Clever-Name said:
I have to strongly second this. I am very discouraged with astronomy/astrophysics right now due to a course I just took that covered things like magnitude, star formation, stellar evolution, black holes, galaxy classification, etc.
One thing that I've always been able to do is connect the math with the "feeling." The mathematics of astrophysics is a bit like looking at a race car or airplane and someone hands you the blueprints to see how everything works. I look at a ball of burning gas and someone hands me the blueprints. Something that helps me understand that the math is that I imagine myself reaching into the core of the star. What does it feel like? What does it smell like? What does it taste like?
Something that I encourage people to do is to take classes in the humanities seriously. One reason for this is that if you take classes in literature and poetry and understand how to describe feelings and emotions, you can then take the dry mathematics that you learn in physics class and then connected them with the feeling.
A lot of people get interested in astrophysics and astronomy by reading Sagan and/or Hawking or science fiction like Star Trek or Doctor Who. What's interesting is that at some point, you have to stop reading and start writing. Sagan called Cosmos "A Personal Voyage", and every astronomer or astrophysics takes their own personal voyage through space and time. Humanities classes help you describe your voyage to other people, but also to yourself.
And not all of the feelings are spiritual or uplifting. My view of the universe is somewhat cold, depressing, and more than a little angry. (see The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin or The Star by Arthur C Clarke to see how nasty the universe could be). Still it's a feeling.
I suppose a lot of it was fueled by being exposed to remarkably clear night skies and having the telescope out, there is something mesmerizing about seeing a dot in the sky but looking at it in a telescope and you see the rings of Saturn or the spot of Jupiter.
For me, there is something mesmerizing about seeing a dot in the sky. Looking really closely and then still seeing a dot. What are you? Imagine being in a totally dark room and then seeing a dot of light. You walk toward the dot of light, because you see nothing else. But the light never changes. You still walk toward the light, and then you start keeping careful notes about brightness, color, angular size. You don't stare at the light, because it's really, really faint and if you look at it directly it disappears because the sensitive parts of your eye are in the corner. You keep walking. The light seems to move, but you realize that this is an illusion because you close your eyes for a few seconds at a time, and the light seems still.
You keep walking toward the light. Days, months, years, decades pass, and you still don't know what that light is. It's still a mystery, but you just keep walking toward it. By walking at a different angles, you've established that the light is very far away and that you'll never reach it. But you still keep walking toward it knowing that you probably will die without understanding what it is.
That sort of describes my world, and it's different from Sagan's, or Hawking's, or Asimov's, or Rodenberry's, or Sydney Newman's, or Russell Davies's, or Stephen Moffat's.
Also, one thing that I find fascinating about astrophysics is that once you know just a little about it, then the ordinary becomes extra-ordinary. Let's forget a moment about the stars in the sky and look at the black void between the stars. The black void really shouldn't be there. (see Olber's Paradox) Once you realize *why* this black void just shouldn't be there, then you get chills down your spine every time you look at the night sky, or at least I do, and then you look closely at the sky, and then you realize that the sky is on fire (see Cosmic Microwave Background) and you can watch the heavens burn and smell their ashes.
Then seeing the images from Hubble of nebulae and galaxy clusters, especially the deep field image, it invokes a feeling of awe and inspiration to understand how these things came to be and the physics behind it.
Maybe. For me seeing those images makes me sad, depressed, and angry. One problem with physics is that I can hand you the apple, but you have to choose whether or not to bite into it, and once you bite into the apple, I can't control what you end up seeing, and what you might make you wish you had never bitten into the apple. When I look at the Hubble deep field images of galaxies, I see death and the destruction of world. You are watching stars die, you are watching the entire universe die. You look at the temperature curve of the universe. It's like looking at the cooling rate of a corpse. Same thermodynamics.
And there there is fear...
Let's go back to the point of light. What I just described of me walking forever toward the unknown light is a fragment of a dream, but it's not a nightmare. I may spend my entire life walking toward a point of light in the sky without never really understanding what it is, but that doesn't frighten me. Where the fragment of a dream turns into a fragment of a nightmare is just moments before I take my last breath and can walk no longer toward the faint point of light in the sky. For no reason at all, it disappears...
