When I was about ten, I got my hands on a box full of books that came from the library of a New Jersey Catholic High School in the Philadelphia area. It had a lot of stuff I wasn’t interested in but it did have a few items that I was. There were copies of two books by C.S. Lewis; “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and “The Screwtape Letters.” The first book whetted my appetite for fantasy and the latter was an oddity that combined a comedic take on the devil with theology that didn’t currently interest me.
But a third book that was in that box was a book on astronomy. It was called “Neighbors of the Earth.” It was a collection of articles from the astronomy magazine “Sky and Telescope” that concerned the planets and other bodies that travelled around our star and made up the solar system. For a young boy many of these articles were somewhat opaque because spectrographs were beyond my level of scientific accomplishment. But there was plenty of things I could understand that changed a lot of the “facts” I had about the planets that I had begun to accumulate from science fiction stories. The statement that, “the atmosphere of Venus consists largely of carbon dioxide” seemed to put the kibosh on my idea of a planet colonized by humans working on farms raising tobacco and coffee. Later on, the surface temperature being 600 degrees Fahrenheit sealed any hopes of Venusians of any kind. Then, the article, “Is There Vegetation on Mars?” provided the death blow to my thoughts about Martians.
But the book had many thought-provoking and for me enjoyable articles. An article called, “Internal Structure of Jupiter and Saturn” introduced me to the concept of “metallic solid hydrogen.” The idea that a gas could be turned into a solid metal was so exotic to my juvenile understanding of science that it probably sparked my first wishes to understand the mysteries of chemistry.
But looking at the book recently, I noticed that I never was very interested in the mysteries that surrounded the relatively recently discovered planet Pluto. Even back then, the fact that Pluto seemed much too small to account for the perturbations in the orbit of Neptune was very disturbing to the astronomical community. So, theories to explain this included either trying to convince themselves that Pluto’s diameter was much larger than observed or that its density was enormously higher than any other body in the solar system. There was an “experiment” with metal balls of different materials and coated with materials of differing reflectivity to show how “specular reflection” could make a larger object look much smaller. I’ll have to say it wasn’t very convincing. And this made me think of all the current theories using dark matter and dark energy that are being used to explain measurements that defy the current models of how the universe works. And this reminds me that our knowledge is always incremental and that we will never have all the answers.
But it’s interesting to see how that one box of unwanted books seems to have informed many of my intellectual leanings. Sort of a personal butterfly effect.
