WHEN an official was unexpectedly promoted, one
newspaper commented with excitement on his ``meteoric rise". The
ignorance of this remark infuriated me, since meteors do not rise: they
fall. There is a deplorable tendency among people who know nothing about
science to use scientific terms and get them wrong.
One of the worst examples (although it has nothing to
do with astronomy) is the pejorative use of the word ``dinosaur".
Any group of people seen as reactionary, obstinate, or vaguely stuffy
are routinely labelled ``dinosaurs". This is despite the fact that
the dinosaurs, the most successful group of species that ever lived,
lasted 160 million years, more than 2,000 times longer that the whole
history of modern humans!
Another frequently misused term is
``light-year". People wrongly use it to denote time instead of
distance, misled perhaps, because it contains the word ``year".
Tony Blair did this in a recent speech. But he was in good company. In
the first Star Wars movie, Han Solo, played by Harrison Ford,
says: "I can get to [such-and-such a world] in 12 parsecs. ``This
is like saying: "I can get to Birmingham in 100 miles."
``Galaxy" is often misused, even when we are not
talking about chocolate bars or military aircraft. A news agency
reported last year that three planets had been found ``in another
galaxy, 44 light years away". Ominous news indeed, if another
galaxy had sneaked up so close! The correct term of course was ``solar
system".
People say the strangest things about black holes. A
meteorologist, explaining magnetic storms which disrupt electricity
supplies, was quoted as blaming ``exploding black holes on the surface
of the Sun". Surely he meant sunspots?
There is a popular but lunatic theory that the Sun,
for some reason or other, will turn into a black hole and swallow up the
Earth. This cannot happen. Even if, by some extraordinary procedure, it
became a black hole, its gravity, coming from a point source, would
affect Earth exactly as it does today. Admittedly our days would become
somewhat dark and cold, but that is another story.
There exists indeed a respectable theory that one day
Earth will be struck by a ``black apocalypse". Statistically, this
could happen about once every 100 billion years. A black hole of several
solar masses could rush into the Solar System and tear our planet to
wisps of debris. Such a catastrophe could be occurring even now in the
star system Cygnus X-1.
Statisticians, incidentally, can talk as much
nonsense as anyone, usually because they misunderstand their data. Mark
Twain once satirised them nicely: ``In the space of 176 years the
Mississippi river has shortened itself by 242 miles. [Therefore] in the
old Silurian system the Mississippi was upwards of 1.3 million miles
long. Seven hundred and forty two years from now, the Mississippi will
be only one and three quarter miles long. There is something fascinating
about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such
a trifling investment of fact.''
