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illumination of the mind
Astronomy is a special science.
As the French mathematician Henri
Poincaré observed more than a century
ago, it was astronomy that inspired the
origins of science in general. In ancient
times, people observing the night sky
saw that its “multitude of luminous
points is not a confused crowd wander-
ing at random, but a disciplined army,” he noted. Such obser-
vations provided a clue that nature’s chaos concealed order
that humans could discern. It was astronomy, in other words,
that taught humankind that the world obeys natural laws
that people are capable of discovering.
“Under heavens always overcast and starless, the Earth
itself would have been for us eternally unintelligible,”
Poincaré wrote in The Value of Science. “The stars send us
not only that visible and gross light which strikes our bodily
eyes, but from them also comes to us a light far more subtle,
which illuminates our minds,” he observed. “Astronomy …
has given us a soul capable of comprehending nature.”
That lesson is sometimes lost in the glare of hoopla surrounding the dramatic revelations of telescopes small and
large, from Galileo’s handheld tube to the orbiting observatory named for Edwin Hubble. Still, the 400th anniversary
of Galileo’s telescope fully warrants this year’s International Year of Astronomy celebrations. Galileo’s work, as
the award-winning science writer Dava Sobel articulates
so clearly (Page 16), opened science’s eyes to the vast diversity of wondrous phenomena that telescopes can reveal. In
that tradition, astronomers today contemplate truly cosmic
questions about the universe’s origin, its contents, its future,
and the prospects for life beyond Galileo’s home planet, as
Ron Cowen describes (Page 22). Solutions to some of those
mysteries may come from the future successors to Galileo’s
original technology, surveyed by Janet Raloff (Page 30).
All this attention to astronomy stems from its attachment
to the curiosity infused in the human spirit, not from practical uses like those expected from other sciences. Not that
astronomy is useless — historically, it has been fertile with
applications, from aiding the earliest calendar makers to
navigation guides for ships in the dark. But mostly astronomy’s usefulness is not its applications, but its inspiration.
“Astronomy is useful,” Poincaré wrote, “because it raises us
above ourselves.”
—Tom Siegfried, Editor in Chief
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