Bryson Chapters 2-3 QQC

Chapter 2:

Q: “We have been spoiled by artists’ renderings into imagining a clarity of resolution that doesn’t exist in actual astronomy. Pluto in Christy’s photograph is faint and fuzzy – a piece of cosmic lint – and its moon is not the romantically backlit, crisply delineated companion orb you would get in a National Geographic painting, but rather just a tiny and extremely indistinct hint of additional fuzziness. Such was the fuzziness, in fact, that it took seven years for anyone to spot the moon again and thus independently confirm its existence.”

Q: Was this written before Pluto stopped being classified as a planet? If it’s so difficult to see and make out Pluto and its moon, how do we know what we do about it, let alone other bodies, such as stars, even further away? If existing photographs are so blurry and indistinct, how are artist renderings even possible? What are they basing their images on? How is it possible for it to have taken seven years to see the same planet twice?

C: I chose this quote, because it’s something I hadn’t really thought about. These planets are so far away,  guess it makes sense that pictures we have are hardly good representations, and that the representations of the solar system that we rely on are inaccurate as well.

Chapter 3:

Q: “Looking into the past is of course the easy part. Glance at the night sky and what you see is history and lots of it – the stars not as they are now but as they were when their light left them. For all we know, the North Star, our faithful companion, might actually have burned out last January of in 1854 or at any time since the early fourteenth century and news of it just hasn’t reached us yet. They best we can say – can ever say – is that it was still burning on this date 680 years ago. Stars die all the time.”

Q: So when does a star really die? When it first explodes, or when we notice it? How do we know exactly how far away these stars, such as the North Star, are, and therefore how long it takes there light to reach us? So the lights that we view stars at are actually just old light just now reaching us?

C: I found this quote interesting, because it’s not really something I had ever thought about or really even fathomed. I hadn’t really put together that, since the stars are so far away, what we are seeing in the night sky may not even exist anymore. 

Bryson Intro QQC

Q: "Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic level. For all their devoted attention, your atoms don't actually care about you - indeed, they don't even know that you are there. They don't even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all, and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.) Yet somehow for the period of your existence they will answer to a single overarching impulse: to keep you you."
 

Q: What does this have to do with math? How is it possible for things that what makes you up isn't, in itself, even alive? How do the atoms "keep you you"? Why is it not a gratifying experience? If the atoms are not alive, is there even an experience to be had?

 

C: I thought that this section of the introduction was interesting because of the way it introduced atoms. Without really explaining what they truly are, the author let you know that they're what make you you, and, while they make you alive, they aren't actually alive. He also presented ideas that aren't usually brought up, like how "if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust", and I found that thought-provoking.