Approaches to Astronomy

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Approaches to Astronomy
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Ho-Hum
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Overwhelmed?
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Insignificant?
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A Sterile Exercise?

• When I heard the learn'd astronomer,When the
  proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns
  before me,When I was
  shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide,
  and measure them,When I sitting heard the
  astronomer where he lectured, with much applause
  in the lecture-room,How soon unaccountable I
  became tired and sick,Till rising and gliding
  out I wander'd off by myself,In the mystical
  moist night-air, and from time to time,Look'd up
  in perfect silence at the stars.
• Walt Whitman, in Leaves of Grass (1866)

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Astronomy is Physics
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and Physics Explains Everything!

• within certain limits, that is!
• Pure Physics cant explain our deepest
  emotions, or our aesthetic responses to a
  beautiful sunset or glorious music.
• (but see Musicophilia, by Oliver Sacks.)

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Moreover, Physics is Simple (Excuse me?)

• We think that physics is complicated because it
  is hard for us to understand, and because physics
  books are full of difficult mathematics. But the
  objects that physicists study are still basically
  simple objects.
• The behaviour of physical, nonbiological objects
  is so simple that it is feasible to use existing
  mathematical language to describe it, which is
  why physics books are full of mathematics.

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Physics is Simple!

• The objects and phenomena that a physics book
  describes are simpler than a single cell in the
  body of its author. And the author consists of
  trillions of those cells
• Nobody has yet invented the mathematics for
  describing the total structure and behaviour of
  such an object as a physicist, or even one of his
  cells.
• Richard Dawkins, in The Blind Watchmaker

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Galileo Galilei

• La mathematica e l'alfabeto nel quale Dio ha
  scritto l'universo.
• (Mathematics is the alphabet with which God has
  written the universe.)

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But Not In PHYS 015(or only rarely)