Blame Poseidon by Rowan

Blame Poseidon by Rowan - September 2017 Scholarship Essay

Science has the power to tell stories about us, to narrate the course of the universe from its very beginning to the unfathomable present. Though I’ve always known this on some level, “Introduction to Astronomy” was the first class that enabled me to pinpoint this capacity and realize how integral such narrative is to exploring my academic interests.

During this course, I learned the names of constellations and asterisms, the typical life cycle of a star, and how to use Dobsonian telescopes to parse the heavens. But what I loved most were the stories alongside the technical elements: How Cassiopeia is near her beloved husband, Cepheus, in the sky, but sentenced to spend half the night upside-down as punishment for insulting the sea god; how a star’s composition and mass at its inception determines whether it will end with a bang or a whimper; how several collaborations and innovations led to the most powerful telescope lenses the scientific community uses today.

The best story of all is, naturally, that of the Big Bang. Although the birth of the universe was technically silent, having as yet no medium for sound to travel through, its reverberations are evident in all of the intricacies we see when we tilt our heads back to look at the night sky, and more that we need sophisticated technology to observe. The presence or absence of matter everywhere in space correspond to patterns of hot and cold temperatures in the cosmic microwave background, themselves arisen from imperceptible variations in the distribution of quantum particles minutes after the Big Bang. Moreover, zooming way, way out on our humble home planet reveals the complex superstructures of galaxies: inscrutable threads that tangle and intertwine, weaving our universe together. The ratio of hydrogen to helium, which was established in the first three minutes of the universe, continues to inform the composition of celestial bodies and even played a role in the rise of sentient life. The Big Bang represents not just the beginning, but all that we have become.

My favorite part of astronomy was not the classroom lectures or the pretty pictures of space, but rather the long nights spent outside at the observatory hunting for Messier objects. The process was seemingly simple: pick a quarry, transcribe instructions for finding it, then grab a telescope and search. I might attempt to locate a set of twin stars in the Big Dipper or a globular cluster in Orion’s Belt, and, though the hunt was wrought with great frustration, the ultimate triumph of stumbling across just the right patch of faint fuzziness after an hour of searching was like nothing I had ever experienced. The concrete, explainable aspects of astronomy encompass the actuality of stargazing, but the awe-inspiring vistas are what give all the scientific blather meaning.

In fact, being able to embed my newfound star-hunting prowess in stories of fiery birth and death turned out to be such a good strategy that I began to apply it in other classes. I may not need to know that Euler’s method was used to determine the reentry point of the Friendship 7 capsule, or that the Communist party hired poor artists to design propaganda posters throughout Mao-era China, but it makes the application of the subjects we cover in school more tangible and memorable. In all of my classes, not just astronomy, I seek to understand the stories that weave together some small part of the depth and breadth of human knowledge, and in so doing I am transformed from a passive learner to someone who marvels at it all. And I never fail to feel a catch in my throat when I look at the unfathomable sprawl of the Milky Way above.