Notes from the Astronomy Underground: Just a Theory

Contents

Grading homework is a big part of the endless cascade of joy that defines grad student life. Personally, I get to evaluate almost 700 essays from an introductory astronomy course. It sounds pretty rough, but I really don’t mind it. It fits into my adorably naive crusade to make science more approachable for everyone and vaguely Make a Difference Somewhere.

Anyway, my mission for these essays is to look for what these students got out of the course; what part of Astronomy touched them personally. Pretty easy, right? Ordinarily, you’d expect Astronomy Newbies to be flabbergasted by the vast scales of the universe and our insignificance next to the astounding menagerie of stars, galaxies, quasars, dark energy, etc. Ideally, if these students are going to walk away from this course with anything, it’s an enlightened, albeit slightly depressing, cosmic perspective on humanity.

Well, for the most part it worked. A satisfying 60-70% of the class got the message and were somewhat inspired by the mesmerizing complexity of the universe. But the remaining students callously dismissed most of the course material, claiming everything they learned was “just a theory."

Just a theory.

Seriously, if I had a dollar for every time I read that exact phrase, I could put all the money in a big water tower and swim around in it like Scrooge McDuck did in Ducktales.

Everyone knows this isn’t a local phenomenon, either. If you’ve been following the Intelligent Design debacle in the U.S., you have a good idea of what I’m talking about. It’s been exhaustively covered by just about anyone with a working pulse, so I don’t need to discuss it here. But why would people want to be so willfully ignorant of science in the first place?

Fundamentally, it’s because people just don’t know what we do. I’m actually very sympathetic to that. As a grad student, I frankly never have a clue of what I’m doing, either. But I get the feeling that the public’s perception of modern science doesn’t resemble a tightly-knit, venerated community of the finest, meticulous minds on the planet so much as it does some horribly maladroit sequel to the Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure franchise.

Yeah… you may notice I’m quite fond of making marginally appropriate references to pop culture icons of the 1980s. You can expect a lot more of that in the future.

So how could the Me Decade’s favorite duo of SoCal burnouts personify these apparently easily rejected trivialities of science? I imagine it would go something like this:

Ted: Bill, my friend?

Bill: Yes, Ted, my friend?

Ted (gesturing wildly): Have you ever wondered how this… most excellent Universe came to be?

Bill: Dude… that is a most profound question. One that requires… philosophical musings of the greatest significance.

(Bill and Ted furrow their brows in thought)

Ted: Bill, what if… the Universe… started in a big bang. A most triumphant bang.

Bill: A most bodacious theory, my esteemed colleague. But what about the most uniform cosmic microwave background? It violates our most sacred laws of causality, dude.

Ted (dejected): Bogus…

Bill: Wait, Ted…. are you thinking what I’m thinking?

(Both perk up)

Bill and Ted in unison: INFLATION! DUDE!

(Both theatrically strum air guitars)

Now I’m not saying that Wyld Stylllyn cosmology is entirely without merit, nor am I trying to downplay how awesome a Van Halen-inspired spacetime metric could be. The point is, science doesn’t happen in three seconds. Astronomers don’t think up cosmic microwave background anisotropy because we’re annoyed at microwaves for unevenly heating our hastily purchased 7-11 burritos.

At the most basic level, the problem is a matter of transparency and semantics.

Aside from your celebrity scientists like Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and Carl Sagan, scientists really are locked away in the proverbial Ivory Tower. It’s true in the most literal sense for me- I am literally locked in a windowless office tower, denied any contact with normal civilization. It’s bad. I think I'm starting to devolve into some kind of nocturnal mole creature. Granted, we scientists tend not to be the most socially graceful people on the planet, but that’s no excuse for our minimal integration into society.

“But wait!” You say. “Astronomy has a long, seasoned history of outreach. Surely that can’t be the main problem. Also, you are an amazing human being in every conceivable way. Your witty insight breathes new life into the very core of my being.” Well, you’re right. And thanks for your kind words. But really, it’s not the quantity of public relations that matters; it’s all about how we present the material.

For some bizarre reason, even when we teach the scientific method in middle and high school ad nauseam, most people seem to forget about the vitally important distinctions between hypotheses, theories, and laws by the time they go to college or to this “real world” I’ve heard so much about. It’s well known that our theories- our rigorously supported, peer-reviewed, and observationally/ theoretically consistent explanations of the universe- carry the same weight in the public domain as gut feelings and fairly arbitrary suggestions. That’s why the Theory of Evolution can occupy the same intellectual plane as 2005’s torrent of implausible predictions concerning the supposed invincibility of Chuck Norris’s beard.

What’s even worse is that we coldly summarize decades, even centuries, of scientists’ singularly driven passions into terse passages in both introductory textbooks and public literature. Every sentence you read in these books encapsulates someone’s individual contribution to science, cemented with decades of sacrifice, blood, and tears. And if he or she lived in the 1950s, it probably included plenty of cigarettes and red scare propaganda, too.

It’s an unfortunate, but necessary evil. With so much material to cover in classes or books, naturally we can’t delve into every minute detail about any particular theory. But then we invariably risk understating the years of mathematical and observational agony that is so essential to science, and giving the public this warped, Bill-and-Ted perspective on our research. We’re turning science into a running joke. Some of my students laugh at the Big Bang, claiming they could come up with equally plausible explanations to fit the limited number of observations we have time to make into crude sound bytes for them. We’re rapidly turning science education into a queasy circus of superficially crazy, poorly explained ideas, and I don’t see any appealing solution here.

But at the very least, we should at least tone down some of the religious language we use in our public discourse. I understand this is a deeply religious country, and drawing colorful analogies between faith and science may seem useful, but in reality this approach is as viable as using sheep as dinner napkins (I mean, eventually you’d run out of sheep). Every time Lee Smolin claims an aspect of cosmology is “an item of faith,” or Marcelo Gleiser writes about “Einstein’s complete faith in his ideas,” I spout threats of generic, self-inflicted eye injury. Almost every Astronomy educator is equally guilty of sprucing up science with inappropriate language. We “believe” in the Big Bang and Evolution, we are “agnostic” to ideas outside of our scientific “dogma,” and we “confess” that theory is not strictly the same as fact.

Ok, the last few examples are a little extreme. But “believe” and “faith” are in print in way more places than they should rightfully be. These semantic tangles pit science against religion in a wholly unneeded, bitterly divided theological battleground, and this is the worst kind of publicity we could possibly get. Science and Religion are not Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots awkwardly fighting in some ideological arena; nor are they contenders for class time in science curricula (I’m talking to you, Kansas). Somehow we’re putting what should be two complementary aspects of our humanity through a kind of twisted intellectual schizophrenia. And all this because we’re getting sloppy with our language and inadvertently transforming the country’s view of science.

Yikes. I didn't really intend to go that far into religion. For the record, I consider science and religion to be perfectly compatible. To be quick, I'll refer you to the philosophical works of Eddington, Jeans, Schrödinger, and Whitehead. For a bunch of dead white guys, they're alright.

What’s the next step? We could probably use some serious pedagogical backpedaling. By trying to make science universally accessible, we’ve harnessed the connotative power of the English language and obscured our beloved fields so much that no one understands the difference between a genuine theory and an idea any more.

So until we can get everything straightened out, in the words of my favorite, oft-quoted characters, just be excellent to each other.

Gleiser, M. 2005, The Dancing Universe, Hanover, NH: Dartmouth University Press.

Smolin, L. 2006. The Cosmic Landscape, New York: Little, Brown, and Co.

http://i.cnn.net/cnn/2003/SHOWBIZ/Movies/11/05/sprj.caf03.film.keanureeves.ap/story.bill.ted.ap.jpg