These are my raw notes. I don’t promise they make sense.
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Mike Brotherton:
The goal is not to learn all of astronomy in a week, but to learn enough that we can intelligently research questions for stories.
People learn through story, more easily than in the classroom. If he can get us to use more and better quality science then through our works we can reach a wider audience and raise the awareness of science. Which is what NASA wants.
Jim Verley:
Started out as running the cultural association on campus. Always read SF. Noticed misconceptions as he proceeded on the educational track. As a science educator, he knows that we can reach an audience that he can’t. More than facts it is important to be a clear thinker. If we can learn to be clear thinkers and to ask appropriate questions then that will allow us to be educators to the general public through our stories.
Jerry Oltion:
Started as SF writer with casual interest in astronomy. Burned out on writing in 2003. Got bit by the astronomy bug. Builds telescopes and grinds his own mirrors. Designed new type of telescope mount.
The Scale of the Cosmos: Mike Brotherton.
From Seeds, Chapter 1
Astronomy deals with objects on a vast range of sizes, speeds, and times.
Most of these scales aare way beyond everyday experience.
Humans the Earth and even the solar system are tiny on a cosmic scale.
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
— Douglas Adams
You don’t want to go to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for science, but Douglas Adams gets this thing totally right. This is the kind of thing that sticks in the general public’s mind.
Showed us slides stepping up by factor of 100.
Metric system is the language of science. Jay says that he uses metric with SF and english (usually) with Fantasy.
When the numbers get astronomically large, it becomes meaningless, so Mike prefers to explain things via relative scale. (It took the Apollo astronauts a few days to get to the moon.)
Science world-building: In order to avoid large numbers beyond our imagination, we introduce new units: Distance Sun to Moon = 150,000,000 km = 1 AU (astronomical unit) Scientist still like numbers between 1 and 10, because we like to count on our fingers, so we make new units in order to keep the numbers small. Even up to 100 is fine and 100 AU gets us all the way out to the edge of the planetary disc.
Solar system use AU. Outside solar system, use light year. Mike explains what a parsec is. Yoiks. When an object moves one arc second, we say that’s 1 parsec.
1 light year (ly) = distance traveled by light in 1 year = 63,000 AU = 1013
You can go 1000 LY in any direction and you are still in the Milky Way.
Figuring out that we are in a galaxy and where the center is was hard stuff. Not exactly sure what the galaxy looks like because we can’t take a picture (see the 1000 ly issue) from the outside. Diameter of the Milky Way ~ 75,000 ly But there’s a dark matter halo that’s like the Ort Cloud.
Galaxies not universally distributed through space, and they are are also large in comparison to the distances between them. Stars are very far apart compared to their sizes. If two galaxies collided there would be no stellar collisions.
Distance to the nearest large galaxies: several million light years.
Galaxies not universally distributed through space, something called Large Scale Structure. Clusters of galaxies are grouped into superclusters. Superclusters form filaments and walls around voids. Astronomers start using mega-parsecs and giga-parsecs when talking on this scale. Again, this is to try to keep the numbers between 1 & 10 or 1 & 100.
We stop here because stepping up another scale of 100 would take us larger than the observable universe. We can see 14 billion ly.
Other approaches to Sizes
Powers of Ten movie(s)
Cosmic Voyages
Contact Opening
When looking to reach readers, relate to everyday exerience whenever possible, if only to boggle with the truth.
Examples? How long to walk to the moon if you could? The sun? Another star? How about at jet airplane speeds?
Re-emphasizes the importance of trying to get numbers down to 1-10 or 1-100 because those are numbers that we can wrap our heads around.
Good GOD woman when did you do this? We barely finished the lecture!
I was taking copious notes as he talked. I just pasted. That’s why they may not make sense.
You need to bold the statement about these being raw notes and so may not make sense. Most of them do though.
Good idea. Done.
Thank you for posting this! It gives my brain something to munch on and will make me feel better for not being able to attend Launch Pad.
Happy to share.
Cool! Good notes so far. Thanks for passing the information on.
The metric system is so much easier in science. I used it a lot in my classes, and I can’t imagine how much of a pain it would have been with English units. Scientific notation helps a lot, too. Though I wonder if that would look strange when reading a story.