The Last Word On Nothing

A defensive back playing for a Texas university football team recently said something unusual into a press microphone. “I don’t believe in space,” he said. “I’m religious, so I think, like, we’re on our own right now. I don’t think there’s, like, other planets and stuff like that.” 

I welcome eccentric ways of thinking. Being bogged down by rational observation can hide glimmers of truth science doesn’t see. Believe away, I think, which the young football player did, using the word ‘heliocentric,’ saying he doesn’t believe the Earth revolves around the sun. “I started seeing flat Earth stuff, and I was, like, that’s kind of interesting,” he said. “They started bringing up some valid points.”

The mind doesn’t always take kindly to infinity heaped with countless nuclear engines swirling through galaxies as numberless as the stars. It might be easier to think of space as a canvas, a background, nothing to see here. There’s a reason Galileo stood trial before the church.

Several days before these quotes came out, I attended an event for Rebecca Boyles’ wonderful new book, “Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are.” She described how moon dust is like tiny splinters of glass, not softened by the erosive processes we experience on Earth, no wind to blow it around, no water to wear it down. As of the lunar landing in 1969, NASA scientists weren’t sure if the dust might be flammable, insisting astronauts re-enter their lander without any on them, which they found to be impossible because the minuscule barbs of bolide ejecta stuck to everything. Everyone held their breath and, thank goodness, the dust turned out to be inert. That is real. 

I took the football player’s quote to Richard Panek, another writer for LWON, and in a video chat his mouth struggled to come up with a response. He finally said, “It’s a new one on me. It would never occur to me. It would be like saying the ocean isn’t real. It makes no sense.”

Panek has written books about gravity and dark matter. One of his first titles was, “Seeing and Believing: A Short History of the Telescope and How We Look at the Universe.” Having eyeballed what’s up there, he has trouble reconciling the notion of someone thinking space isn’t a place.

“Where do you…” he searched. “Where do you begin?”

I suggested that not believing could be a reaction to feeling insignificant in the presence of outer space.

Richard said, “I had a line in one of my books that was — let’s see if I can get this right — if you need the universe to tell you that you’re insignificant, you haven’t been paying attention.”

To him, looking up and seeing space and planets and stars is democratic, it allows personal freedom. He said, “In researching the telescope book, I came to understand that the telescope was actually the instrument that would lead to democracy. It removed the power from the papacy and from the monarchies and so on. Each individual could make their own discoveries.”

Apparently that also means discovering that nothing is up there, blaming a scientific hoax.

I spoke with Ann Finkbeiner, also a writer at LWON, because having minds around like these is a good reality check. Like Richard, she hadn’t heard the quote. She thought for a moment, then said, “Well, in a way it’s kind of reasonable.”

Reasonable was not the response I expected from an accomplished writer in the astronomical fields. She is the author of “A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering In A New Era of Discovery.” Of all people, she knows space is real. She also knows that real is not a fixed point.

Ann said, “I grew up in the country. I didn’t get really interested in astronomy until I was in my early 40s, but I spent a lot of time looking at the night sky. It wouldn’t have occurred to me that the moon didn’t go across the sky. It wouldn’t have occurred to me that the sun didn’t go across the sky. It would never have occurred to me that the stars were there during the day. If I’d been pushed, I would have thought that everything up in the sky is pretty much the same distance from us.”

She had me there. If you never learned what was really going on in space, or if you cared not to believe what you heard, that’s exactly what it would look like, a child’s-eye view. Stars appear, then disappear, and then appear again. The sky seems flat.

Ann reminded me that the only reason I know a blood-red dot is Mars is because someone told me, and I believed them. I saw pictures of the place and learned its circumference, and that became part of my knowledge.

“You believe what you can see, right?” she said.

Ann knows what’s up there, at least she’s been told so much that her head is packed with black holes and quasars, which solar systems are crowded with gas giant planets and which are more like ours. When she looks up, space and all it holds appears quite real. Planets have been measured and tested, atmospheres deduced by the spectral light they put off, gravities ascertained in such detail we slingshot space probes around them with incredible accuracy.

Ann told me about waking up to see an eclipse early in the morning. She got the time wrong and when she looked outside, the eclipse wasn’t happening. “They must have rescheduled it or it must be delayed,” she said. “That was my first thought.”

I asked, “What age was that?” 

“Oh, I was writing for LWON,” she said. “It wasn’t that long ago.”

For Ann, space can be subjective, depends on your mood, what you believe or what you don’t, and since it’s all out of reach you can interpret it however you want. She said, “It’s not unreasonable to say, I believe only what I can observe and what my experience has been.”

I imagine a groggy astronomy writer rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, and her default is that the people in charge of eclipses were behind schedule.

She told me, “You know, for the early Christians, curiosity was a sin.”

I said, “There’s a whole universe that is really none of your business.”

“But I want to know,” she said.

There lies the difference between Ann, me, Richard, Becky, and the young man hoping to be a draft pick for the NFL. He doesn’t want to know. Fair enough, I think. I hope you’re good on the field.

Photo: squishy moon toy handed out by Becky’s daughter at an “Our Moon” event, and of course I had to have one.