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Why astronomy is so important to science
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826622.500&print=true

25 June 2008
A. C. Grayling

NEXT year, 2009, is the International Year of Astronomy. It
commemorates the 400th anniversary of Galileo's telescopic sightings
of objects that no one before him had been able to see. They
included craters on the moon, stars invisible to the naked eye, and
on 7 January 1610 the moons of Jupiter, which Galileo named "the
Medicean stars" after his patron, Grand Duke Cosimo II de Medici.

Astronomy is often described as the first science, in honour of the
acute and patient Babylonian observers whose gazings on the
spectacular canopy of the heavens produced the first systematic
astronomical data. That they were doing it mainly for purposes of
astrological divination takes the shine off the story a bit, but the
accuracy of their calendar and eclipse predictions is undoubtedly
impressive.

The popular image of an astronomer is of someone sitting quietly in
the cool of night, watching and waiting - or, nowadays, studying
computer printouts in an office - and perhaps that is why astronomy
has the reputation of being a peaceful science. But it is in fact
revolutionary, because it so drastically changes our conceptions of
the universe, threatening old pieties and beliefs. Some of its
practitioners were, after all, burned at the stake, and it is not
much more than a decade since the Roman Catholic church finally got
round to apologising for persecuting Galileo. But burnings at the
stake did not stop the work of Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo
and others from eventually turning our view of the cosmos upside
down.

By one of those ironies in which the British government's science
policy abounds, at the end of last year funding for UK astronomy was
suddenly and drastically cut. One planned victim was the UK's
participation in the Gemini Observatory and its 8.1-metre telescopes
in Hawaii and Chile, which between them observe almost the entire
sky. Leaving the project was expected to save £4 million a year, a
move meant to help fill an £80 million hole in funding for physical
sciences.

But by then the UK had already spent £35 million as a Gemini
partner, giving it nearly a quarter stake in the project, so backing
out represented a financial as well as a scientific loss. Such was
the outcry following the announcement that British participation in
Gemini has been reinstated, at least for the time being, and
long-prepared projects have once again taken their place in the
queue for telescope time.

In International Astronomy Year, the UK will have to decide what
long-term role it sees for itself in astronomy. Would it be right,
for instance, to opt out of efforts to crack fundamental puzzles
such as the question of the nature of dark energy? For the past
decade, inquiries into the workings of the cosmos have been
complicated by the discovery that the universe's rate of expansion
appears to be increasing rather than decreasing, suggesting that an
as yet unknown force is acting in it.

If there is such a force, then what we know about the structure and
properties of the matter we are able to detect and investigate turns
out to be just a small part of the story. According to this view,
the universe is 23 per cent dark matter and 72 per cent dark energy;
the visible matter that we are familiar with is confined to the tiny
remainder, just 5 per cent of the total.

At present, the growing awareness that we simply have no grasp of
most of reality has led to a plethora of imaginative and exotic
hypotheses involving extra dimensions, branes, variable energy
fields, adjustments to the general theory of relativity, and more.
Astronomy is a key part of efforts to explore some of the deepest
questions about the nature of the universe, and the prospects for
discovery are thrilling and important: not just in cosmology but in
fundamental physics. Any nation with pretensions to be at the
forefront of science must remain fully part of it.

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Weblinks

International Year of Astronomy 2009
http://www.astronomy2009.org/
Gemini Observatory
http://www.gemini.edu/public/
Biography of Galileo
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Galileo.html