A queen hangs upside down. She has grown accustomed to the company of a hunter mistakenly killed by a goddess and an age-old dragon, protector of golden apples and the Golden Fleece.
This strange pseudo-realm where she exists was first referred to as “the heavens,” then unfurled after several ages into a “sky,” and now the poor thing is called “ever-expanding space.”
Space exploration has become the neglected middle child of the sciences because it seems to have nothing at all to do with human affairs.
But once you consider that all the elements that went into the creation of earth – substances vital to life and human beings such as oxygen and carbon– came forth from supernovas or the fusion reactions of stars, the cosmos go from being light years away to literally under your skin and in your lungs.
A sense of curiosity about astronomy is nothing new for mankind, but what is novel is the startling progress we have made in this field in the past few years.
Last week, astronomers huddled over the controls of the Hubble Telescope in Baltimore, looked 9 billion years into the past and reported sightings of dark energy, an antigravity force to which we attribute approximately 90 percent of the universe, according to The New York Times.
During the same week, researchers also started considering blowing up stars (essentially manufacturing supernovas) to study particle acceleration.
Since dark energy is said to make up a majority of the universe and supernovas are held responsible for basically everything else, these studies are essentially a deep study of our origins.
These cosmic particles should continue to be researched. This is philosophy in its physical form trying very hard to answer the question, “Where do we come from?”
Like many other students here at UCLA, I sat through year after year of biology, chemistry and other science classes before walking through the Bruin gates. But also like many Bruins, I suspect, I never took a serious astronomy class.
“I watched Star Wars once,” said Jeff Lyu, a second-year history and political science student.
I suppose no one is ever really taught astronomy as a core science, but this being the final frontier, it should be more prevalent in our education.
“It is not really related to practical life,” says Alex Kim, a third-year political science student. “It doesn’t lead to trendy jobs like doctors or biotechnologists, and it doesn’t win much attention from the public or the media.”
How can we saunter through existence, thinking about vascular tissues, the Loop of Henle or spectroscopy without ever lifting our gazes to our origins?
Even the UCLA Planetarium is becoming a relic with its 1973 sky projector and faded seats.
A general lack of astro-knowledge among the populace makes it difficult to receive funding from citizens and politicians for projects involving outer space.
When you hear terms such as “binary stellar systems” or “globular clusters,” the reaction is a crinkled forehead, raised eyebrows and a mental barrier that blocks out all further knowledge of the cosmos.
According to the American Astronomical Society, this branch of science suffered significantly in Congress’s budget proposal for the upcoming fiscal year, so it isn’t just us who are mollified into a dazed confusion by astrophysics. Apparently, most of Capitol Hill is too.
So while our representatives are spending millions on wars we don’t need or financing pork all over the country, it proves to be an almost Herculean challenge for them to seriously consider granting funds for astronomical research.
Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall” speaks of a fictional sky that saw stars once in a thousand years. The vision was so much to behold that it drove men mad.
We have the stars to ourselves every night, but they stand aloof, the dragons of our imaginations, the queens of our stories.
It’s strange that we have a few telescopes peeking into their hearts, but the rest of us turn our backs on them.
Send cosmic energy to rjoshi@media.ucla.edu. E-mail general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.