Questions You Should Not Ask An Astronomer
by Biman Nath
Little did I know as a teenager that the line of study I had chosen for myself was going to raise eyebrows later in my life. When people ask me about my profession, most of them show surprise, as if astronomers not only studied stars and planets but they also hailed from Mars or Pluto.
After being convinced of my terrestrial origin, however, many of them ask the next question. ‘What about astrology? You must be drawing horoscopes too?’ My answer in the negative either kills their enthusiasm in me completely, or, in some cases, makes them try their best to convince me of the powers of the zodiac.
There have been a few interesting exceptions to the rule though. Once, during my graduate years in the States, I had gone to receive a friend from the airport at Washington D. C., and we were coming back to my place in a taxi. The street was almost deserted at night and the taxi-driver had begun talking to me. After learning that I was a student of astronomy, he started discussing cosmology in earnest. ‘Dat Big Bang stuff, Man, you guys really believe dat?’
‘I’ve read Hawking’s book, y’know’, he continued, ‘but dat thing about baby universes, man, dat beats me!’ The Brief History of Time was on everyone’s lips at that time. I was beginning to enjoy his monologue. But my friend, a student of economics, couldn’t help asking me in whispers if theoretical cosmology was a common topic of conversation among the taxi-drivers in D.C. In that case, he announced, ‘I’m leaving this city NOW!’
There was another incident that had left me puzzled for several moments. I was going back to the States after a summer school in England. The lady at the passport control looked at my university papers with a somewhat ominous look on her face. Although everything was in order, one could never be sure. ‘Hmm’, she looked up, her eyes shining with a mischievous glint, ‘so you study astronomy. Did you watch the lunar eclipse last week?’
There was indeed a lunar eclipse the week before but it was too late in the night in England for me to watch. I said I hadn’t. ‘Well, you missed something — it was spectacular,’ she said. Just when I was trying to gauge where this conversation was going, there came a stunner. ‘Can you tell me when the next lunar eclipse is going to be?’ she asked.
I was stumped. It was not really the kind of information a theoretical astrophysicist like me would remember off the cuff. I remember mumbling something like ‘I really don’t know, sorry’ and thinking that some big problem probably lay in store for me. She then looked down, fumbled with the paper and the rubber stamp that she was supposed to put there, as if she couldn’t make up her mind what to do with them.
Seconds felt like eons before she suddenly looked up and broke into a big smile, saying, ‘But I do!’ She not only knew the date of the eclipse but also the exact hour. She hardly waited for me to gather myself from the shock, promptly stamped my passport, wished me luck and let me go through.
The most memorable of such incidents happened a few years ago while travelling on a train to some place which I don’t remember now. It was probably during the summer, and I was travelling alone. My fellow passengers in that ordinary second-class sleeper coach were busy chatting, probably to beat the heat of the night, and kept ordering tea at every stop. I occasionally joined them but mostly kept to myself. At some point one of them asked me what I did for a living. And suddenly the focus of the conversation changed from Bollywood stars to the stars in the sky.
When I woke up early next morning, the train was speeding through a terrain that had changed overnight, and I found my fellow passengers all intently looking at me. Bleary eyed, I wondered if something had gong wrong. Then one of them said, ‘We are all waiting for you. Have some tea — we ordered it for you at the last station.’ Another person offered biscuits.
Suddenly the images of cautionary posters from the Railways flashed through my mind: ‘Don’t take food from strangers on train!’ Where was I? I wondered if I was being taken for an absentminded scientist who would easily take the bait, and momentarily repented having introduced myself as an astronomer. Who else would rank the lowest in matters of practicality if not astronomers, and whom else should one try to dupe if not the most impractical sort of person? I thought.
I eyed the cup of tea that they held out for me, looking at the colour and imagining what secret potions might have been added to it. I glanced at the other adjoining berths and found to my horror that everyone else was asleep in the whole coach. What timing, I thought — — no one would know if I were to doze off and to be robbed before the next station came.
‘Come now, take the tea,’ the person urged, ‘we have a lot of questions for you.’
‘Excuse me?’ I blurted out. That didn’t quite sound right for the scene I had just imagined.
‘Yes, we have been discussing something and want to know the answer from you,’ He said.
‘What is it?’ I asked, surprised and confused, and took the cup from him, sitting up near the window.
‘You see,’ he said, looking all pensive, ‘what we want to know is this: you see stars in the sky, but how do you find out how far they are from us?’
‘They all look distant, no?’ quipped another. ‘So tell us.’
I couldn’t believe my ears, and looked at the cup of tea again, because I didn’t want to look at them, at the people whom I had suspected of planning a horrible crime a moment ago. I probably never felt more embarrassed in my life than I did that day.
Biman Nath is an astronomer and writer. He writes at night when he should be watching the sky, and works on astronomy when all astronomers go to sleep, because he thinks he is a theoretician and does not need to look up at the sky.