At public viewing events, the members of the local astronomy club who attend and set up their scopes and entertain guests; each tends to adopt a routine; showing images on a laptop gathered from their scopes, looking at a particular galaxy or globular cluster, a planetary or gaseous nebula, a planet or the moon, if lucky there is a comet or nova or supernova to direct the viewing public’s attention, etc. In part, the “routine” is due to the constraints of allowing persons queued so as not to make them wait too long to get their chance to see the offered celestial object and a view of the same.
My shtick involves providing views of Sirius in the spring and Vega in the summer and fall, as seen through an optical spectroscope attached to the observing end of the scope (8” SCT) with an eyepiece inserted. These two stars provide the noticeable absorption (dark) lines in the blue end of the spectrum, with a fainter line in the red end of the spectrum, indicative of the element hydrogen. When providing these views, I engage in the following spiel.
What follows is long. In the experience at the public viewing events, I will selectively include some of the parts of the following; especially as subsequent viewers overhear what was said to previous observers.
What follows is what I do and say with mature viewers. If the viewer is a child, as the child is viewing, I might say the following things to a parent with the child so that the parent can repeat later what s/he thinks his/her child might understand and appreciate. If the child is very young, I suffice with attempting to help her/him see the pretty colors and to sense the excitement of her/his parent/sibling.
Again, what follows is what I invariably do with mature observers.
I affirm/console each observer by telling her/him that it takes time to find the object in the eyepiece. (To aid each in finding the view in the eyepiece, I will use a faint red light to illumine the eyepiece.) I ask each to let me know when they see something in the eyepiece. Invariably, because what they are looking at is a very colorful object (a horizontal spectrum), each knows when s/he is seeing the desired object.
I allow the person observing to observe as long as s/he desires. I invite her/him to keep observing. I assure her/him that s/he is not inconveniencing others from getting a view, because, when each of them approaches the eyepiece, I will give each the same suggestion; to view as long as s/he wishes to view. At some point, I will reaffirm the appropriateness, to each subsequent viewer, of this invitation, by pointing out to her/him that they are viewing with the combined processing tools of their eye and brain. Because of this, the longer they look, the more they are able to see as the brain processes and saves and augments the views gained.
Next, I ask each observer to tell me what s/he sees. I explicitly tell her/him not to tell me what they heard someone else say or what they have learned in school or read in a book or on a webpage. I repeat to each that I want them to tell me, in her/his own words, what s/he sees in the eyepiece. I learned this technique from an art teacher teaching his students to draw. Immediately, I sense each person becoming more interested in what s/he is looking at/for; as if s/he is on a special journey unique from what others have observed…which, of course…it is and s/he is. The retina of her/his observing eye and the electro-chemical circuitry of her/his nerves and brain is feeding on light which no one else has ever seen.
Eventually each will say s/he sees a rainbow or a splotch of color. I ask her/him to tell me if the rainbow is horizontal or vertical. Because I have the spectroscope so arranged, the view is always horizontal, from blue on the left to red on the right. I then ask what else s/he sees. Sometimes an individual will independently notice and mention seeing dark absorption lines. More often then not, I need to guide each to this awareness. I do this by asking if s/he sees dark lines running vertically within the horizontal spectrums. Invariably, each acknowledges seeing these. I ask them to tell me how many they see and in what part of the color spectrum they appear. Each does so.
And then, I ask each to keep observing while I talk.
“A couple centuries ago, three persons named Kirchoff and Fraunhofer and Bunsen were responsible for creating an instrument called a spectroscope and attaching it to telescopes. By doing this, persons came to understand what the view of stellar spectra was telling them. You are looking through just such a spectroscope.
“What they came to understand was that the dark lines told them what elements, atomic chemical elements, are in that star. The original users of spectroscopes made this connection between the dark lines and the atomic elements because of what they had seen in a laboratory when, through a process called hydrolysis in which electricity is applied to water, they collected hydrogen gas and sealed that gas in a glass tube and then applied heat or electricity to that tube which caused the hydrogen to glow. Looking at that glow through a laboratory spectroscope, they then saw vertical colored lines. The colors of those lines were identical to the positions in the colored spectrum of the dark lines you are seeing. And in that moment, they knew that what they were seeing was an indication of the presence of hydrogen in that star (Vega or Sirius) at which you are looking.
“Other stars have other lines indicating the presence of other elements in those stars. Consider what this knowledge implies. It tells us that the stars are made of the same stuff as what constitutes your skin, the eye with which you are looking at the spectrum, the ground your feet are resting on.
“In short, because of these lines, we know that the stars are made of the same stuff as what we find on earth and in ourselves on earth.
“If we apply just a little bit of mathematics, algebra and geometry, to what we see, we can also come to know many other things about this star; its age, its size, its brightness, its distance, how long it will exist, what it will look at in future stages, its temperature, objects in its immediate vicinity such as planets.
“For some twenty thousand years, by means of drawings we have found in caves in France, we know primitive people were aware of the stars. We also know they had no idea of what the stars really were. They knew they were bright and pretty and many and tiny points of light. (At this point I ask each observer to remove their eye from the eyepiece and look up at the star (Vega or Sirius) to which I direct her/his attention with a green laser pointer.) These primitive humans knew the stars stayed in associated patterns and followed regular paths across the sky each night and over the seasons. To attempt to explain these behaviors and characteristics they created many different types of pseudo-natural (e.g. crystalline structures in the heavens) and quasi-divine (e.g. angels or demons or spirits) descriptions of them as explanations for their behaviors.
“In short, our primitive ancestors, in noticing that the stars were not like anything they commonly saw or experienced in their local surroundings, imagined them to be different from them and from their earthly world.
“Today, we would point out that a reason they made this assumption was quite logical; millions of years of evolution had developed their senses (in general) and vision (in particular) and the connections of these senses to their brains in such a way to enable them to recognize and understand what was important to know about their immediate surroundings. The evolution of their senses and brains did not need to inform them of the actual nature of the stars.
“Slowly, they began to see the stars as means for navigation. In a limited sense, this provided them something of a human connection with the stars. But, as with Newton describing gravity, they could only say what the stars did and allowed; not what they are. As Newton said when asked what gravity was, he responded in the Latin language, hypotheoses non fingo, literally translated as “I feign no explanation”, but meaningfully translated as “I don’t know and I don’t care.”
“The work of Kirchoff and Bunsen and Fraunhofer, for the first time, showed that the stars are made of the same stuff as what we find on the earth.
“Consider, the importance of this discovery. At the moment this understanding appeared, the persons having this understanding were no longer defined by their earth and local surroundings on earth. In that moment of realization, they understood that they were also beings, equal parts, of a universe. In that instant of understanding, each such human observer’s world increased exponentially in size and significance and relevance.”
Because of this shtick, I always have substantial lines of people waiting to observe. Often, persons who have observed and heard this spiel, continue to stay and think and listen and talk, one with another about what they have just seen and what they have just heard.
I have had a college instructor of art gaze for a half hour. I have had a veterinary doctor talk about the relevance of life and technological immersion in the lives of students. I have, on number occasions, had persons of religious faith talk of matters scientific and theological and philosophical; feeling comfortable doing so. This type of interaction and participation is not a new experience for me. Because I was taught how to engage students dialogically in the subjects presented, I have seen high school students, advanced high school students, college students, non-traditional college students, adults in religious settings, (and now members of the public at viewing events), get excited about the topics as indicated by hearing them talking about the same things hours after instruction as they sat together in a dining hall or recreation area. One man, a father, coming to an observing event, and introducing his son to me, told me of the impression this presentation made on him the previous year.
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Always, there will be the individual who sticks around to discuss matters scientific and theological and philosophical. This then allows us to consider the philosophical and theological and psychological and politico-social ramifications of what it means to consume light oneself rather than seeing reflected/generated terran light in electronic images or pictures in a magazine.
Invariably, I will briefly set up a concluding statement which I state and then become silent so that the statement can make a cognitive impression.
“You and I are looking at Vega (Sirius). We see it up there with our eyes as a beautiful white point of light. We then looked at it through the spectroscope and saw Vega as an horizontal rainbow of light with dark vertical lines. Both are Vega. One is not more real than the other. It is just that you are experiencing…experiencing Vega with different eyes; adapted in different ways to your narrower local world of before and your expanded world of now. Both are equally Vega. Both are equally real.
“You are feeding on the stuff of that star. Your eye/brain connection is consuming electromagnetic energy and converting it into electro-chemical signals which then your brain transforms into an image we believe [if you understand reality phenomenologically and not according to the analytic tradition] corresponds to what is out there in/on Vega. You are feeding on energy just as surely as at dinner this evening you were feeding on energy producing food and drink.
“As you look at that beautiful white point of light, and as you look at the spectral image of that star, you are not just seeing it. You are touching that star.
“You are touching that star in two different, but equally real, senses. The first is this; unlike an image of that star you see on a laptop or in a photograph, light from that star is stuff of that star which has entered into your body through your eye and brain. You are literally touching that star’s stuff.
“A second way you are touching that star is best described in something called relativity theory. According to relativity theory, anything which travels at the speed of light, which, obviously is the speed at which the light you were looking at through the spectroscope is traveling; anything which travels at the speed of light experiences no passage of time. Therefore, though the light from that star Vega which you just consumed took 25 years to get to your eye; from the perspective of that light, no time passed.
“If no time passed for that light, which you consumed just now, to “travel” from Vega to your eye, then, it necessarily follows that from the perspective of that light, you and your eye are directly in contact with that star; with the surface of that star.
“A different way to say the same thing is that though we use time, the concept of time, in our scientific explanations, we do not know what time is. Time is either continuous or discrete or a mental construct. Over two thousand years ago, a Greek named Zeno explored a number of hypothetical examinations of time which proved that light cannot be continuous. Similarly, today, despite our best efforts to find it, we have not been able to find discrete quantums-of-light, sometimes referred to as a chronons. Finally, the concept of time as a mental organizing tool of the brain through which we make sense of reality around us; such cannot be analytically proven to exist. Therefore, in looking at Vega and considering our interaction with its light, we interact with the reality of time itself, rather than just an interface with things known using time and space as tools of explanation.
“Finally, consider the artificiality of the time and space concepts, expressed mathematically, we use in our explanations of physical reality, from the microcosm of the small as seen in atoms to the macrocosm of the large as seen in the observable universe. Earlier I told you Vega was twenty five light years away. Being able to say that gives the ersatz impression we know something; are familiar with it. But we are not, we are not able to be familiar with the concept of twenty five light years. In terms of something with which we are perhaps familiar, flying in a jet at 500 miles an hour and a lifetime of a hundred years, if we were to fly toward Vega in that jet and never stop…it would only take six thousand life-times to get to Vega. That figure is not understandable; its not even imaginable. We stargazers and telescopists regale members of the public by talking about millions of years and billions of light years and quintillions of tons and thousands of degrees temperature and trillions of stars and galaxies. However, these things when described with these numbers have no meaning for us. They have no meaning for us, because evolution and social interaction have developed in us the ability to understand local realities consisting of temperatures between freezing and boiling, distances of a few hundreds or thousands of miles, time segments of lifetimes measured in under a hundred years. Maybe, the only meaningful large number with which any of us deal in our lifetime is the payment for a house we sell measured by a check in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Other then familiar numbers like this, the numbers we use to describe what we are looking at through our telescopes…are meaningless; are without meaning. If we imagine they have meaning, we are evidencing an artificial redefinition of ourselves, no longer as thinking beings, that is homo sapiens, but calculating beings, that is homo ratiocinator or as cybernetic beings or as beings whose cerebral cognitive processes are now replaced by algorithmic digital computation.
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And then, later and/or elsewhere, there may be a rare individual who will allow me the opportunity to talk about the relevance of acquiring an Archimedean point of view, perspective, in relation to our world.
“The word world does not primarily refer to the specific planet on which we live nor (when understood in its Greek language term cosmos) as the universe in which we live. Phenomenologically, the world is the context of self-understanding within which we have been made to fit through evolution and social convention. The world is the name for all that input which provides the background for us to make sense of the things we believe we know and understand; (e.g. the Gestalt discovery that a point of light projected on a wall in an otherwise completely light-less room, will seem to bounce around because the brain has no context to locate it so as to provide a meaning of what that dot of light is).
"Second, when I or you see the spectrum of Vega and understand that Vega is of the same stuff as you and I, at that moment, our position relative to reality changes. This change of perspective is referred to as acquiring a cognitive Archimedean Point. Figuratively speaking, a moment ago your point of perspective was here, a local “here”. In this local-here, the ground was flat to the horizon. The twilit sky and now the stars in the sky appeared as a dome over us. Our minds were pre-occupied with the excited talk and views of people looking through telescopes and talking about cosmic things; occasionally distracted by the tone-deaf guy singing over in an adjacent venue. Now, your point of view is astronomical, cosmic. Your local here, now includes the stars and their places relative to each other. And when you come to imaginatively visualize the galaxy in which we are situated, and visualize the ecliptic path through which the planets roam and which describe the construction of the solar system, or see a movie called Powers of Ten which give an impression of the microcosm and macrocosm; then your local “here” will be much larger; much different. You will then be something other than thinking man, homo sapiens, perhaps a surhomme living in the “noosphere”.
“When we translate the French language word surhomme into the German language, we begin to get an indication of the artificiality and un-human-ness of acquiring a new scientific/technological Archimedean Point. The German language translation of surhomme can be Übermensch, the “Over-man” or, more commonly, “Superman”. This word, historically and sociologically, has been associated with an inhumane assumption that those who are scientifically/technologically advanced are the real humans whereas the others are sub-human; Untermensch; with all the eugenic inhumanity that word and its meaning and its use implies.
“It was Hannah Arendt (A.D. 1906 to 1975) who understood the powerful attraction of acquiring the new Archimedean Point made possible by Galileo’s use of the telescope for astronomy, and who understood the dangerous ramifications of acquiring that Archimedean Point. The acquisition of this point by humanity is not something that can be chosen; we are immersed in it by default of the modern world in which we live. Seeing ourselves as beings whose local-here is much different from before the advance of modernity (c. A.D. 1400 to present) and modern science within modernity, our understanding of what we are as human beings has changed.
“So as not to belabor the points, to avoid being pedantic, I will not define the terms she used, but simply use them. If you are interested, you can read how she uses these terms in her The Human Condition, “The Discovery of the Archimedean Point”, pages 257 to 268.
“Due to this adoption of an Archimedean Point, compared to pre-modernity, in modernity the vita activa and the vita contemplativa have been reversed. Further, the political and “social” realities of those persons referred to as animal laborans, previously separated from the vita activa of speech and action among one’s public familiars, have become homo faber (i.e. “human doings”); social beings who now define the vita activa.
“Progressively, we human-doings have progressively moved from a social condition in which we had skills to a condition where we labor as job-holders. Already, we have sacrificed knowledge-for-its-own-sake; the result of which is the mistaken idea that facts are knowledge. In the analytic tradition in which modernity was formed and is ensconced, knowledge acquisition has eliminated the search for essences. For human beings this means that those few times we are interested in knowing “who we are”, we invariably describe “what we do”. This is why ceaseless frenetic activity; i.e. workaholism, is a widespread current reality.
“The denouement of this trend in modernity is upon us as technology in general and artificial intelligence in particular remove people from the jobs these human beings performed; these jobs by which they identified themselves. Arendt, citing Karl Marx, observes by asking “What could possibly be worse, then the current situation in which people who define themselves by what they do, are no longer able to labor/work?”
“Yes, our acquisition of the Archimedean Point allows us a larger local-here, but can we still be human beings in this “new” local-here?
“Perhaps, it would be wise for us to consider a particular manifestation of the influence of the acquisition of the Archimedean Point. Billions of dollars are being spent, supposedly, to create a human habitation on Mars. A justification given is that it doubles the possibility of human survival by providing a second place humans can live. This seems to be a reasonable advantage for having a larger, different, local-here.
“That is a good argument. However, here is another point of view. Perhaps spending a tenth as much wealth, we could transform Antarctica into a livable space for tens of millions of human beings. This would be a dramatic change in our familiar local-here, to be sure. But it would still be within our familiar local-here provided us by biological and pre-modern social evolution.
“In short, assuming we even have a choice; which local-here should we choose and encourage?”
Edited by Otto Piechowski, 23 June 2025 - 06:52 PM.
