Images

“That day we first

Beheld the summit of Mount Blanc, and grieved

To have a soulless image on the eye

Which had usurped upon a living thought

That never more could be.”

(Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book Sixth, lines 524-528)

Images. So much of amateur astronomy is all about images, whether they be on the observer's retina via an eyepiece, or digital data from photons collected by a camera. Whenever I give a talk to the public, I will almost inevitably toss out the following question to the audience. "Astronomy is the most visual of all the sciences. Why is that?" The answers can be quite interesting, but my own take on the question is that astronomy is the only science where we can't actually touch the subject matter, put it in a laboratory, or run experiments on it. (Note: I do not consider data from space probes within our solar system to be astronomy, but rather planetology.) 

As to the above quotation from Wordsworth. About 10 years ago, I decided I just had to read his Prelude - a daunting task if ever there was one. It was to me mostly forgettable, but this one passage managed to burn itself into my brain. I felt like the poet was speaking directly to me.

Now I've always been a voracious reader, for as long as I can remember. Way back in grade school, the library was one of my favorite places to be. And as soon as I had pocket money, I was forever buying paperback books (mostly science fiction) as fast as I earned any. But from the very beginning, I always hated most illustrations. I wanted my own impressions of what something looked like to prevail, and it's a curious fact that images trump our own imaginations almost every time. I might have built up a picture of what John Carter of Mars ought to look like, but a single cover illustration could pop my mental image like a soap bubble. And the victorious illustration always seemed to be so damned inferior to what I had thought up.

This was especially true for one of my all-time favorite books, The Lord of the Rings. Here my imagination was paramount, and for a long time was unchallenged by anyone else's ideas. (I read the trilogy for the first time in 1968, and have re-read it pretty much annually since then.) The movies came out decades later, and I resolutely avoided even glancing at any pictures from them. If I happened to be in a movie theater when a trailer for one of them came on, I'd shut my eyes until it was over.

Martian landscape, by Chesley Bonestell

So when I read those lines from Wordsworth, I knew that he and I shared this same trait. What we imagined was almost inevitably superior to the dull reality. Take our own Solar System. Who in their right mind would ever choose the actual Mars over Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom? Or the real world Venus over C.S. Lewis' Perelandra? Or any planet, for that matter, over the unparalleled imagination of R. Frank Paul?

No contest, right? And the same goes for the galaxy. Back in the 1960s, when I was reading that mountain of SF novels, it was so easy to picture one's self (or some future version of me) flitting from star to star in my spaceship (which always seemed to resemble a WWII German V-2 rocket bomb), finding a conveniently breathable atmosphere on whatever planet I touched down on, and conversing with untold numbers of intelligent alien species. But now we must sadly admit defeat before the iron universal speed limit of 186,000 miles per second, and the omnipresence of lethal cosmic radiation.

Science ruins everything!