Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax&quot

281 Pages·2002·3.33 MB·English

by  Philip C. Plait

Bad
Astronomy
Misconceptions and Misuses
Revealed, from Astrology to
the Moon Landing "Hoax"
PHILIP C. PLAIT
Bad
Astronomy
Bad
Astronomy
Misconceptions and Misuses
Revealed, from Astrology to
the Moon Landing "Hoax"
PHILIP C. PLAIT

CONTENTS
Introduction 1
PART I Bad Astronomy Begins at Home 9
1 The Yolk's on You: Egg Balancing and the Equinox 11
2 Flushed with Embarrassment: The Coriolis Effect and Your Bathroom 21
3 Idiom's Delight: Bad Astronomy in Everyday Language 28
PART II From the Earth to the Moon 37
4 Blue Skies Smiling at Me: Why the Sky Is Blue 39
5 A Dash of Seasons: Why Summer Turns to Fall 48
6 Phase the Nation: The Moon's Changing Face 57
7 The Gravity of the Situation: The Moon and the Tides 64
8 The Moon Hits Your Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie: The Big Moon Illusion 77
PART III Skies at Night Are Big and Bright 87
9 Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star: Why Stars Appear to Twinkle 89
10 Star Light, Star White: Stars of Many Colors 97
11 Well, Well: The Difficulty of Daylight Star Sighting 103
12 The Brightest Star: Polaris-Just Another Face in the Crowd 111
13 Shadows in the Sky: Eclipses and Sun-Watching 116
14 The Disaster that Wasn't: The Great Planetary Alignment of 2000 125
15 Meteors, Meteoroids, and Meteorites, Oh My!: The Impact of Meteors and
Asteroids 133
16 When the Universe Throws You a Curve: Misunderstanding the Beginning of
It All 142
PART IV Artificial Intelligence 153
17 Appalled at Apollo: Uncovering the Moon-Landing Hoax 155
18 Worlds in Derision: Velikovsky vs. Modern Science 174
19 In the Beginning: Creationism and Astronomy 187
20 Misidentified Flying Objects: UFOs and Illusions of the Mind and Eye 202
21 Mars Is in the Seventh House, But Venus Has Left the Building: Why
Astrology Doesn't Work 212
PART V Beam Me Up 221
22 Hubble Trouble: Hubble Space Telescope Misconceptions 223
23 Star Hustlers: Star Naming for Dummies 236
24 Bad Astronomy Goes Hollywood: The Top-Ten Examples of Bad Astronomy
in Major Motion Pictures 245
Recommended Reading 259
Acknowledgments 263
Index 265
INTRODUCTION
love bad science fiction shows. Angry Red Planet, Voyage to the Bottom of
the Sea, UFO, all those old TV shows and movies in black and white or living
color. I grew up on them. I'd stay up late watching TV, sometimes long after my
folks would normally let me. I remember clearly coming home from third grade
and asking my mom for permission to watch Lost in Space. I worshipped that
show, Robot, Dr. Smith, Jupiter 2, and all. I wanted to wear a velour,
multicolored V neck sweater, I had a crush on Judy Robinson-the whole nine
yards.
Sure, I liked the good ones too. Five Million Years to Earth and The Day the
Earth Stood Still were favorites of mine back then, and they still are. But the
important thing to me wasn't that they were good or bad, or even if they made
sense-I remember an Italian flick about a voyage to Venus that might have been
written by Salvador Dali on acid. What was important was that they had aliens
and rocket ships.
I would spend long hours as a child pretending to ride a rocket to other planets. I
always knew I'd be a scientist, and I was pretty sure I wanted to be an
astronomer. Those movies didn't discourage me because of their bad science;
they inspired me. I didn't care that it's silly to try to blast a conventional
chemical rocket to another star, or that you can't hear sounds in space. All I cared
about was getting out there, and if I could do it by watching ridiculous movies,
then so be it. I would have given anything-everythingto be able to step on board
a spaceship and be able to see a binary star up close, or cruise through a nebula,
or go out through the plane of our Galaxy and see it hanging in the sky, faint,
ominous, luminous, against a velvet canvas of blackness so dark you can hardly
convince yourself that your eyes are open.
Nowadays it would be a bit harder for me to give up everything to take such a
ride. Maybe I would so my daughter could someday ... but that day is not yet
here. We're still stuck here on the Earth, more or less, and the only way we can
see distant vistas is either vicariously through the eye of the telescope or through
the eye of a movie director. One of those eyes, perhaps, is a bit more clearly
focused than the other. Despite my childhood yearnings, as an adult I can wish
that movies did a better job of portraying astronomy (and astronomers) to the
public.
The movies may be inspiring, which is their most important job as far as I'm
concerned, but there is a downside to the bad astronomy. It muddies the
distinction between fantasy and science, between what is only pretend and what
can really happen. Movies can portray the make-believe so realistically that the
line gets blurred. It's fair to say that most people don't understand all that much
about how space travel, for example, really works. Space travel is complicated,
difficult, and relies heavily on unfamiliar physics.
Movies, however, make it look easy. Just get in your ship and go! All you have
to do is watch out for the stray meteor shower or alien starship and everything
should work out pretty well. Unfortunately, it doesn't work out that way in the
real universe. If it did, we'd have colonies on Mars and the other planets by now.
I've given talks to audiences about movies and astronomy, and the question
almost always arises: why aren't we on the Moon now? Why haven't we built
starships, or at least colonized the solar system? Sometimes these are honest
questions, and sometimes they are asked with an edge of impatience, as if the
people asking the question are concerned that the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration engineers aren't as up to speed as Scotty from Star Trek.
The film industry makes a big impression on people and, as the scenes play over
and over again, they worm their way into our brains. Movies show space travel
all the time, but they show it incorrectly, and so it doesn't surprise me that the
majority of the viewing public has the wrong impression about how it really
works.
If movies were the only purveyors of scientific inaccuracies, there would hardly
be a problem. After all, it's their job to peddle fantasy. The problem is, it doesn't
stop there. The news media's job is to report the facts clearly, with as much
accuracy as possible. Unfortunately, this isn't always the case. In general,
national media do a fine job; most TV networks, newspapers, and magazines
have enough money to maintain at least a small staff of experienced science
journalists who do a good job reporting the news. Local news is more often the
culprit in misrepresenting science. Local reporters may be inexperienced in the
technical jargon and tools of science, and so will sometimes write amazingly