Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan [145]
Another reaction to Percival Lowell’s writings can be gleaned from the address of James Keeler at the dedication of the Yerkes Observatory:
It is to be regretted that the habitability of the planets, a subject of which astronomers profess to know little, has been chosen as a theme for exploitation by the romancer, to whom the step from habitability to inhabitants is a very short one. The result of his ingenuity is that fact and fancy become inextricably tangled in the mind of the layman, who learns to regard communication with the inhabitants of Mars as a project deserving serious consideration (for which he may even wish to give money to scientific societies), and who does not know that it is condemned as a vagary by the very men whose labors have excited the imagination of the novelist. When he is made to understand the true state of our knowledge of these subjects, he is much disappointed and feels a certain resentment towards science, as if it had imposed upon him. Science is not responsible for these erroneous ideas, which, having no solid basis, gradually die out and are forgotten.
The address of Simon Newcomb on this occasion contains some remarks which apply generally, if a little idealistically, to the scientific endeavor:
Is the man thus moved into the exploration of nature by an unconquerable passion more to be envied or pitied? In no other pursuit does such certainty come to him who deserves it No life is so enjoyable as that whose energies are devoted to following out the inborn impulses of one’s nature. The investigator of truth is little subject to the disappointments which await the ambitious man in other fields of activity. It is pleasant to be one of a brotherhood extending over the world in which no rivalry exists except that which comes out of trying to do better work than anyone else, while mutual admiration stifles jealousy … As the great captain of industry is amoved by the love of wealth and the politician by the love of power, so the astronomer is moved by the love of knowledge for its own sake and not for the sake of its application. Yet he is proud to know that his science has been worth more to mankind than it has cost … He feels that man does not live by bread alone. If it is not more than bread to know the place we occupy in the universe, it is certainly something that we should place not far behind the means of subsistence.
AFTER READING through the publications of astronomers three-quarters of a century ago, I felt an irresistible temptation to imagine the 150th Anniversary Meeting of the American Astronomical Society—or whatever name it will have metamorphosed into by then—and guess how our present endeavors will be viewed.
In examining the late-nineteenth-century literature, we are amused at some of the debates on sunspots, and impressed that the Zeeman effect was not considered a laboratory curiosity but something to which astronomers should devote considerable attention. These two threads intertwined, as if prefigured, a few years later in G. E. Hale’s discovery of large magnetic field strengths in sunspots.
Likewise we find innumerable papers in which the existence of a stellar evolution is assumed but its nature remains hidden; in which the Kelvin-Helmholtz gravitational contraction was considered the only possible stellar energy source, and nuclear energy remained entirely unanticipated. But at the same time, and sometimes in the same volume of the Astrophysical Journal, there is acknowledgment of curious work being done on radioactivity by a man named Becquerel in France. Here again we see the two apparently unrelated threads moving through our few-years snapshot of late-nineteenth-century astronomy and destined to intertwine forty years later.
There are many related examples—for instance, in the interpretation of series spectra of nonhydrogenic elements obtained at the telescope and pursued in the laboratory. New physics and new astronomy were the complementary sides of the emerging science of astrophysics.
Accordingly, it is difficult