AIAA San Francisco Section Newsletter
September 1994

Armageddon as a Spectator Sport
Shoemaker-Levy Meets Jupiter
Brenda Forman

	Wow.  What a show.  Fireballs the size of earth.  
Armageddon live and in living color.  Jupiter taking it on 
the chin, film at eleven.  A real-time demonstration of the 
turbulence of our little solar system.  It even made some 
Congressmen worry that it might happen here and tell NASA to 
do a ten-year study of the danger.

	How the world has changed.  Not so very long ago, the 
ideas of a turbulent universe was actually scientific taboo, 
and advocating it meant you risked ridicule -- or even worse 
-- in scientific circles.  Remember Immanuel Velikovsky's 
notorious book, Worlds in Collision ?  It piled its 
unorthodoxies high, wide and handsome, insisting that the 
universe and the solar system were very chancy and chaotic 
places indeed.  So outraged was the scientific establishment 
that it systematically tried to block the book's publication.

	Now we watch catastrophe by remote and flip channels 
looking for the best pictures.

	You ought to read Velikovsky's book, by the way; it's a 
real page-turner.  Argue with its data and challenge its 
conclusions if you like, but the point is the furious, 
unreasoning hostility that greeted its defiance of the 
received astronomical dogma of its times.  Intriguingly 
enough, at least some of it subsequently proved to be true, 
notably Velikovsky's insistence that Venus, which the 
orthodox theory of the time held to be a wet, cool, cloudy 
world, was instead hot and hellish.  Many years later, when 
the Magellan probe discovered a Venusian surface temperature 
in excess of 500 F, I fully expect that Velikovsky was 
gloating in his grave.

	Contradicting orthodox dogma could also get you a lousy 
grade in college.  I recall being a freshman -- in a leading 
Ivy League college that really should have known better -- 
and doing an English term paper on the origins of the solar 
system.  I diligently researched the rival theories of the 
time.  The respectable one insisted that the solar system was 
unique, created as is.  The other, formulated by Ren
Laplace, held that the planets formed out of dust clouds 
surrounding the young sun, which of course implied that 
planets might occur throughout the universe.  The Laplace 
theory seemed remarkably more reasonable to me, and I said so 
in my paper.  My English teacher was so threatened by this 
challenge to received orthodoxy (and possibly, I darkly 
suspect, by the "un-ladylike" nature of the subject matter!) 
that she gave my paper an insultingly low mark.

	And now the Hubble Space Telescope is taking pictures of 
those very dust clouds, and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto 
Rico has even found a quasar 1500 light years away that is 
circled by no less than three planets.

	All that in less than a lifetime.  In just a few 
decades, Newton's orderly, clockwork universe has yielded to 
one that is turbulent, often unpredictable and of once 
unthinkable variety.  The 18th Century exulted in its belief 
that it had deciphered the laws of an orderly, comprehensible 
universe.  The 20th Century is uneasily discovering that it 
knows a lot less about that universe than it once thought and 
that rather than an infinitely wondrous clockwork mechanism, 
it is, equally wondrously, often disorderly, possibly 
threatening and, just possibly, ultimately incomprehensible.

	Personally, I side with Arthur C. Clarke's assertion 
that, "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it 
is stranger than we can imagine."  That, of course, does not 
in any way chill my ardor for seeking to understand it -- nor 
my mesmerized fascination in witnessing its acts of 
spectacular violence such as we were regaled with this past 
month.  I'd hate to see that comet headed for earth, but I 
could hardly unglue myself from the screen when it was safely 
headed for Jupiter.

	Shoemaker-Levy meets Jupiter, incidentally, was by way 
of being the hit of the television season, drawing major 
viewership the whole week.  Too bad we can't stage something 
like that more frequently.  This was the first time since 
Apollo 11 that space has had good ratings!