Journal of the Institute for Astrophysics and the Hillbilly Blues
Somewhere around 1998, a book about Einstein appeared that (according to the evening news) detailed his relationships with women, showing that he was a fairly lousy husband and father.
The woman I was dating at the time said, “I knew it! Einstein was a PIG!”
“Well, in that case,” I thought to myself, “I guess objects with mass can travel faster than the speed of light.”
We split up a week or two later — purely coincidentally, as I recall.
The stars of the Big Dipper look nothing like a bear. But ancient cultures all over northern Asia — from Scandanavia to Siberia — did see them as a bear. Even the Greeks saw them that way. More strangely, a number of Native American cultures have traditions of seeing these stars as part of a bear narrative.
It’s hard to confirm, but the image of these very un-bear-like stars as a bear may well have crossed into North America with the migration of humans over the Siberia-Alaska land bridge during the last Ice Age. If so, this story, this metaphor, is one of the oldest acts of imagination we know.
Note, also, that one of the first signs that the genus Homo had begun to have a kind of imaginative life is the appearence of burials deliberately using bear iconography and bones to lay the dead to rest — the so-called “Bear Cult” of Europe.
I first read about it in an article in Sky and Telescope in the 1980s, but a good article is now online at The Discovery Channel, Canada.
My momma done told me … when I was a boy … that when she was growing up on a Wisconsin farm, the corn would grow so fast in late summer you could hear it grow — it was noisy. Being a suburban kid, and a born skeptic, I didn’t believe her at first. An April Fool’s joke?
She explained that at the height of the growing season, little fibrous strands on any given stalk of corn will snap on occasion, maybe once a week or so. But when you have a whole field of many thousands of stalks of corn, the field crackles like a campfire.
So, in that Wisconsin farmhouse, late at night in the dog days of summer during the Depression, with the windows of her bedroom wide open, she used to fall asleep listening to the corn grow … crackling, crackling, all night long.
This was a lesson in statistics: very rare events happen all the time. I thought of it years later, reading how radio astronomers map our galaxy.
The vast, star-forming clouds in our Milky Way Galaxy’s spiral arms are mostly made of hydrogen atoms — simply, one electron circling one proton. They both spin on their axes like tops, usually in parallel directions. But very rarely, the electron will flip and spin in the opposite (or anti-parallel) direction from its proton. When this happens, the atom emits a light wave at a wavelength of 21 centimeters — a radio frequency.
It only happens to a given hydrogen atom every 10 million years or so, but because our galaxy contains trillions of hydrogen atoms, it happens everywhere, all the time. So radio astonomers can map the galaxy, because the Milky Way softly hums with radio noise, all night, all day, for billions of years.
Sundogs (and Sun)
Astronomy has always been my first love, so people sometimes ask me what causes sundogs, rings around the sun or moon, light pillars, etc. I used to say, “Uh, it’s ice crystals.” That seemed to satisfy most people. But when I read the book “Rainbows, Halos, and Glories,” I learned what it really meant — how, exactly, ice crystals cause the various spots, arcs and rings you see in the sky from time to time. Suddenly the whole sky really came alive for me all over again.
Sundogs are the colorful spots you sometimes see on either side of the sun:
Sundog Sun Sundog
* O *
______________________________________ horizon
They’re caused by ice crystals shaped like hexagonal plates — like thick-ish stop signs, miniaturized. These little hex plates fall through the air with their faces parallel to the ground. So, picture billions of tiny quarters made of ice, all falling either “heads” or “tails”, not standing on the edge.
As they fall, the sun reflects off their faces and edges, and also passes through them making prismic colors (or not), depending on the angle of the sun and the angle from which you view them. There’s one particular angle that’s really sweet — an angle at which the sunlight passes horizontally right into the edge, along the plate’s face, and with the plate rotated “just so”. At that angle, the ice crystal passes a nice rainbow through itself.
Towards a certain direction in the sky, all the crystals that happen to be in this orientation “light up” that part of the sky. The direction works out to be about 22 degrees to the left and right of the sun:
* 22deg O 22deg *
_______________________________________
It turns out that various other angles are also “sweet” for different reasons. And ice crystals can have different shapes — for example, hexagonal cylinders, like pencils — which, in turn, creates a huge variety of wild arcs and rings and spots, which you can see if you are both lucky and alert.
Visit Les Crowley’s beautiful site on Atmospheric Optics or read “Rainbows, Halos, and Glories.”
There’s nothing explicitly about science in the songs on The Anthology of American Folk Music, even though I’ve named this science/music blog after an illustration on The Anthology’s cover.
The closest thing to an exception I can recall is Kelly Harrell’s “My Name is John Johanna,” a song about what a rotten place Arkansas is ( … alleged to be). After listing the horrors he witnessed there, the singer vows that if he ever sees Arkansas again, it’ll be through a telescope.
It’s a funny line to me, I suppose partly because I’m used to thinking of telescopes as a way of overcoming distance, not of enforcing it.
In the early stages of my … condition, I had a CD changer that held six CDs. I’d put the entire Anthology of American Folk Music on repeat, place a speaker next to my pillow (since the original 78s were in mono, one speaker would suffice), and just let The Anthology seep all the way deep down into my skull while I slept, soaking the reptilian core of my brainstem, all night long, every night, for months. After a while, I expected Amnesty International to break down my door.
The next CD I bought after The Anthology was Dock Boggs’ 1960’s recordings. I brought it home, put it on the stereo, and when “New Prisoner’s Song” came on, I burst into tears, just sobbed openly for a while … until I suddenly thought, “My musical tastes have CHANGED.” Maybe it was like admitting to yourself for the first time that you’re gay — realizing you’re someone other than who you thought you were. I mean, what should I tell the wife? The judge will surely side with HER! You should really be careful what music you mainline directly into your subconscious.
Years later, I hit the bunk in the army barracks at American Banjo Camp, at 2 in the morning, a little whiskey in me, after five hours of jamming and listening in on jams … fiddles, guitars, accordions, two doghouse basses, three dozen banjos. I slept like the dead, so deep and contented, drifting off with the sound-memory of old-time music so bright and benevolent and everlasting inside my head … Brilliancy Medley, June Apple, Sally in the Garden, Ducks on the Millpond, Whiskey Before Breakfast, Soldier’s Joy, Sail Away Ladies, Liberty, Devil’s Dream …
I hear an astronaut’s folk song
Of course, maybe it’s me … I can’t help but hear Pete Seeger’s “Well May the World Go (When I’m Far Away)” as at least two songs in one. Is the narrator of “Well May the World Go” about to die? Or is he an astronaut? After all, Seeger based the song on an old Scottish tune (maybe a sea chantey) called “Weel May the Keel Row,” which bids a bon voyage. Was Seeger thinking of death or space travel when he decided “The World” would somehow stay behind?
To my ears, “Well May the World Go” is a fine anthem for NASA’s manned space program. The song’s aims are like those of the program I thought I knew as a youngster – to reintroduce us to our own planet as a beautiful place, to collapse vast distances, to wish the world well. NASA still seems to want to be seen this way, and many of its employees are kids like me who never fully grew up. “Well May the World Go” still lurks somewhere in the gaps of NASA’s bureaucracy.
So why not really adopt the song as an official anthem? The trouble, from NASA’s point of view, would not just be that Pete Seeger has always been a proud resident of the blacklist and a sworn enemy of American missiles. The still bigger problem would be that the song is too apt. The manned space program has come to be haunted by Death, always there on the buffalo side of the coin. Many of us already think the risk to human lives and the measly return on investment make the manned space program a dinosaur.
The song could also be seen as reflecting the fact that the policy has turned its back on the world and its needs “when its far away.” Instead of needing a new song, the Bush administration, to make the obvious quip, should consider naming its outlandish Mars program “No Planet Left Behind.”
Chorus
Well may the world go
The world go, the world go
Well may the world go
When I’m far awayWell may the skiers turn
The swimmers churn, the lovers burn
Peace may the generals learn
When I’m far away(Chorus)
Sweet may the fiddle sound
The banjo play, the old hoe down
Dancers swing round and round
When I’m far away(Chorus)
Fresh may the breezes blow
Clear may the streams flow
Blue above, green below
When I’m far away(Chorus)
— Words by Pete Seeger/Stormking Music, Inc.
