by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I put on PBS for a couple of space-themed shows, including a
NOVA episode (it always rankles me that among the listed sponsors of NOVA are “The David Koch Fund for the Advancement of
Science,” when David Koch and his brother Charles are among the major contributors
to Republican politicians who trash
science in general and human-caused climate change in particular — the
influence of the Kochs and Exxon Mobil on PBS was reason enough why Greg Palast
called it the “Petroleum Broadcasting System”) that offered instant coverage of
last Monday’s total solar eclipse. It was fun once again to see the eclipse
footage from Salem, Oregon and Casper, Wyoming — Charles and I had watched some
of it “live” on MS-NBC, whose ubiquitous talking heads stopped talking about Donald
Trump long enough to let us enjoy one of the wonders of nature — and it was
remarkable that NOVA’s filmmaker,
Martin Gorst, was able to throw together a reasonably credible and interesting
documentary on the eclipse in just two days. Obviously a lot of the interviews
with solar experts were conducted “before the fact” — one of the interviewees
even gave the game away by identifying the eclipse as something that was going
to happen in the near future — but the show was still a good example of
“instant television.” The episode, called “Eclipse Over America” — a reference
to the fact that this was the first total solar eclipse whose line of totality
went all the way across the U.S. since the 19th century — made the
point that the real importance of eclipses for scientists studying the sun is
it gives us the only chance we have to see the corona, the sun’s atmosphere,
because at all other times the intense light from the sun itself renders the
corona invisible.
The corona is important because it’s actually hotter than most of the sun’s interior and because it sends
out solar flares, which contain magnetic pulses that, if they land on earth
(which, fortunately, they usually don’t) and make it through the protection of
the earth’s own magnetic field, they can short out entire power grids and screw
up radio and TV reception. The last is a big deal not only because it might get
in the way of the entertainment industry but it could screw up the power by
which satellites run. If nothing else, the eclipse program made the point that,
as one of the interviewees said, nature is still boss: an eclipse is one of the
many ways in which nature likes to tap arrogant humanity on its collective
shoulders and say, “See? There’s stuff I can do that you can’t do anything
about!” There were some interesting bits of scientific trivia on this show,
including that the pattern by which solar eclipses could be predicted was
worked out as early as 2,500 years ago in ancient Babylon and this was a major
issue for them because Babylonians believed that a solar eclipse heralded the
impending death of a king — so when an eclipse was coming, they’d appoint
someone else to be “king for a day” to take the place of the reigning monarch,
have him rule during the day of the eclipse … and then kill him. The pattern
was re-worked out by the British
astronomer Edmond Halley (best known today as the man for whom the comet was
named because he worked out the length and trajectory of its orbit and
therefore was able to predict how often it would occur in the sky) who was a
good friend of Isaac Newton and therefore had access to Newton’s calculations
of the orbit of the moon (in order to figure out the orbits of the planets
around the sun Newton worked out an entirely new sort of mathematics, which he
called the “Theory of Fluxions”; unfortunately Newton thought it was important only as a tool to make his astronomical calculations, so
Johann Gottfried Leibnitz got the credit for inventing this mathematical tool
and it was Leibnitz’s name for it, calculus, which stuck), which Halley used to
figure out when the sun, moon and earth would be in the right conjunction for
an eclipse to occur.
