Weinberg, Steven - The Missons of Astronomy

10/09/2009

The New York Review of Books Vol 56 No 16 10/22/2009

This is an article in the popular press about the history of astronomy, its importance in the ancient world, and the places it currently occupies in science. The thesis is that astronomy was developed as a science much earlier than other studies like physics or biology, probably because the movements of the stars and planets followed such regular patterns. The practical also contributed to the advancement of astronomy since it assisted with navigation, predicting the seasons and telling the time. As other mechanisms like GPS and atomic clocks have become widely used, the practicality of astronomy has become diminished. Yet astronomy has become much more important in figuring out our cosmology and sub-atomic laws of nature. For instance, it took observations of the deflection of light around a gravitational field to confirm the General Theory of Relativity.

The article ends with bemoaning the misplaced priorities of NASA and other government funding for manned spaceflight instead of unmanned, arguing that more, and more useful, scientific data could be collected by unmanned space missions.