Saturn and the GOP

This rather amazing picture of Saturn is real - courtesy of NASA.  In the 50's, my parents bought the Golden Book of Astronomy for me and I scoured the pictures - illustrations really - and the "ringed planet" was always a source of amazement.  My view was compounded one night when my parents had a party at our house in suburban Cincinnati and a fellow who was invited brought along a homemade telescope and it was big enough for me to see the real deal Saturn through it.  I can remember that image clear as crystal and what struck me then as does any venture with telescope into the night sky, is the absolute blackness that surrounds anything - the edge of the moon, Saturn, any star.

Long ago, about the time of our Revolutionary War, Saturn was the last planet visible to the unaided eye (Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter being the others).  Until hard astrophysics and real-deal science took over our view of this wonder was limited to clear nights and great optics.  Our understanding of the complexities of Saturn was equally limited - the moon count for instance now approaching 60-some, the rings being understood more or less, etc. and what was for a long time just a wonderment of a the night sky, be it through a back yard telescope in the 1950s or through human eyes in Mexico or Egypt 3000 years ago - simply due to evolving science and understanding thereof.

I recoiled a bit at the GOP/Tea Party Debate last evening as there were only a couple folks on that stage that believe in science - who if pressed could explain the picture above as anything other than an illusion - a fake - unsettled.  There is something absolute about science; perhaps that is its attraction. All of it - and I mean all of it - works together.  There is "none" of the some of it works and some of it doesn't.   You aren't either in for a nickel or in for a dollar but you embrace the scientific method and try and piece it together as part of a sum total of knowledge. 

I cringe whenever I hear someone who supposedly is "in the know", who wants to be our shinning light leader; the embodiment of America, stand up and utter the word "unsettled" to describe some core part of science.  Sure there are unknown aspects of it - that is the thrill of exploration and discovery, experiment and meticulous noting of results - but because there is an unknown it is unsettled - it merely means that some of the stuff needs further investigation and unearthing for want of a better term.

To hear "unsettled science" as a category of scientific knowledge is just poppycock, pure and simple. I think back to my first views of space objects through that telescope on the patio in Cincinnati 50+ years ago and note that when you are viewing Saturn and don't have a tracking computer on an amateur device (a complete unknown then), Saturn would spin away after a few minutes and you would be left with a view of deep space with nothing in it but the purest black you have ever seen.  Nothing there. A void.

Welcome to the GOP Tea Party faithful.