Complex Numbers

Astronomy

It's Labor Day here in the US, and I have an aversion to labor, so today's comments will be brief.

    The 8 Best Astronomy Books For Beginners  
From Mary Roach’s hilarious look at space travel to astronaut Scott Kelly’s photos documenting a year off planet.

Usually, Atlas Obscura highlights interesting locations here on Earth. This represents a bit of an expansion of their purview.

It’s easy to forget amid summer road trips and back-to-school to-do lists that our Earthly home is just a floating speck of blue in the vastness of the universe, that our human lives are just a blink in our galaxy’s long history.

It should be easy to forget. No matter how insignificant we may seem, we're the ones figuring this shit out, and that's pretty awesome.

Even if you’re completely new to the topic, these books are accessible, moving invitations into the furthest reaches of our cosmos.

I'm anything but new to the topic, but one cool thing about astronomy is that there's always more to learn.

I haven't read any of these books. They seem interesting enough, though they're not all technically about astronomy.

Since there's not a lot of point to copying the book titles and summaries—they're right there in the link, and the summaries are elevator-pitch length—this is as good a time as any to do one of my language investigations.

Before astronomy, there was astrology. Astrology is, rightly, considered pseudoscience at best, complete horseshit at worst. I fall somewhere in between; I look at it the same as I view folklore. It's an interesting window into psychology and human history.

Which leads me to the language bit. Other legitimate branches of science use the -ology suffix: psychology, biology, geology, zoology, etc. It can also be used to describe questionable fields of study, like theology, demonology, or UFOlogy, perhaps lending these subjects a false aura of science. The suffix itself, obviously, comes from the Greek "logos," which as I understand it just means "word" (which doesn't explain why a "logo" is often just a pictogram).

Astronomy is different, then, in the use of the "-nomy" suffix, which, according to the usual sources, means something like arranging or categorizing. But it's not alone. You also have taxonomy, which has nothing to do with paying the government money and everything to do with categorization; economy, which is notoriously slippery to define; gastronomy, which is kind of related to today's link because Atlas Obscura also hosts Gastro Obscura, a series of articles about the wonders of food (I've linked those a few times); and not many others. Anomy, however, refers to a lack of moral or ethical standards, which, what? It's also spelled anomie because English is had to pin down, sometimes.

Had the history been different, perhaps "astrology" would be the science while "astronomy" would be the folklore. We'll never know. But one reason I can't fully dismiss astrology as a subject is its place in history. Even Newton, known for his discoveries in science and mathematics, started from a foundation of astrology and alchemy. Just to be clear, though, I don't "believe in" it; I just find it interesting, same as with the folklore surrounding cryptids.

Astronomy can be defined as the study of celestial objects, and this is why it's kind of fuzzy to define in practice: Earth is, itself, a celestial object. One of my favorite websites, which I've visited nearly every day since it began in 1995 and which hasn't changed format much in those nearly three decades, is the Astronomy Picture of the Day  —and it often features images of Earth alongside investigation of faraway planets, stars, nebulae, and galaxies.

Which leads me back to the original link, because some of the books there are really about Earth. And that's okay; our -ologies and -onomies are all interconnected, anyway.