Errors Galore

Absent-Minded Writers

PEOPLE WHO write about astronomy, like people who write about anything else, are liable to make embarrassing mistakes. These are not necessarily due to ignorance, or failure to check facts, but absent-mindedness, as if the fingers were running away from the brain. They can also make the most amusing reading. For example, I have found myself writing that such-and-such a galaxy is ``the biggest object in the university'', and that space is filled with ``cemetery'' dust. And I once wrote ``miles'' when I meant to write ``light-years'', an error of a factor of six trillion. A fine collection of such blunders is recorded each month in the ``Here and There'' column that appears in the The Observatory magazine.

Mistakes not necessarily due to ignorance!

Consider this remarkable statement, taken from a students' text book: ``Rigel is much further away from Rigel than we are.'' I suppose the authors meant to say that another star is much further from Rigel than we are, but it sounds as it stands as if Rigel had been cut in half, and the two halves sent rocketing off in opposite directions. Here is some real absent-mindedness from another text book: ``. . . . opening up the solar system for efficient exploration by unmanned deep sea probes''; to which the Here and There editors have given the witty headline: ``Bound for Neptune Presumably.'' Sometimes there are weird compressions of time in which hundreds of millions of years just seem to disappear. ``. . . who was the first to argue that supervolcanism caused the extinction back in 1979,'' said a well-known journal. ``The history of M31 [the Andromeda galaxy] began a long time before the telescope was invented,'' said another. Quite a long time, perhaps. ``Plasma was invented in the US 30 years ago,'' said a news magazine. ``The probe entered the Jovian atmosphere at 5.04 pm local time,'' said an evening newspaper. Just in time for tea with the aliens. Here's a possible plot for a ``Mission Impossible'' story: ``Such studies aim to describe the behaviour of gases at temperatures, magnetic fields and densities that cannot be reached,'' said a university bulletin. Are astronomers sometimes drunk on duty? ``This stereo vision of the Moon has to do with libations,'' said a journal. And even the most brilliant minds can have trouble with elementary arithmetic. ``Only 73 total solar eclipses will be seen over British skies between 1AD and 3000, an average of one every four centuries,'' wrote an expert. Quite so. But I make that more like eight every four centuries. It is usually very cold at observatories, and one is advised to dress up warmly. But perhaps the opposite is true and one should wear nothing at all. ``The star 51 Pegasi is visible to the naked within the Milky Way,'' said an Australian newspaper. It seems that low Earth orbit is becoming pretty crowded. Apparently entire cities are being relocated up there. ``Before returning to Earth, the sample carrier was sealed in an argon atmosphere and returned to Leiden.'' said an experimenter's report. These are heroic times for observers. A scientific paper contained this sentence: ``We first observed the bright star SAO 12917 on December 11, 1995.'' Did you really? And no one ever observed it before? Congratulations!