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.\u00a0 It had a lot of stuff I wasn\u2019t interested in but it did have a few items that I was.\u00a0 There were copies of two books by C.S. Lewis; \u201cThe Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe\u201d and \u201cThe Screwtape Letters.\u201d\u00a0 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\u2019t currently interest me.<\/p>\n
But a third book that was in that box was a book on astronomy.\u00a0 It was called \u201cNeighbors of the Earth.\u201d\u00a0 It was a collection of articles from the astronomy magazine \u201cSky and Telescope\u201d that concerned the planets and other bodies that travelled around our star and made up the solar system.\u00a0 For a young boy many of these articles were somewhat opaque because spectrographs were beyond my level of scientific accomplishment.\u00a0 But there was plenty of things I could understand that changed a lot of the \u201cfacts\u201d I had about the planets that I had begun to accumulate from science fiction stories.\u00a0 The statement that, \u201cthe atmosphere of Venus consists largely of carbon dioxide\u201d seemed to put the kibosh on my idea of a planet colonized by humans working on farms raising tobacco and coffee.\u00a0 Later on, the surface temperature being 600 degrees Fahrenheit sealed any hopes of Venusians of any kind.\u00a0 Then, the article, \u201cIs There Vegetation on Mars?\u201d provided the death blow to my thoughts about Martians.<\/p>\n
But the book had many thought-provoking and for me enjoyable articles.\u00a0 An article called, \u201cInternal Structure of Jupiter and Saturn\u201d introduced me to the concept of \u201cmetallic solid hydrogen.\u201d\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 So, theories to explain this included either trying to convince themselves that Pluto\u2019s diameter was much larger than observed or that its density was enormously higher than any other body in the solar system.\u00a0 There was an \u201cexperiment\u201d with metal balls of different materials and coated with materials of differing reflectivity to show how \u201cspecular reflection\u201d could make a larger object look much smaller.\u00a0 I\u2019ll have to say it wasn\u2019t very convincing.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And this reminds me that our knowledge is always incremental and that we will never have all the answers.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s interesting to see how that one box of unwanted books seems to have informed many of my intellectual leanings.\u00a0 Sort of a personal butterfly effect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1263,3545],"tags":[1609,1267,5070,165],"class_list":["post-35121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","category-science","tag-astronomy","tag-photogs-corner","tag-pluto","tag-science"],"yoast_head":"\n