Beware of Undead Astronomers

My bedtime reading last night was an old pop-science book by Isaac Asimov, about black holes and astronomy generally. He talks at some length about the size and age of the universe, and just before I stopped and went to sleep last night, I reached his discussion of Cepheid variables, which begins thus:

In 1784 a Dutch English astronomer, John Goodricke (1749-1786)-- a deaf-mute who died at the age of 21-- noted that the star Delta Caphei (in the constellation Cepheus) varies in brightness.

After his death in 1770, Goodricke became a vampire, and continued his astronomical career for a further 16 years, subsisting on the blood of unsuspecting post-docs. He made several discoveries of note during this time, but his career came to an unfortunate end in 1786, when he attempted to make some observations of sunspots.

(Goodricke was, in fact, deaf and dead at 21, though he was evidently neither mute nor born in 1749.)

While the real story is, sadly, less Tim Powers than what's in the book, it is a nice reminder of the importance of fact checking and copy editing. Timely, too, because I should be getting the copyedited manuscript of the book-in-production any day now. This promises to be an interesting experience.

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Did Isaac Asimov really subtract 1749 from 1786 and get a result of 21?

*collapses in tearful shock*

Goodricke was, in fact, deaf and dead at 21...

If the dead are not deaf, tearful shock is only the beginning...

By Pierce R. Butler (not verified) on 10 Apr 2009 #permalink

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John Archibald Wheeler and the Smoky Dragon
by
Jonathan Vos Post
====================================================

"It from bit," said John Archibald Wheeler,
giant of Physics, the last superhero
still standing, of Einstein, Feynman, Bohr;
S-Matrix master, mutating metaphor;
all collaborators, all decayed towards zero,
into the black hole of death, beyond any healer.

Ninety-six years when wormhole pneumonia
pulled him away from consensus space-time,
into the ultimate language of clarity,
collapsing at last to his own singularity,
the plutonium peak of the Matterhorn,
Manhattan Project, the rocket-base crime,
"a smoky dragon" -- spirits of ammonia.

"We are no longer satisfied with insights
only into particles, or fields of force,
or geometry, or even space and time."
His way with words, a deep internal rhyme,
blinding as an ultraviolet source,
and so he writes, calculates, and re-writes.

"Today we demand... some understanding
of existence itself," he said to all teachers,
stretching the metrics of Physics to breaking,
we recall, our hearts aching, star-quaking
geometrodynamics for creatures
beyond the horizon, an instrument landing.

"Black hole... teaches us that space can be crumpled
like a piece of paper, into an infin-
itesimal dot, that time can be extinguished,"
he lectured, in his black coat, distinguished,
"like a blown-out flame," our identical twin
aging faster, falling in, stressed spacesuit rumpled.

He wrote: "The laws of physics that we regard
as 'sacred,' as immutable, are anything
but." Not abstract. He made it astrophysics.
He dragged the game at last into metaphysics.
Starlight shining on his golden ring
Magician slams down the ace, last playing card.

Into the unified field, this is not tragic.
Fissioning atom, conceived as liquid drop,
beyond the cosmos, John Archibald Wheeler,
Physicist, prophet, poet, teacher, feeler,
"wave function of the universe" -- without stop;
"mass without mass" -- magic without magic.

1240-1435
14 Apr 2008
====================================================
Copyright (c) 2008 by Magic Dragon Multimedia.
All rights reserved Worldwide. May not be reproduced without permission.
May be posted electronically provided that it is transmitted
unaltered, in its entirety, and without charge.
====================================================