atomic clocks.
Here we will avoid that sort of thing. In the interests of understanding other people, or at least building character, we’ll look at time from the standpoint of non-scientists. It’s not the same time as we understand, and translation is in order.
Our astronomer has often found himself traveling on public transport and occasionally eating alone at crowded restaurants. This means he has overheard many a conversation, unintentionally to be sure (he lacks the gossip gene, or alternatively the instincts of the spy). Many of them have been very irritating to him, and at least he sat down to work out why.