Conceptual Difficulties

I really want ideas that you can hold in your hand, that you can examine at your leisure and test and react to, I want things you can do and things you can see, events you can watch unfurl and initial conditions you can change and set how you want, and I want an unlimited amount of time to figure stuff out. But really, beyond experiments and things like that, I want to be able to take the concept of gravity or orbital dynamics and put my fingers around it, toss it up in the air and pull it apart and have it impart the facets of its existence into my brain without an equation or a lengthy explanation. I want something different from the way I have to learn things now.

It'd make explaining things easier as well. Instead of comparing a complex and abstract idea to something more simple and concrete, you could just hand students an idea and say, "Here. Take this, play around with it for an hour or so, come back tomorrow to check and see that you didn't miss anything, and then you can go on to the next thing." Actually, can we get on that, science? Just find some way to impart facts without pencils and papers and diagrams and graphs and extrapolations.

I just spent a couple of hours today doing something that I haven't done in a while: trying to understand something. Part of it was trying to dredge of memories of things that I'd thought I'd learned before, but most of it was staring and graphs pretending like I had never heard the words Galaxy Rotation Curve used together before, and doing algebra and avoiding unit conversions and thinking thoughts like, "Galaxies behave like fluids, right?" and "That's an elliptical orbit, so you can't use Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation, yeah?" There was also a lot of, "I hope I'm not wrong. Please don't let me be wrong. I'm going to look so dumb if I'm wrong. Oh, shhh...oot, I'm wrong."

Now, I can tell you the approximate number of miles in a light year and I can explain moon phases and seasons like no one's business. I also have a propensity to spout random facts which are, in general, scientifically or historically accurate. But people expect you to know everything about science when you work in a planetarium and science center and that's just not the case with me. And even with things I'm supposed to understand, like the general expected shape of rotation curves for galaxies, the observed shape of rotation curves for galaxies and why that implies the existence of Dark Matter, I don't really. I just have a phrase or two that will clear up a commonly answered question, and hope that there's not much more than that that's required of me.

Part of the problem with being an astronomy educator is that astronomy concepts are so abstract. You can't pick up a planet, you can't hold a star in your hand, and it's rather difficult to get a sample of an asteroid or a comet to study it. I mean, moon rocks might just be rocks, but they've got a substantial cost of shipping- that's why you have to go through a training on how to handle and treat these little pieces of outer space. Most of us haven't been off of Earth to see that the Sun actually floats out there in the void among the stars. No one's been out beyond our solar system, over to even the nearest star, to see the vast expanses of space that separate us from the things that twinkle when we turn away from the Sun.

I mean, think about it for a second. Imagine walking out of the room you're in and going to the next room. Now walk out of your house. Now out of your neighborhood. Do you still have a good concept of the distance you're traveling? Great, now go to the grocery store. Head over to the nearest mall. Now, can you imagine walking to the next town over? How about to the nearest city? Not driving- don't hop in your car and let the world pass you by. Actually walk the distances, let your mind get lost in the trees, realize how far away your eyes see on a clear day and realize how close that is. Now, the distance to the nearest big city for me is around eight miles. I don't have in my head a good concept of what eight miles is. The Moon, the nearest natural thing to us in space, is almost a quarter of a million miles away from us. I can't properly conceive of what a hundredth or a thousandth of that amount of space is. If I can't get a handle on it, how can I explain it to someone else?

So we use words and we use analogies- if the Earth was a size of a basketball, then a tennis ball would be the Moon, except the tennis ball, to be to scale, would need to be around 24 feet away. On that scale, the Sun would be the size of a house and it would be almost two miles away. If you shrunk the entire Earth down to the size of a basketball.

What. Even.

So yeah, I want something easier to understand, something I can actually wrap my head around and explain without props. Then again, nothing else has the same awe and wonder thing with it as contemplating the universe does, so I guess we take what we can get.