Science Up Front

Why I’ll Be an Astronomer (In My Next Life)

I’ve decided that in my next life I will be someone who is much better at math.

Now, I know that in the usual understanding of reincarnation one is not given a choice. Somehow or other one’s behavior in the present life determines, or at least strongly influences, what one will be in the next. This entails the possibility of coming back as a lesser being rather than as a greater one. Thus if I were a Buddhist or a Hindu I would have to acknowledge that certain sins about which I shall here be mute might – might – cause me to return one day as one of Josh Billings’s muels.

But I subscribe to neither of those long-established religions. Rather, I adopt the method of so many modern theologians – L. Ron Hubbard comes to mind, along with Oral Roberts and the Reverend Ike, all now, alas, unshuffled from the mortal coil – and simply make up my own, the chief difference being that I won’t be asking anyone for money.

So it is that I intend to be better at math next time around. Why? you ask.

I’m not all that bad at math now. I can do algebra, a little geometry, and I can name the six basic ratios of trigonometry, though I can’t remember which one is which. I even grasp, sort of, the basic idea of the differential calculus. But that’s it. And that’s not nearly enough for a physicist or an astronomer.
I went off to college with the intention of becoming an astronomer. I got through the first term of differential calculus fairly well and then floundered in the second, devoted to the integral calculus. I did not know how to deal with that sort of difficulty and so, evading the ignominy of failure, I changed my major to English.
But next time – next time I’m going to be an astronomer. The science writer Dennis Overbye had a nice piece in the New York Times a few weeks ago about being a physicist. What he writes about is chiefly the burning desire to know: to know what the universe is really like, how it originated, to what end it is bound. It is very hard to find out about such things, and the skills required are difficult to master.

It says much about the human animal that we have invented not only the idea of physics but also that of metaphysics. The prefix meta-, from Greek, in this case means something like transcending, more comprehensive. Metaphysics is about the fundamental nature of things, too, but in a different way. While a physicist observes, measures, theorizes, experiments, and – if he has done all that well – finds something to be actually true or not true of the physical world, the metaphysician mostly theorizes, and he does so in such a way that he can never be shown to be wrong. This is why the work of physicists tends to converge upon a single understanding of nature, while metaphysics consists of a hundred competing visions. The physicist asks, What is the world made of? and the answer (for now, at least) has to do with observable, measurable particles and energies. The metaphysician asks, Ah, but what is the real nature of things? and the answer comes to him in clouds of words.

So next time I’m definitely going to plunk myself down away out in the right-hand tail of the normal distribution of math ability. Here’s why: At the end of his piece Overbye quotes the physicist Vera Rubin, who has spent a lot of time trying to understand the nature of the mysterious “dark matter” that apparently makes up a good deal of the universe:
“I’m sorry I know so little; I’m sorry we all know so little. But that’s kind of the fun, isn’t it?”