God's false view

Stars Through the Looking Glass

ONE of the greatest joys in visiting New York is having lunch in the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station. Many people, even if they have not personally seen the station, will know its terminal with its magnificent chamber, five storeys high, made famous by a scene in the Hitchcock film North by Northwest in which Gary Grant tries to escape from both police and gangsters. The ceiling of this vast chamber has been recently cleaned to reveal its original painted design of the stars of various constellations. But astronomers are not pleased by what has been revealed. A notice explains that the ceiling "depicts a winter sky with 2,500 stars. Said to be backwards, it's actually seen from a point of view outside our solar system."

Grand Central Station - ceiling reveals its original painted design

What this extraordinary statement means is that the constellations are painted on the ceiling like a mirror image of what we see from Earth. Orion, for example, appears exactly in reverse, with the Belt backwards and the Great Nebula to the bottom right instead of the bottom left. The brilliant star Rigel is similarly displaced. But in fact this is not what we would see if we were "outside the solar system". In your imagination get into a starship and travel for one or two light-years. You will truly be "outside the solar system". Then look out through the portholes. The constellations will have barely changed. Orion will be more or less exactly as we see it from here. All right, then suppose that we travel out for 1,000 light-years and then look back towards Earth. Orion will now have changed completely. But it will not look remotely like the mirror-reversed constellation we see on the ceiling painting. So what went wrong with this ambitious and admittedly beautiful work of art? The ceiling painter fell into the trap of believing, like most astronomers before about 1600, that all the stars were on a sphere, equidistant from the Earth. People in ancient times liked to depict the stars, not as we see them, but as they imagined God would see them. And since God obviously lived both outside the Solar System and beyond the stars, it was evident to these thinkers that when He looked towards us, He would see the constellations in reverse. Hence the medieval habit of painting them in this way, which has been copied in America's most famous railway station. Of course, it is all nonsense since the stars vary hugely in their distances from us and in their intrinsic brightness. Orion - to me the most terrific sight in the sky - only looks the way it does because we are where we are. It would be possible, if one had the necessary computing power, to calculate what the night sky would look like from any point in the galaxy. True, the task would require tens of zillions of gigabytes (although it will one day be done to make interstellar navigation possible.) But for people in the 20th century to have publicly depicted the Universe in a way that any expert could have told them was utterly wrong was a setback to the spread of scientific knowledge. Still, the oysters in Grand Central Station are the best I have ever tasted, and one can enjoy a dozen of them at any time without having to look at that irritating ceiling.