Editorial: Matters of Flesh

Mercury, May/June 2000 Table of Contents

©2000 Astronomical Society of the Pacific

As children we encounter a spectrum of experience, great knobs of "pleasure" and "pain" marking either end, and in between a truncated continuum characterized by fuzzy, child life of trying to get to the former and trying to avoid the latter. Our inability to recognize subtlety in life - in ourselves, in others, in nature enveloping us - brings us to jagged figures of doggy and kitty. It is not that our eyes do not see the squishy fleshiness of those and that which surrounds us, it is that our ability to interpret is simple, characterized by an infant geometry in which the sky rests at the top of the page and mother and daddy are sticks with circle heads.

In much the same way, we as thinking, scientific (read as both "curious" and "doubting") creatures have come to view the Universe around us. A few thousand generations ago, our conception of the Universe amounted to here and there, with no flesh on the bones of that bipolar cosmology. As technology developed and we as a species found ourselves not always running or hiding in sheer terror from larger predators, we could take some time to think abstractly. About the way the fire always climbs to the sky, always seeming to join with those other, distant fires floating in the dark nightness. Indeed, we came to a point when we could begin to add flesh to those stick bones.

Do you recall putting flesh on your stick people when you were a child? The sticks persisted for a while, "training wheels," so to speak, for your wobbly exercises in trying to capture reality. Those black Crayola lines that for so long had represented the whole person were now surrounded by red or blue or brown lines; you had added a layer of skin to that skeleton of sticks. To our ancestors, those distant fires in the sky - whether markers of the gods, cosmic dramas of acts lasting longer than we, or fires of celestial hunters celebrating the kill and spitting of mythic creatures - changed, took on "flesh," as it were, as more directed observations showed changes among the constancy above. New sky fires appeared, others were extinguished, some even moved among their flaming brethren. The Universe grew flesh.

Comparisons between the Sun during the brightness of day and those distant..."fires? Are they really fires or balls of flame like our Sun god above?"...came next, followed by the entrainment of careful observation and unrelenting curiosity by those chartered to decipher the world. Scientists were born, and using their skills and the technology available to them, they began to craft a more life-like Universe on the simple structure handed them from antiquity.

And we today are no different from our ancestors as we refine and sometimes even radically change the way we draw the Universe. Just twenty human generations ago, the telescope was pointed to the heavens, and what a shift in our perception that brought about! If we follow the evolution of our imaginings of the Universe from far in the past, we find that abstract thought and technology draw us forward - a slow, often unremarkable saunter punctuated by audacious leaps of a few of our kind. In our present era, we rely on photonic assaults on sophisticated detectors from virtually every portion of the electromagnetic spectrum; neutrino and gravitational-wave observatories are on-line and listening for sniggers and peeps, while particle colliders are adding experimental substance to our sketches of the Universe just after the Big Bang boomed. This is technology fleshing: we cannot forget the abstract notions of warped spacetime, M-Theory, and dark matter, for they add life and animation to the drawings.

Now all the guider lines are gone. Like our stick humans evolve eventually to the fullness-of-life characters of Whistler or Rockwell, our rendering of the Universe becomes more full and rich, and, we hope, closer to the genuine item. Will we ever capture the true grace and beauty of the cosmos in our models and theories? Perhaps, but a part of me hopes not. It is the act of observing, of thinking, of refining, that brings the Universe to life. Just like adding flesh to stick figures and planting thoughts and emotions and desires in those little scribbles' heads.

James C. White II, Ph.D., Editor

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