Astronomy and the kitchen sink. . - book review

Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax." By Philip Plait. John Wiley & Sons, New York, 2002. ISBN 0-471-40976-6. 277 pp. Softcover, $15.95.

In the town of Nanyuki, Kenya, located on the equator, a local man named Peter McLeary performs an intriguing demonstration for tourists. He takes them to a line drawn on the ground (the putative location of the equator) and drains a pan of water on either side of it. The water flows clockwise when the pan is north of the line, and counterclockwise when the pan is south of the line. McLeary explains that this is due to Earth's rotation, and then collects tips from the tourists.

Those tips may start drying up if some of the tourists read Bad Astronomy, a lively, informative guide to astronomy-related errors and deceptions. As Philip Plait explains, Earth's rotation does divert moving objects in opposite directions in the northern and southern hemispheres, a phenomenon known as the Coriolis effect. However, the effect is significant only over large distances (as with the movement of hurricanes, say) and not, as commonly supposed, in toilets and kitchen sinks. As for McLeary, he achieves an effect by spinning the pan as he turns to face the audience (but he gets it backwards, since the Coriolis effect would make water in the northern hemisphere spin counterclockwise).

Bad Astronomy is the first in a planned series of Bad Science books to be published by John Wiley & Sons; the next installment will be Bad Medicine. Plait, an astronomer at California's Sonoma State University, is the creator of a useful Web site called Badastronomy.com, which also delves into wrong ideas involving space and celestial objects. Bad Astronomy deals with diverse topics including the inefficacy of astrology, the non-dependence of egg balancing on the spring equinox, and the dubious claims of companies that offer to have a star named after you or a loved one.

Did NASA fake the Moon landings? Plait exposes the hollowness of the arguments put forward for such an elaborate conspiratorial hoax. As hoax theorists point out, no stars are visible in the black lunar sky in photographs taken by the astronauts. As Plait explains, the stars were too faint to show up in the short-exposure photos, which were taken in daylight when the lunar surface is brightly lit by the Sun. By the way, he asks, if NASA had taken the photos on an expensive fake set, wouldn't the agency's Soviet rivals have called attention to something as basic as a failure to put in stars? [For a fuller account, see "Fox Special Questions Moon Landing But Not Its Own Credulities," SI, May/June 2001.]

Did Venus emerge from Jupiter, pass by the Earth, and cause the "miracles" written about in the Bible, as theorized by psychoanalyst Immanuel Velikovsky in the 1950s? Plait highlights the many problems with this theory. If Venus was ejected from Jupiter, why are the two planets' compositions so different? Why are Jupiter's moons still circling the giant planet in unperturbed orbits? If Venus passed within hundreds of miles of Earth, as Velikovsky asserted, then it would have literally filled the sky (a spectacle the ancients did not note). Moreover, it's hard to reconcile such an event with such facts as that our Moon is still in orbit and that humans survived all this.

Plait is adept not only at untangling the convolutions of bogus theories but also at explaining everyday phenomena of the physical world. He clears up common confusion as to why Earth has seasons and why the Moon has phases, and may spare parents some embarrassment in fielding questions from their kids about why the sky is blue. Bad Astronomy is a powerful antidote to public befuddlement about the universe around us.

Kenneth Silber is a writer based in New York City.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
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