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Misconceptions and MisusesRevealed, from Astrology tothe Moon Landing Hoax

PHILIP C. PLAIT

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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BadAstronomyPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP

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BadAstronomyPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP

Misconceptions and MisusesRevealed, from Astrology tothe Moon Landing Hoax

PHILIP C. PLAIT

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Copyright 2002 by Philip C. Plait. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York

Illustrations by Tina Cash Walsh

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, ortransmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permis-sion of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 750-4744. Requests to the Publisher for per-mission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons,Inc., 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158-0012, (212) 850-6011, fax (212)850-6008, e-mail: PERMREQ@WILEY.COM.

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CONTENTS

Introduction 1

PART I Bad Astronomy Begins at Home 9

1 The Yolks on You: Egg Balancing and the Equinox 11

2 Flushed with Embarrassment: The Coriolis Effectand Your Bathroom 21

3 Idioms Delight: Bad Astronomy in Everyday Language 28

PART II From the Earth to the Moon 37

4 Blue Skies Smiling at Me: Why the Sky Is Blue 39

5 A Dash of Seasons: Why Summer Turns to Fall 48

6 Phase the Nation: The Moons Changing Face 57

7 The Gravity of the Situation: The Moon and the Tides 64

8 The Moon Hits Your Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie:The Big Moon Illusion 77

PART III Skies at Night Are Big and Bright 87

9 Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star: Why Stars Appearto Twinkle 89

10 Star Light, Star White: Stars of Many Colors 97

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vi CONTENTS

11 Well, Well: The Difficulty of Daylight Star Sighting 103

12 The Brightest Star: PolarisJust Another Facein the Crowd 111

13 Shadows in the Sky: Eclipses and Sun-Watching 116

14 The Disaster that Wasnt: The Great PlanetaryAlignment of 2000 125

15 Meteors, Meteoroids, and Meteorites, Oh My!:The Impact of Meteors and Asteroids 133

16 When the Universe Throws You a Curve:Misunderstanding the Beginning of It All 142

PART IV Artificial Intelligence 153

17 Appalled at Apollo: Uncovering the Moon-LandingHoax 155

18 Worlds in Derision: Velikovsky vs. Modern Science 174

19 In the Beginning: Creationism and Astronomy 187

20 Misidentified Flying Objects: UFOs and Illusionsof the Mind and Eye 202

21 Mars Is in the Seventh House, But Venus Has Leftthe Building: Why Astrology Doesnt Work 212

PART V Beam Me Up 221

22 Hubble Trouble: Hubble Space TelescopeMisconceptions 223

23 Star Hustlers: Star Naming for Dummies 236

24 Bad Astronomy Goes Hollywood: The Top-TenExamples of Bad Astronomy in Major Motion Pictures 245

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CONTENTS vii

Recommended Reading 259

Acknowledgments 263

Index 265

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INTRODUCTION

I love bad science fiction shows. Angry Red Planet, Voyage to theBottom of the Sea, UFO, all those old TV shows and movies inblack and white or living color. I grew up on them. Id stay up latewatching TV, sometimes long after my folks would normally letme. I remember clearly coming home from third grade and askingmy mom for permission to watch Lost in Space. I worshipped thatshow, Robot, Dr. Smith, Jupiter 2, and all. I wanted to wear avelour, multicolored V neck sweater, I had a crush on Judy Robin-sonthe whole nine yards.

Sure, I liked the good ones too. Five Million Years to Earthand The Day the Earth Stood Still were favorites of mine backthen, and they still are. But the important thing to me wasnt thatthey were good or bad, or even if they made senseI remember anItalian flick about a voyage to Venus that might have been writtenby Salvador Dali on acid. What was important was that they hadaliens and rocket ships.

I would spend long hours as a child pretending to ride a rocketto other planets. I always knew Id be a scientist, and I was prettysure I wanted to be an astronomer. Those movies didnt discourageme because of their bad science; they inspired me. I didnt care thatits silly to try to blast a conventional chemical rocket to anotherstar, or that you cant hear sounds in space. All I cared about wasgetting out there, and if I could do it by watching ridiculousmovies, then so be it. I would have given anythingeverythingto be able to step on board a spaceship and be able to see a binarystar up close, or cruise through a nebula, or go out through theplane of our Galaxy and see it hanging in the sky, faint, ominous,

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luminous, against a velvet canvas of blackness so dark you canhardly convince yourself that your eyes are open.

Nowadays it would be a bit harder for me to give up every-thing to take such a ride. Maybe I would so my daughter couldsomeday . . . but that day is not yet here. Were still stuck here onthe Earth, more or less, and the only way we can see distant vistasis either vicariously through the eye of the telescope or through theeye of a movie director. One of those eyes, perhaps, is a bit moreclearly focused than the other. Despite my childhood yearnings, asan adult I can wish that movies did a better job of portrayingastronomy (and astronomers) to the public.

The movies may be inspiring, which is their most important jobas far as Im concerned, but there is a downside to the bad astron-omy. It muddies the distinction between fantasy and science, be-tween what is only pretend and what can really happen. Movies canportray the make-believe so realistically that the line gets blurred.Its fair to say that most people dont understand all that muchabout how space travel, for example, really works. Space travel iscomplicated, difficult, and relies heavily on unfamiliar physics.

Movies, however, make it look easy. Just get in your ship andgo! All you have to do is watch out for the stray meteor shower oralien starship and everything should work out pretty well. Unfor-tunately, it doesnt work out that way in the real universe. If it did,wed have colonies on Mars and the other planets by now. Ivegiven talks to audiences about movies and astronomy, and thequestion almost always arises: why arent we on the Moon now?Why havent we built starships, or at least colonized the solar sys-tem? Sometimes these are honest questions, and sometimes theyare asked with an edge of impatience, as if the people asking thequestion are concerned that the National Aeronautics and SpaceAdministration engineers arent as up to speed as Scotty from StarTrek. The film industry makes a big impression on people and, asthe scenes play over and over again, they worm their way into ourbrains. Movies show space travel all the time, but they show itincorrectly, and so it doesnt surprise me that the majority of theviewing public has the wrong impression about how it reallyworks.

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INTRODUCTION 3

If movies were the only purveyors of scientific inaccuracies,there would hardly be a problem. After all, its their job to peddlefantasy. The problem is, it doesnt stop there. The news medias jobis to report the facts clearly, with as much accuracy as possible.Unfortunately, this isnt always the case. In general, national mediado a fine job; most TV networks, newspapers, and magazines haveenough money to maintain at least a small staff of experienced sci-ence journalists who do a good job reporting the news. Local newsis more often the culprit in misrepresenting science. Local reportersmay be inexperienced in the technical jargon and tools of science,and so will sometimes write amazingly inaccurate copy. This is areal problem, with perhaps no easy solution, since many local newsoutlets simply cannot afford to keep as many reporters needed whoare knowledgeable in the vast number of topics covered in the news.

Not that I am sidestepping national news. I remember vividlywatching the Today show on NBC in 1994. The Space Shuttle wasin orbit, and it was doing an experiment, dragging a large, circularshield behind it. The idea was that the disk would clear out parti-cles in its wake like a snowplow pushing snow out of the way,leaving a cleared trail behind it. In the ultra-grade vacuum behindthe wake shield experiments were being conducted that took advan-tage of such an environment.

Anchor Matt Lauer was reporting on this experiment, and whenhe was finished, Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel both commentedthat it must have been hard for Lauer to read that copy. All threelaughed, and Lauer admitted he didnt understand what he hadjust said. Think about that for a moment: three of Americas mostfamous journalists, and they actually laughed at their own igno-rance in science! How would this be different if, say, the reporthad been about Serbia, and they laughed at how none of themknew where it was?

Needless to say, I was pretty well steamed. That event is actu-ally what started me down the road of discussing Bad Astronomy;I decided to take action when I realized that millions of people inthe United States were getting their information from people whodidnt understand even the simplest of scientific events. The reportitself was accurate, and may have even been written by someone

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who fully well knew what the Space Shuttle was doing, but whatthe public saw was three respected journalists saying tacitly thatits okay to be ignorant about science.

It isnt okay. In fact, its dangerous to be ignorant about science.Our lives and our livelihoods depend on it. No one can doubt thepower of computers in todays world, computers that rely on physicsto operate and improve their performance. Science is what makesour houses warm, our cars go, and our cell phones ring. Medicalscience progresses very rapidly, with new medicines, treatments,and preventions coming out almost daily. We must understand thescience of medicine to be able to make informed decisions aboutour health. In the United States, hundreds of billions of dollars arespent every single year on science and technology, disciplines withwhich the typical voting citizen has not even a passing familiarity.Thats your money. You should understand not only how its beingspent but also why.

Unfortunately, getting reliable science information isnt all thateasy. Science misconceptions and errors are propagated by the mediain all its forms. Unfortunately once again, the problem doesnt stopthere.

Anyone who has gone outside on a clear, warm night and laindown on a blanket to watch the stars may know the deep joy ofastronomy, but understanding astronomy is a different matter.Unfortunately, astronomyand science in generalhas been underattack lately. This isnt anything new, really, but the recent public-ity has been a bit more obvious. From NASA budget cuts to stateschool boards that promote antiscience, the atmosphere is morehostile than it has been before. The modern consumer is bom-barded by pseudoscience at every turn. Most newspapers in thecountry carry an astrology column, and some even have columnsby self-proclaimed psychics, but precious few devote even a singlepage a week to a regular column about new scientific results. Con-spiracy theories abound that twist and pervert simple science intoridiculous claims that are tissue-thin, yet are accepted wholesale byhordes of believers. The World Wide Web propagates these theo-ries and a host of others at light speed around the world, makingit even harder to distinguish between what is real and what is fan-

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INTRODUCTION 5

tasy. In this atmosphere its no wonder theres so much confusionabout science.

Still, theres hope. Science may be on the rebound. The Discov-ery Channel started small, and many critics predicted it would fail.Yet, just a few years later, it is the most highly rated basic cablechannel, and they charge dearly for advertising. Bill Nye the ScienceGuy teaches science on TV to kids in a fun and engaging way. Evenadults can watch the show and get a kick out of it. The web de-serves its dueone of the most popular sites on the web is not fora rock star, or a TV celebrity, or something steamy you wouldntlet your kids see. The website to which I am referring belongs toNASA. Yes, the NASA. Their home on the web is one of the mostpopular sites on the planet. When the Sojourner Mars probelanded on the Red Planet in 1997, their web site scored millions ofhits, more than any other event in the history of the then-youngweb. Since then, the site has had almost a billion hits. When theSpace Shuttle serviced the Hubble Space Telescope late in 1999,the NASA web site got a million hits in a single day. When thecomet Shoemaker-Levy 9 smashed into Jupiter in 1994, the webnearly screeched to a halt due to the overwhelming amount of traf-fic as people tried to find pictures of the event from differentobservatories. Other science-based web sites report traffic similarto these examples as well.

The public not only likes science, it wants more. A survey of thereading public was made by newspapers, and they found that morepeople would read about science news, if it were offered, thanabout sports, finance, or the comics. When I give public lecturesabout results from Hubble, people barrage me with questions, andI usually wind up staying late answering more questions from peo-ple curious about the universe around them.

Despite their desire, a lot of people harbor some odd notionsabout astronomy. Come to think of it, its probably because of thatdesire. If you want something enough, youll take anything to fillthat void. People have an innate curiosity about the universe; thisis almost certainly a simple outcome of evolution. People who arecurious are likely to explore, to learn, to discover. Thats a prettygood survival trait.

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