Bad Astronomy PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing “Hoax” PHILIP C. PLAIT John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Bad Astronomy PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP Bad Astronomy PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing “Hoax” PHILIP C. PLAIT John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Copyright © 2002 by Philip C. Plait. All rights reserved. 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For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.Wiley.com 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 v vi CONTENTS 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 CONTENTS vii Recommended Reading 259 Acknowledgments 263 Index 265 INTRODUCTION love bad science fiction shows. Angry Red Planet, Voyage to the I 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 Robin- son—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—everything— to 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, 1 2 BAD ASTRONOMY 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 every- thing 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 astron- omy. It muddies the distinction between fantasy and science, be- tween 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. Unfor- tunately, 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 sys- tem? 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. INTRODUCTION 3 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 sci- ence 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 inaccurate copy. This is a real problem, with perhaps no easy solution, since many local news outlets simply cannot afford to keep as many reporters needed who are knowledgeable in the vast number of topics covered in the news. Not that I am sidestepping national news. I remember vividly watching the Today show on NBC in 1994. The Space Shuttle was in orbit, and it was doing an experiment, dragging a large, circular shield behind it. The idea was that the disk would clear out parti- cles in its wake like a snowplow pushing snow out of the way, leaving a cleared trail behind it.