In the beautiful 2007 documentary, Seeing in the Dark, author Timothy Ferris explored the intersection the art of music with the science of astronomy during while coming of age in the 1950s:

I came to think of music and the stars as landmarks to steer by. I didn’t yet know that this was already an old story back when Kepler and Galileo talked about the music of the spheres, but I could sense a resonance between the night sky and the tricky matter of plucking a few strings in just the right way to put human hearts in tune with the cosmos.

Now of course music is not just art; it’s also math. And astronomy is not just science; it’s also creativity. Ferris is not alone in arguing the poetics intrinsic to the natural world and our drive to systematically and rationally understand it, and he is also not alone in trying to communicate the beauty of the underlying order of the universe through music. Symphony of Science is another such effort. John D. Boswell, known online as melodysheep, remixes science lectures and monologues from science documentaries-not necessarily the source material most remix artists would turn to first-into oddly compelling music videos. They are strange, but somehow wonderful. Here is one that is particularly on topic:



Monty Python has taken a different tack, but one that is no less reverent, under it all, to science. Here is there “Galaxy Song” from The Meaning of Life:



More recently, They Might Be Giants, the official rock band of nerds everywhere, produced a wonderful album of science songs for children called Here Comes Science. The songs are infectious, smart and funny. Most of them are covers, some of which are from the 1950s. No New Age-y self-importance or pan-pipe-y spirituality here. Just good science with pop hooks. Here they are on the first track, Science Is Real:

I like the stories
About angels, unicorns and elves
Now I like those stories
As much as anybody else
But when I’m seeking knowledge
Either simple or abstract
The facts are with science.

As a text, Science is Real is a model for pithy, succinct argumentation, quickly delineating superstition from science, and clarifying the way scientists use the word “theory”…which some science communicators don’t even seem to grasp. Parents, play Here Comes Science to your children. The world will be better for it, eventually.

One of those 1950s songs They Might Be Giants have revived is the wonderful round What is a shooting star? Some day I’m going to print out the parts of this song onto cards and hand it out to a crowd gathered for a star party and get them to sing it. It would be a great way to stall for the sky to get just a little darker at dusk.



In Part II we’ll look at how two of the songs on Here Come Science actually serve as an example of how science changes over time to reflect new understandings based on verifiable data.

What is the value of a clear, dark, night sky?

It’s worth considering, because we are losing it. Just a few years ago, humanity crossed a momentous threshold, becoming for the first time a mostly urban species; over half of us live in the crystal lattices of light and pavement we call cities. And few cities are smartly and efficiently lit to allow any of the splendor of the night sky to show through.

Most people born today will never see the Milky Way. It’s just to dim to push through the light pollution. The number of visible stars drops precipitously as our settlements gets thicker and our obsession with “safely” lighting every corner of the nighttime world grows.

Our cities are glorious hives of constructed reality. Add a screen at the end of every human hand, and you have the makings of a reality complete, and completely without any reference to the natural world. Or to the rest of the universe.

Consider this photograph, taken by Dan Duriscoe of the National Park Service, out in Canyonlands National Park.

That bright path over the horizon is the core of the Milky Way galaxy, the gigantic swirling pinwheel of stars where our sun and its entourage of worlds resides. While the camera captures more than the human eye and brain can integrate, this photograph provides us a sense of what we are missing. The night sky at a truly dark spot on earth is a majestic, mind-blowing expanse. You could almost fall into it.

Here’s Mark Twain in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened—Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could a laid them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn’t say nothing against it, because I’ve seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them stream down. Jim allowed they’d got spoiled and was hove out of the nest.

Earth is a raft, in fact, and we’ve inadvertently lit that raft so well that there’s scarcely a corner of it dark enough for Huck and Jim to look up and wonder. And how do you measure that loss? How do you quantify the fact that most people will only ever see the world as a human-made thing, and what limits will that place on our future imaginations?

Good questions to ponder this week. It’s International Dark Sky Week. There’s a lot of work to be done to reclaim the night sky for the future. In some ways it’s an easy win…light pollution is a result of poor design and policy more than anything else. Smart lighting laws and well-designed fixtures (they already exist) make our world safer, more beautiful, and, to boot, a lot cheaper and less wasteful.

It costs a lot to make the stars invisible. So why bother doing it? Turn down the lights and let them shine.

As an outreach astronomer, and as a writer, the issue of communicating the sublime is near and dear. I can, if pressed, think of some famous movie scenes that are sublime in their own right. But sublime encounters with the natural world, instances when I felt privileged and connected to the earth and the cosmos, those moments are indelible, unforgettable, and they pop into mind almost daily. When I start to die, and my neurons start firing wildly, perhaps these memories will among those that flash before my eyes.  (As long as I’m not vaporized instantly by the Vogons.) If so, and if some other, far less sublime experiences are left out, I shall die pleased. For the moment, I feel lucky to have been alive to witness them.

1. The Owl

It was winter, and I was in the sixth grade. My friends and I went sledding at a wonderful–and crazy–spot called the Pump House, a water pumping shed in the middle of Kinn’s Woods, a county park of pine forest planted during the Depression by the CCC. The sled run began as a twisty offshoot of the main loop trail, getting wider and deeper until, in the last steep third, it was veritable bobsled run, with high walls. We sledded for several hours, until it got so dark that there was a good chance we wouldn’t be able to swerve between the trees without braining ourselves. There were different ways to get to the Pump House, depending on where in the development you lived, and my next-door-neighbor Karl and I broke off down our own trail home. The sky was still twilight blue, but the stars were coming out. As we crossed a glade of thinner trees, something caught our eye overhead…the unmistakable silhouette of an owl in flight, and right over our heads. Like, a few feet above us. The owl glided almost completely silently, all we heard was a subtle swoosh of air, though in my memory I almost feel like we felt it rather than heard it. It was big! Maybe a barred or great horned owl. We froze in our steps. It was a little startling, awe-inspiring, and unforgettable.

2. The Hermit Crabs

In August of 1997, I travelled to Cohasset, Massachusetts, for the wedding of my cousins Jason and Wendy. Cohaset is a little colonial harbor town, impossibly cute, and a great place to walk along the rocky coast. We stumbled upon a little inlet that I returned to several times, recording these encounters in my journal:

I’m back at the little inlet. The tide was rushing out to sea fast. Michelle [my sister] and I waded into the warm water and chatted. A few minutes later, I actually stopped to look at the rocks we were standing on and realized that everything was in motion! There were thousands, and thousands of hermit crabs. And fiddler crabs (or something like that) and starfish. The most diversity I’ve seen on the shore, one doesn’t see such things on sand beaches.

I recorded more of this experience a few days later, from a less diverse sandy beach on Nantucket:

At the Cohasset inlet, I observed very closely how hermit crabs examine their candidates for new homes. I dropped an empty shell near one, and it would scurry, grasp it with both claws to gauge its size. If the shell passed this test, it would examine the opening. I realized there was a deadly housing shortage in the inlet–there were no unoccupied shells that didn’t have holes in them, something the crabs would quickly discover in their examinations. I even saw a hermit crab that was unshelled get caught by a fiddler crab. It’s a tough market, and the hermit crabs are eager to look at any possibilities.

What I remember from that experience is something more. I remember the joy at our initial discovery of the hermit crabs. I remember what it felt like when they would scurry across our feet. The way I remember it, that’s what got us interested in scrutinizing the “rocks” in the first place. I remember the excitement of watching the crabs examine the empty shells, I was the Dianne Fossey of itinerant decapod crustaceans! I also remember that larger, stronger hermit crabs would get the first chance to examine a shell, something that people more serious about hermit crabs than I call vacancy chains.  I think about that experience all the time, and feel so lucky to have experienced it. It was like a window to a different world.

3. The Meteorite*

From my fourth blog post on Bicycle Astronomy, in March, 2009, titled Origin Story:

Astronomy has been part of my life for longer than it hasn’t. During high school, I’d host parties for my friends on the tennis court across the street, usually for the Perseids meteor shower in August. I’d show them Jupiter and it’s four largest moons through a terrible old 60mm telescope. One night, while walking my dog Maggie, I saw a meteor streak across the sky, something I’d seen many time before. But instead of fading out, it abruptly changed, went from white streak of light to a blue pinpoint, and changed course. Through the upper atmosphere, and probably very tiny and very hot, it drifted now, more slowly, in a straight line to the ground, disappearing over the horizon of trees. I was stunned and excited. I ran home to tell my father and step-mother, who were watching TV. “That’s nice, dear,” they said.

The common element in each experience was awe, wonder and something approaching glee. These were dopamine moments where I was simply thrilled to be alive and present, and I don’t think it’s coincidental that most such moments in my life have revolved around an encounter with a part of our natural world. I think it’s because, at those moments, we feel a part of the web of life on earth, or, in the case of astronomical events, part of what Carl Sagan called “the cosmic fugue”.

* Since it passed through the atmosphere and landed on the ground, it was a meteorite. The streak of light in the sky that ends with the vaporization of the rock is a meteor.

Though I’m fine with NASA astronauts or officials asking us to pray for Astronauts in peril (which is any astronaut on an active mission), I’d be less excited if NASA adopted that as their working procedure, say, for quality control of reentry heat shields on spacecraft. The detailed procedures and manuals the space agency is famous for are probably more reliable than appeals to a higher power.

But at a hearing of the House Science Committee last week, NASA’s chief, Charles Bowden, suggested just that response to advance warning of an approaching asteroid large enough to destroy a city, according to Reuters. “From the information we have, we don’t know of an asteroid that will threaten the population of the United States. But if it’s coming in three weeks, pray.”

Now, the discomfiting thing is that the information NASA has on asteroids about 165 feet in diameter, or thereabouts, is not very much. Less than 10% of that size are identified and tracked. (Larger asteroids are obviously easier to see, and we know about most of those, which is good, since their encounters with earth in the distant past seem to correspond to massive extinctions).

And even more discomfiting is the suggestion that given such short notice, we’d be left with no viable defense options. This is a problem. The concept of asteroid impact avoidance is not simple and there are few easy solutions (Russia’s recent talk about using nuclear weapons to “deflect” approaching asteroids might work, or might just as likely turn a shotgun slug into bird shot, potentially increasing the area impacted). We might consider a little more seriously funding research into systems that could save the entire planet. Just a thought, and I hope that’s what the Representatives took from the meeting. It’s certainly was Bowden’s main message.

But the appeal to a higher power by the chief administrator of the nation’s most visible science organization is disturbing as well, and unfortunate. And of course, it made headlines (religion always does in the US). NASA says to pray!

Bowden should have realized that there are people in this country (and probably in the House of Representatives) that would take “pray!” as a serious response, and some who would think it might even be better than actually trying to intervene. Some whackos will even think we should do nothing, and that an asteroid hitting Chicago, or unfortunate New Orleans, is just God’s way of saying that he opposes Gay Marriage. I understand Mr. Bowden meant his quip to underscore how unprepared we are, but surely there were better phrases to use.

Manuy Americans neither understand nor accept science as an evidence-based process distinct from, say, theology or astrology. Most Americans, heck, most people in government, don’t understand the difference between a hypothesis and a theory. Some states fund schools that teach creationism, either as an alternative theory (which it can’t be, as it doesn’t use an evidence-based process, though it pretends to in the form of intelligent design) or as the only explanation for how things are.

About half of Americans believe in the literal truth of the Bible (in spite of two different and contradictory creation myths and two different and also contradictory lineages for Jesus). For pete’s sake, Mr. Bowden, one poll suggested that 83% of American believe that God answers prayers. And you just suggested it as a good way to defend against asteroids! Do you think you might have chosen better words?

Scientists (and adminstrators of science organizations) who revert to talking about God, whether they mean a Higgs Boson, unified field theory, an impersonal universal life force, the physical parameters of the universe, or even as the dude with the white beard, gleefully killing people who masterbate or smell funny or occupy a piece of land he thinks some other people should occupy, really are not helping the already tenuous understanding of the difference between science and religion in the US. They should stop pandering to the masses and start using their moments in the spotlight to educate people about science, evidence, logic, and reality.