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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 March 2017
Writings of the great thinkers abound with words expressing the great hold of astronomy. Plato said “astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.” When William Herschel (1738–1822) – the father of modern observational astronomy – received the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1781, the Society President and naturalist Joseph Banks, stated that “the treasures of heaven are well-known to be inexhaustible.” Astronomers themselves have spoken of their unquenchable curiosity and their drive and persistence to slake that curiosity. German astronomer Johann Schroeter (1745–1816) spoke of the “impulse to observe,” while another astronomer said the purpose of existence is to observe. When Herschel was once asked why he had become an astronomer (with the implication – familiar even today – that a life of observing is impractical, even useless) he simply said that when he looked up and saw the beauty and wonder of the skies he didn't understand why everyone wasn't an astronomer.
But then there is the counterpoint in the public mind, captured in Walt Whitman's (1819–1892) poem “When I Heard the Learned Astronomer”:
When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
The calculating astronomer misses the essence of the thing. As brilliant as he was, Whitman was wrong on this one. Most non-scientists think science is dry, fact-based, memorization – exact, or impenetrable. It is none of those things. Science is an endeavor of creative thought and activity, and it affects our everyday world by paving the way for technological inventions and by providing the groundwork for everything from weather forecasting to curing cancer. In its highest form it is no different from poetry.
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