Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
You’ve made a career out of combating ignorance of astronomy. What inspired you to start?
When the Internet was new I was in graduate school studying astronomy, and a lot of people were writing web pages filled with misinformation about the universe. I thought these bad ideas presented a good opportunity to actually talk about astronomy, so I started writing about them. The name Bad Astronomy became obvious and I haven’t looked back since.
Before we talk about the five guides to our galaxy you have selected, please remind us what is outside our atmosphere?
What’s outside of our atmosphere is everything but the Earth – space on a scale that is hard to imagine. The Earth is huge. It would take a full day in an airplane to fly all the way around it. But the Earth’s circumference is tiny compared to the distance to the moon, over 200,000 miles away, the distance to the sun, 90 million miles away, or the distance to Neptune, billions of miles away. And that’s just our solar system.
Outside of our solar system, there is nothing but empty space for trillions of miles to the next star. There are something like 100 billion stars in our galaxy, shaped into a flat spiral disc. And beyond the Milky Way there are probably hundreds of billions of other galaxies in the universe. The scale of space is so immense that it crushes our sense of scale to dust. But we do have numbers we can hang on to. We can use maths and physics to try to understand.
What’s the difference and relationship between cosmology, astronomy and astrophysics?
The joke is: If you’re sitting next to somebody on an airplane and you want to talk to them you say you’re an astronomer, and if you don’t want to talk to them you say you’re an astrophysicist.
An astronomer is someone who observes the sky. I am an astronomer. There are professional astronomers who do it for a living, and there are amateur astronomers who still have fantastic equipment and incredible knowledge of the sky. An astrophysicist applies the science of physics to astronomy. They study how planets move, how stars form or why black holes exist. Every astrophysicist is an astronomer, but not every astronomer is an astrophysicist.
Cosmologists are a subset of astronomers and astrophysicists who study the universe as a whole. They want to know how the universe came to be, how it’s changed, where it’s going and how it’s evolving. So they’re studying the universe as a whole, instead of specific things inside of it.
And, ahem, what is an astrologist?
Astrology is the old idea that the cycles in the sky somehow have an effect on Earth. In some sense, that’s true: We have seasons, the sun rises and sets and all of that. But some people believe that the planets, stars, sun and moon have a direct effect on people’s lives which can be foretold through a horoscope. That’s just not true. First: There’s no physical force that could do that. Second: Scientists have rigorously tested the validity of these claims over and over again, and it’s been shown that what most people think of as astrology is without validity. It’s a psychological effect, there’s no real science behind it.
Bang! is the first book you selected, subtitled “A Complete History of the Universe”. Please give us a précis.
This book is a general overview of astronomy, and doesn’t go into detail about any one thing. It basically takes the reader on a tour of the entire universe, and tells you everything you want to know. When I was a kid, I loved books like this. I would read them cover to cover. There were so many of them out there and there have been many since. Most don’t hit me hard but I really liked this one. It’s beautifully described, accurate and they feature fantastic photography. If you like astronomy and those Hubble pictures on the Internet, don’t know much but would love to learn more, this would be a great book for you.
It sounds comprehensive, but I can’t ignore that one of the three authors is the founding guitarist of Queen.
Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott are very famous astronomers in England from a long running BBC series called The Sky at Night. The third author is Brian May, the lead guitarist for Queen. That may sound funny, but he has a PhD in astronomy and became a very good astronomer.
Bang! tells the birth story of the universe and even gives a birthday for the universe. How did science estimate that date?
If you were to ask me what is the single most amazing thing that science has ever done, I would say: Calculating the birthdate of the universe.
There are so many different creation myths. But now we have the ability to measure things. Take the Earth: We can estimate its age through a lot of different techniques, like radioactivity, continental drift and how long it would take the Earth to cool after it was formed. All of these measures point toward an age of about four and a half billion years.
Then by looking at the sky we can put an age on the universe itself. We learn that the universe is expanding, and by reversing the clock you can calculate when the universe must have started expanding. There are a lot of different ways of doing that, by studying galaxies or galaxy motion. Using radio telescopes, you can see a glow across the whole sky that is basically the leftover cooling fireball from the Big Bang. By very carefully measuring that lingering glow – using complicated but well understood physics – you can calculate how old the universe is. You get an age of about 13.7 billion years.
Your book Death From the Skies! is also an astronomy primer with an exclamation point in the title.
My book is specifically about objects in space that can damage us in some way – asteroid impacts, solar flares, black holes, galaxies colliding, stars exploding and all the fun violent stuff in the universe. I wrote it as a serious book, in that the science is as accurate and up-to-date as I could possibly make it. But I aimed to make it like getting on a rollercoaster: It’s scary while you’re on it but then when it’s over you think, Phew!
The two catastrophes that have the highest chance of happening are an asteroid impact or a big solar flare damaging our satellites and our power grid. There are preventative measures we can easily take to prepare for those. The other scary scenarios you hear, like a black hole swallowing the Earth or a nearby star blowing up, would happen too far in the future for us to worry about.
Philip Plait is an astronomer. He received his PhD in astronomy from University of Virginia, and has worked on the Hubble Telescope. On his blog badastronomy.com he debunks myths about our galaxy. Plait is the author of Bad Astronomy and Death From the Skies!. An asteroid was named after him in 2008
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