"The stars on a clear winter's night have perhaps novaed a thousand years back, but persist as an undeniable current event," Richard Powers informs us in Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. "The realities of the past become true only when they intersect the present." Powers draws with dying starlight a clever if rather pedantic metaphor. Only one problem-it's pure malarkey. Of the two thousand stars you can see with the naked eye, most are close neighbors of ours. Vega, for example, is only 23 light-years away; the light we see now left it during the Reagan administration. Even the distant giants like Rigel or Deneb are within five hundred light-years. A star's life, by comparison, spans of millions or billions of years. What are the chances that even one of them went nova in the short time it took the light to get here? You do the math.
It turns out that this "dead star" misconception is widespread. Ask anyone you meet, and they will believe that at least some of the stars we can see overhead really are burnt out. So we shouldn't blame Powers, though he is hailed as a genius of literature and science, and a Very Sharp Guy in general. But look-Three Farmers was first published in 1985, and the blunder slipped through a company of editors, supposedly Ivy Leaguers, not to mention a battalion of readers, brainy East Coast New Yorker types, all the way to page 21 of my 1992 HarperCollins paperback.
Folks, I'm not a scientist. I've never taken an astronomy class and only dabbled in Biology. Yet it seems I can't pick up a novel or volume of poetry without running aground on bad science. In one of his essays in The Experience of Literature, celebrated critic Lionel Trilling refers to a stout as a rodent (stoats are weasels-about as closely related to rodents as your dog or cat). Near the end of Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry writes: "Far away to the southeast the low leaning horn of moon, their pale companion of the morning, was setting finally..." Since when does the moon set in the east? My personal favorite, though, is from Andrew Hussey's Paris-The Secret History, an otherwise absorbing read. On page 103 he tells us about the evolution of Parisian maps: "The axis shifted in the next fifty years as maps were turned around 360 degrees to reflect more accurately the division of political power in the city..." Okay, if the map was turned 360 degrees it would be ... exactly the same map. A 90 degree turn would put it on its side (is that what you were going for there, Andrew?).
No field of science appears to be free from insidious falsehoods begat by literary writers and their ilk. Yet these same coves get worked up into a froth over a missed quotation mark. Forget typos. What about misinformation?
Perhaps the solution is for all the large publishers to have a scientist or two on hand, just to check things over. At least try to sneak a copy of the book under the door of the Astronomy department. The arrangement could even be mutually beneficial-scientists might, perhaps, begin writing papers that do not resemble something spit out by a Unix script and mixed in my blender. And they wouldn't be deluded into thinking they can own words. Change all the textbooks you want, boys, but Pluto will remain a "planet" in the English vernacular, just as tomatoes are "vegetables" and Europe is a "continent".
- Joel Van Valin