[ friday, january 11 ]
one more thing about the aas meeting: I'm sure you've heard by now that the universe is seafoam green, or whatever. I'd just like to point you to the horse's mouth.[ 16:03 • + ]
my heart and my brain are engaged in a neverending battle about light. my heart says it is all beautiful; my brain says it belongs to the stars. on wednesday there was a session on light pollution, full of posters showing the spread of floodlit urbanization across the american continent, the disappearance of fainter stars from the night sky, and the damage this is doing to astronomy. I do know that all our shining lights and cityscapes are hurting our ability to study the stars from ground-based observatories, but... I love the big cities. one of the displays at the meeting showed the progression of light pollution in the united states, with images from the fifties of america all black except for the bright spidery splotches of color along the coastlines and the little dots marking burgeoning metropoli scattered across the midwest, and predictions for the future with the entire eastern half of the continent glowing like a giant lightbulb. it was sobering and sad to think of all the parking lots and strip malls and suburban porchlights that will contribute to the erasure of the milky way from our collective consciousness, but I couldn't help but thrill a tiny bit at the brightness around new york and boston and chicago.
I love standing on city sidewalks at night and looking up at the converging edges of skyscrapers, at the windowlights left on in office buildings, patterned like a secret code for passing aliens. I love the trees wrapped in strings of tiny white bulbs all along the sidewalks, the streams of red taillights playing follow the leader down busy streets, the craggy, ornate old buildings standing next to the sleek and streamlined new ones. I love the spotlights swinging across the sky, the unabashed glitziness of twelve-foot neon theater marquees, the dignified grace of aging metal statues and neoclassical marble museums and stately government buildings that are left quietly illuminated all night long, just glowing. I love the bridges that rise up over rivers and houses and boats and birds, holding all our pieces together, throwing their reflections down like paint from caillebotte's brush. I love the way cities with all their lights and buildings stretch up from the ground as if a giant hand had reached down and yanked them skyward, awkward and elegant and majestic and hulking and big. and human. cities can say with their presence what we can't in words that hold humility and arrogance in equal measure, because there are no such words: that we may be small, fragile animals, but here we are and look what we can do. we built this. cities have personality and vibrancy and life, and we gave it to them. our cities show us who we are, collectively, and we're more than just ourselves; we're amazing and we're alive.
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in the airplane between baltimore and boston I kept my face pressed against the window, watching the stars of orion and the big dipper sitting eye-to-eye with me for once, and the lights of human civilization sliding perpetually out from underneath me on the ground below. and like a two year old with a toy in each hand, I wanted to keep them both.
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[ wednesday, january 9 ]
this morning we went to the oral sessions on astronomy 101. swarthmore has no such thing (we do have astro 1, which is a survey course populated by non-majors, but it is not a huge lecture class with 200+ students in it), but I was curious to see where the discussion would go. besides, in all likelihood I will be a ta for an introductory astro course at some big university at some point in my academic life, and I thought it might be useful to get a sense of what that scene is all about. in some ways, the talks were encouraging: people are thinking about what aspects of astronomy are important for undergrads, and what the best ways are to communicate those things, and how to make it accessible to students who don't necessarily want to spend the rest of their lives studying the universe, or even doing science at all. however, they were also a little depressing. one speaker talked about multiple choice versus fill in the blank tests; another pointed out that with a class of a few hundred, spending an extra thirty seconds with each student per week would add up to a few hours every week (time he claimed not to have; I wanted to stand up and point out that my professors spend several hours with me per day when I need them to, but I thought that might be rude); a third said that it wasn't necessary to actually grade any writing assignments, because the students got everything possible out of them just by doing the writing in the first place. the general concensus seemed to be that in any given class, only about twenty percent of the kids are going to understand the things you try to teach them, and that astronomy minors don't need to know any calculus. it was all very eye-opening for me, and while it was sad it also made me indescribably glad to be at swarthmore.after lunch we went to a few talks about stars and disks and viscosity and elasticity and magnetic fields and so on. I understood only about half of what was being said. it made me happy from two sides: I was surprised at how much I was able to follow the talks in spite of my limited knowledge, the product of only five semesters of being an astrophysics major; at the same time, whenever someone asked a question I thought oh, that never would have occurred to me and was happy about how much I still have left to learn. this whole conference has been encouraging in funny ways, actually. I've been walking around, looking at other posters, sometimes asking their authors to explain them to me, and just trying to soak in as much as I can. I've discovered two things. first, that I truly do understand the things we learned in seminar last semester (or the things I've learned from working on research), not just in abstract governing-equationish ways, but as they relate to the new research that real astronomers are doing right now. and second, that I am just as good at explaining our research as a lot of these adult career scientists are at explaining theirs. I can do this.
in the afternoon there was a long invited talk by a swarthmore alum who won a genius award this year and does about a billion different things, one of which is working for seti. he spoke about the prospects for life, intelligent or otherwise, on extraterrestrial planets or moons. while I already knew almost everything he talked about, thanks to the first astronomy class I took at swarthmore (more than two years ago now, yikes!), but it was still nice to hear it being discussed in a serious context and to see the entire ballroom filled with interested scientists. I know that not everyone thinks it's at all worthwhile to spend money on something as potentially futile as a search for alien life, but I'm some sort of romantic at heart, and so I do believe that there's probably life out there somewhere, intelligent life even, and that possibility alone is enough to justify going out and looking. the very last slide in the talk was a picture of our galaxy; the total volume of space we've scanned so far for evidence of life is only a tiny red dot in the smatter of countless stars and clusters of stars. we have so much looking left to do.
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[ tuesday, january 8 ]
today: dressed up in creased pants, red sweater, shoes with holes all the way through the sole. cashew butter and bananas for breakfast. the metro was quiet and smooth all the way to dupont circle. vera rubin, almost completely obscured by the audience-crowd except for her hair glowing white in front of the overhead projector, talked about the galaxy. later I talked too, shakily at first but better after three more people, about young stars and lithium and circumstellar disks. tallied in the back of my head the things my professor would have explained better; afterwards, sitting on the floor, watched him do just that. walked around. thai food and astronomy conversations on all sides for lunch. rooms full of posters, science fair for adults. endless introductions and handshakes and I'm a junior I don't know what my thesis will be on yet yes I want to go to graduate school yes I love swarthmore. sake and sushi and seaweed and teriyaki for dinner; everyone else's sushi was prettier than mine, colorful. duct-tape over the hole in my shoe. music on computer speakers. taxicab at almost-two, past all the stately lit-up deserted buildings. more tomorrow. I like being an astronomer.[ 02:41 • + ]
[ sunday, january 6 ]
I'm always a little skittish before flying; I think the built-in adrenaline is part of the reason I like airplanes so much. since september the airports have been full of guns and shiny boots and camoflage, and it makes my heart beat faster without really making me nervous. I trust my fellow passengers to be as unassuming as I am, to sit quietly inside the airplane and simply wait for the world to finish turning beneath us. all my airplane-death fantasies involve burning engines and sticking wingflaps and fiery explosions; I always hold my breath just a little bit while we land because it seems like it would be just cruelly ironic enough for the plane to spontaneously combust upon touchdown that the universe might actually let it happen. but it never does, and in the parts of my mind that haven't run away with my imagination I know I don't really think it ever will. so I fly and feel as safe inside the hurtling metal cocoon as I do jaywalking in central square or riding my bike in rush hour trafffic. nothing is perfectly safe, but most things are worth the risk.this morning, though, when I was sitting at the terminal at logan for two more hours than I needed to (ticket check, baggage check and security check took a grand total of five minutes combined), I discovered that with proper fiddling I could hear everything that the security guards were saying into their walkie-talkies, and with a little bit more fiddling and rearranging of my headphone cord I could tune into the control tower. the woman who had printed out my e-ticket didn't seem to look at anything besides my name on the photo id I handed her: when she asked me if I was going on vacation and I said not really, I'm going to a meeting, she looked at me incredulously and said, "aren't you a little young? you look sixteen!" it says right on my id, in bright red letters in fact, that I will be twenty-one on 08-04-2002. and when I landed at bwi there was a repeating message on the loudspeaker, telling us that only ticketed passengers are allowed beyond security checkpoints "in this time of heightened security." in this time? do you suppose we will eventually decide that people aren't potentially dangerous and will let just anyone run around the airports? now, I don't want (or expect) america to be run by martial law, but don't you think security should include something that's, well, secure?