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.