outer space life: February 2006 Archives

I've been having a lot of good ideas recently. Some of them are for art installations I'll never be able to do without the assistance of a gallerist, some of them are cool advertising tag-lines like "The Internet: A Window to Someone Else's Computer^(tm)," and some of them, like this one, are nebulous concepts that will dance around my brain in a haze until someone literally asks me point-blank, "Hey, Claire, what do you think is the key figurative parallel between science and literature?"

Which is why blogs exist, I guess.

Science writing is difficult, as difficult as literary writing. At its worst, it can become crippled by its own material, which is by definition too steeped in jargon to be communicable; it can hover awkwardly between being too dense for its readership and too simple for its provenance, the scientific community. Good scientific writing, however, builds a little dinghy that steers a clear, straight, and small path through a sea of information, clarifying those incredibly vast and arcane concepts to people who wouldn't intuitively understand them.

Popular science writing contains, however, some essentially literary gestures. Take this example, as cited in Alan Lightman's marvelous compendium, Best Science Writing 2005. For years, students of astronomy (myself only vaguely included) struggled with the concept of an expanding universe without a center. After all, this is a notion which violently bucks against reason. Cosmologists, however, came up with an image -- a metaphor, if you will -- which lightens the load: imagine that the Universe is an expanding balloon, and the stars and objects in space are dots drawn on the surface of this balloon. From any one star's vantage point, all the other objects in space moving away from it, but without any perceivable pattern. The more distant points would appear to be moving faster. Apart from being a devastatingly simple image that conveys more information that entire astronomy textbooks, it is also an elegant metaphor. It accomplishes the same things as the most successful of literary metaphors: a world of feeling and information, the very chaos of the known Universe, in one image.

If only Keats were so altruistic.

There are a great deal of things in this civilized world of ours which we accept as truth primarily out of laziness or convenience; in fact, it would not be radical to say that our fragile social universe is built upon such precepts. The structure of language, for example, is pretty much arbitrary. So is the practice of putting books vertically on bookshelves, which people did not really invent until two centuries after the arrival of printed matter. The necessity of eating meat? These things are cultural concepts -- they standardize us, and give us a sense of order in a deeply irrational world. Every once in a while, however, something comes along to remind us of just how capricious our taxonomies really are.

The recent discovery by a team of German astronomers of 2003 UB313, a ball of ice and rock hurtling through outer space, has become an unwitting example of such a force for conceptual change. The ice-ball, which was affectionately dubbed Xena by geeks -- errr, scientists -- has turned out to be considerably larger than the planet Pluto. It is, in fact, 30 times wider than the smallest planet in our Solar System.

More interestingly though, it also shares with Pluto pretty much all of the tenuous traits that make the latter a planet in the first place: being large enough to be shaped into a sphere by gravitational force, and being orbitally present on the outskirts of our Solar System. Scientists, faced with this information, are now stuck with an organizational problem -- they can either give Xena planet status (hopefully without its current warrior princess moniker), effectively revising our conception of the word planet, and in suit, our understanding of space; or they can demote Pluto from the Solar System, which would have a similar effect. In either case, we are looking down the barrel of a major paradigm shift.

Whether or not we are aware of it, the astronomical construction of a Solar System -- an organized entity which tidily observes the laws of physics as it hums peaceably in space -- has an iconic status. As children, we were all painstakingly taught, through one mnemonic device (and styrofoam diorama) after another, the firm order of the planets.

Anyone with a primary school education can tell you: nine planets, and nine planets only, the rest being just comets and space dust. Sure, our ninth planet was only discovered in the 1930s, but Pluto still has a firm grip on the cosmological conceptions of many people; I for one always thought of it as the final guardian of our segment of space, the bridge between us and the rest of the cosmos. While I am no scientist, to hear of it being taken away from our hallowed nine; something about it just seems so heretical.

That initial buck against Plutonic reclassification, however, is just an example of how quickly and genially we accept major cultural paradigms, and how such short-sightnedness can always return to freak us out. It was not so long ago, in the 1840s, that astronomers counted no fewer than 11 planets in our solar system. Pluto, too, has only been a planet for close to 80 years. The West has only been using the modern Gregorian calendar since the 1750s, for goodness sake. How quickly a society forgets what it once believed: we happily shed the pre-Pluto universe and moved onto the clear-cut nine planet universe. Now that Xena has come along, we are naturally all aflutter because, as far as we know, Pluto has been our ninth planet for all time.

Because it is the modern tendency to think of time only in terms of cripplingly short increments, it seems we are going to have a harder and harder time accepting and absorbing these kinds of changes, which, as technology frantically develops, are only going to start happening more and more. As a society, we cannot forget so quickly -- nor can we let ourselves be fazed by an altered solar system.

In his excellent book The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, inventor and theorist Stewart Brand puts it into perspective by pointing out that our galaxy rotates once in 220 million years. Earth itself has only been around for about 25 of those rotations, and life on Earth for 19. The human time frame, writes Brand, is narrower than that of life, of the planet, and of galaxies. Just like there was a time before we decided to include Pluto in our Solar System, there was an even longer time before we were even part of it. The galaxy, Pluto included, is far too old for us to talk authoritatively about it with our new science.

Talk about a paradigm shift.