Pale Blue Dot

Honestly, I have two more book reviews in my drafts and nothing else.  I figure I should break things up a bit.  I really like this image and the quote that goes along with it.  Enjoy!

Look again at that dot.  That's here.  That's home.  That's us.  On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you've ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.  The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known

-Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

I also think this quote pairs nicely with one from Sandman, spoken by Destruction:

I like the stars.  It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend.

-Destruction, Brief Lives

Sure makes you feel small

Cecilia Payne

When you study physics, every great discovery comes attached to a name.  The lessons are almost as much about the history of the field as they are about physics itself.  You learn about Schrodinger's Equation (and cat), Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Einstein's theory of relativity, Feynman's diagrams, Kepler's laws, Galileo's equations, the Copernican model of the universe, Bohr's model of the atom, Newton's laws, Maxwell's equations, etc.

But you've probably never heard of Cecilia Payne.

I hadn't, until I stumbled across this article about her.  Cecilia was born in Britain in 1900 and came to America to study astronomy at Harvard in 1923.  At the time, it was thought that the sun had roughly the same composition as the Earth, but no one knew the exact proportions of the elements.  Ms. Payne was tasked with determining this and used the latest advances in ionization theory and spectral analysis to do so.  She concluded that the sun is, in fact, mostly hydrogen.

Her conclusion was controversial at the time.  It flew in the face of the accepted wisdom that the sun was mostly made of heavy metals, just like the Earth.  She was shunted into a different field and it was a few years before the work she had done was verified and finally accepted.  She continued to contribute to astronomy in the field of variable stars (stars whose brightness, as seen from the Earth, appears to vary over time) and wrote several books.

As a side note, Cecilia was the first person to earn a PhD in astronomy from Harvard.  Not just the first woman, the first person.

So why don't we learn about her?  Why was she never mentioned in any of my physics classes?  We did an experiment similar to her's in a lab course.  Her name should have been included in that experiment description, but it wasn't.  I thought she might have been discussed in the actual astrophysics course, which I never took.  A scan of my boyfriend's astrophysics text book debunked this theory.  It contains a 20-page section on Cecilia Payne's work.  Her name isn't mentioned once.

I wanted to write about her here, get the word out.  She deserves some recognition.  She should be as famous as Newton, Galileo, or Einstein for discovering such a crucial and fundamental fact about our universe.  But she's not.

Note:  Apparently it is International Women's Day.  I didn't know that when I wrote this post, but it seems fitting.  If you can think of any other women who don't get enough love, let me know and I'll write about them.  This was fun.