Abstract
It is a truism that historians look to the past for justification of their existence, their raison d’être, and the astronomers are on the cutting edge of that which is new and exciting. But the reality is that historians provide (admittedly very imprecise) forecasts of the future. Astronomers plan trajectories for rockets to Mars and beyond the solar system, preparing us for the eventual life in space, sometime in the future, but every time they look through their telescopes or read their computer printouts of cosmic and radio waves, they are looking deep into the past. The nearest star’s light took four years to arrive here; Deneb’s took 1,600 years; the nearest large galaxy is 2.2 million lightyears away; light from quasars take 15 billion years to arrive. Clearly astronomers are looking deeply into the past, asking, “how did it all begin” and like historians, they speculate, “how will it all end”. This and other relationships between astronomical scientists and humanistic historians are explored in this chapter.
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The news is not good. The universe began 15 billion years ago, or so. A billion years later the first stars emerged. Five billion years ago the Sun was born, followed 5 hundred million years later by the birth of the Earth. That’s history. Using that knowledge astronomers speculate that in 2 billion years the Sun will warm to such a degree that life on Earth will be inhospitable. In 5 billion years the sun will swell up and die, in the process incinerating Mercury, Venus and the Earth. At about the same time, if this were not bad enough, the Milky Way will collide with the Andromeda galaxy. In 150 billion years most galaxies will have moved so far away from each other that none will be visible from any others. In 2 trillion years interstellar gas and dust will be exhausted so that no new stars will be created. In 1030 years galactic cores will collapse into black holes. In 1064 years black holes with the mass of ordinary stars will explode. In 1098 years black holes with the mass of whole galaxies will explode. All remaining stars in the universe will decay to iron in 101,500 years and finally in 10(and 75 additional zeros) iron objects will collapse, emitting bursts of X-rays and high-energy particles. It’s a very gloomy prospect.
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© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Stein, J.B. (2002). Historians and Astronomers: Same Pursuits?. In: Heck, A. (eds) Organizations and Strategies in Astronomy. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 280. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0606-4_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0606-4_16
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