
A week ago, I experienced my first ever total solar eclipse. For 51 seconds, at
8:27 PM, the moon's umbra passed over my town and my head. Sadly we had a cloud
blocking the celestial kiss during totality, but the experience of the sky
darkening and lightening faster than normal was as freaky as I had been told.
There were about a thousand people gathered at the edge of our town's
west-facing waterfront to witness the event. I expected more oohs and ahhs than
I heard, but perhaps that's the cloud's fault. Several whispered whoas escaped
my lips during totality. The sea birds also surprised me; I was expecting them
to be more of the original definition of nonplussed, but they were the new,
modern, opposite definition. One of the friends I was with thought aloud,
"Wouldn't it be cool if the whole town gathered to watch the sunset _every_
day?"

In the days leading up to the event, everyone in town was talking about it;
where to buy special glasses, beware of the fake glasses, where to go to see it
best, etc. I personally scouted out several locations at dusk the previous week
before settling on the waterfront. Every once in a while, I'd talk to a person
who did not care at all about this once-in-several-centuries event occurring in
the sky. Just a total lack of curiosity about Nature.

I've been subconsciously thinking about _why_ eclipses are important, and I
think I've come up with an answer...which I will present to you now.

## Faith

When I was younger, I used to enjoy reading and watching debates between
religious and non-religious people. The best gotcha card the religious people
could ever play was along the lines of,

> Yes, but _you_ have Faith too because _you_ have not run the experiment;
> you're just taking what the Scientists are saying on Faith! #checkmateatheists

While this is _technically_ true, it betrays an ignorance of Science's big
F-word: **Falsifiability**, as well as a whole system built around _trying_ to
disprove claims.

## Observation

One of the amazing things about Science is that we've been able to use logic and
curiosity and communication and teamwork to know about the universe in a way
that our naked eyes evolved to survive on the savannah could never tell us. No
one has ever _seen_ a cell, but we can describe to one another how to shape some
glass in a way that, when you look through it, you'll see a thing that looks a
lot like what I drew when I looked through it. Ditto for planets and galaxies.

You don't have to _believe_ in electrons that no one has ever _seen_, but our
understanding of quantum physics is how the pixels representing this sentence
are being converted into meaning in your brain.

## We'll do it live!

Eclipses are Science performing to live audience. It's a magic trick that no one
has the technology to convincingly fake. We can predict it down to the second.
And we can all gather around each other as fellow humans, regardless of our
politics or religions or race or nationality, to witness with our own naked –
but protected! – eyes that Science Works™.

If you are lucky enough to get the chance to see one, go outside.


Science

Posted in Science