A queen hangs upside down. She has grown accustomed to the
company of a hunter mistakenly killed by a goddess and an age-old
dragon, protector of golden apples and the Golden Fleece.
This strange pseudo-realm where she exists was first referred to
as “the heavens,” then unfurled after several ages into
a “sky,” and now the poor thing is called
“ever-expanding space.”
Space exploration has become the neglected middle child of the
sciences because it seems to have nothing at all to do with human
affairs.
But once you consider that all the elements that went into the
creation of earth ““ substances vital to life and human beings
such as oxygen and carbon”“ came forth from supernovas or the
fusion reactions of stars, the cosmos go from being light years
away to literally under your skin and in your lungs.
A sense of curiosity about astronomy is nothing new for mankind,
but what is novel is the startling progress we have made in this
field in the past few years.
Last week, astronomers huddled over the controls of the Hubble
Telescope in Baltimore, looked 9 billion years into the past and
reported sightings of dark energy, an antigravity force to which we
attribute approximately 90 percent of the universe, according to
The New York Times.
During the same week, researchers also started considering
blowing up stars (essentially manufacturing supernovas) to study
particle acceleration.
Since dark energy is said to make up a majority of the universe
and supernovas are held responsible for basically everything else,
these studies are essentially a deep study of our origins.
These cosmic particles should continue to be researched. This is
philosophy in its physical form trying very hard to answer the
question, “Where do we come from?”
Like many other students here at UCLA, I sat through year after
year of biology, chemistry and other science classes before walking
through the Bruin gates. But also like many Bruins, I suspect, I
never took a serious astronomy class.
“I watched Star Wars once,” said Jeff Lyu, a
second-year history and political science student.
I suppose no one is ever really taught astronomy as a core
science, but this being the final frontier, it should be more
prevalent in our education.
“It is not really related to practical life,” says
Alex Kim, a third-year political science student. “It
doesn’t lead to trendy jobs like doctors or biotechnologists,
and it doesn’t win much attention from the public or the
media.”
How can we saunter through existence, thinking about vascular
tissues, the Loop of Henle or spectroscopy without ever lifting our
gazes to our origins?
Even the UCLA Planetarium is becoming a relic with its 1973 sky
projector and faded seats.
A general lack of astro-knowledge among the populace makes it
difficult to receive funding from citizens and politicians for
projects involving outer space.
When you hear terms such as “binary stellar systems”
or “globular clusters,” the reaction is a crinkled
forehead, raised eyebrows and a mental barrier that blocks out all
further knowledge of the cosmos.
According to the American Astronomical Society, this branch of
science suffered significantly in Congress’s budget proposal
for the upcoming fiscal year, so it isn’t just us who are
mollified into a dazed confusion by astrophysics. Apparently, most
of Capitol Hill is too.
So while our representatives are spending millions on wars we
don’t need or financing pork all over the country, it proves
to be an almost Herculean challenge for them to seriously consider
granting funds for astronomical research.
Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall” speaks of a
fictional sky that saw stars once in a thousand years. The vision
was so much to behold that it drove men mad.
We have the stars to ourselves every night, but they stand
aloof, the dragons of our imaginations, the queens of our
stories.
It’s strange that we have a few telescopes peeking into
their hearts, but the rest of us turn our backs on them.
Send cosmic energy to rjoshi@media.ucla.edu. E-mail general
comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.