Monday, January 14, 2008

Astrolomy

There is no such word.

You could be amazed by the vastness and beauty of the universe, and wish to explore it further. You may think it wonderful that we can predict the development and motion of immense celestial bodies with simple heretical scientific rules. You may also think that observation and measurement of other systems may give us lessons to be learned about the very earliest steps in the evolution of stars, planets, and of life itself. Your predictions may be conservative or radical, but they are verified or rejected depending upon the evidence.

Or you could be so narrow minded as to think that the relative visual positions and brightness of stars and comets as seen from a small backwater planet will individually affect specific human beings in ways that only higher powers can understand. You are aware that the visual recognition system of the human mind looks for patterns that can be matched to known objects, but your desperate search for supernatural guidance means that you attribute personal meaning to these patterns. You cannot see massive black holes and dark matter so you dismiss them from your charts. Your predictions are either worthless platitudes or simply wrong.

The words do not mix. The worlds do not mix. You choose one or the other.

2 comments:

Ann Cardus said...

Or one could be so narrow minded that one could ignore anything that one doesn't believe can be proven by current science methods. Alternatively one could allow people to believe what they believe and keep an open mind.

There's a ghost currently screwing up our broadband and I have an e-mail from Tiscali that proves it.

Rana said...

To paraphrase something I once read - it's good to be open minded, but don't be so open minded that your brain falls out.