Life, Writing, Weirdness

In addition to being the only scientist I’m aware of who lost a nose in a duel over a mathematical proof, Tycho Brahe can perhaps be credited with taking astronomy into the realm of modern science and is probably the greatest of the pre-telescope astronomers. Yes, there are some waffle words in there. So much doesn’t get written down and history is often written by people with biases in what they want passed on.

But looking past the “perhaps” and “probably”, we can see a Renaissance scientist who did an awful lot of work to push astronomy forward into the modern era. He died on (adjusted for the Gregorian calendar) 24 October 1601 at the age of 54. Accounting for the difference in our birth dates (he’s fifteen days earlier in December than I am), when I woke up on Friday morning, I was older than Brahe got to be.

I am not, let’s be clear, comparing myself to Brahe. Yes, I am also an astronomer. Yes, I can claim Danish ancestry (although the place he was born is now part of southern Sweden). Yes, I also have a well-receded hairline (rather farther than his, judging by available portraits). But that’s it. I came to science later in life, work in a completely different area of astronomy that he couldn’t have realized would exist someday, and I live in a part of the world that would barely have been ink on a map to him if he was even concerned with maps of Earth. Is there any real link between us? No, but that’s not the point of my noting the supposed occasion of my surpassing his chronological age.

The point is that so many of the great minds of the past finished their trip around the wheel at far too young an age. How often does that continue to happen? It should be less, right? Compared to the science and technology of the Renaissance, modern society has things a lot better. Average lifespan in some developed countries is three decades more than Brahe got.

Right, developed countries. In most of the so-christened developing nations you’re looking at 10-15 years less the then rich societies of the west until you start looking at places where there’s a lot of very difficult stuff going on, and only a handful of those take you down into the span that Tycho Brahe had. Keep in mind that life expectancy is an average.

And I think the real takeaway from me being older than Brahe by, so far, four days might be that it continues to happen. How many great minds don’t get to do great work because they don’t make that average or didn’t have the opportunity to even get started because they were born in the wrong place or didn’t fit the prevailing model of common wisdom of what a scientist should be at the time? And how much just didn’t get written down.

More importantly, what are the rest of us doing about it?

I think regularly about how finding the original Star Trek as a child helped build and shape the person I’ve become, about how in my eyes the underlying message of the entire franchise (across 12 series that total almost 900 episodes and 13 movies) is summed up by Gene Roddenberry wanting a trinket to market so it got shoehorned into an early third season episode: Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. We see farther, accomplish more, and build a better world to live in when we all work together. A diversity in viewpoints is always going to be better, and not just the great minds that got cut off too soon or the ones that we don’t know about.

I’ll bet that’s not where you thought this post was going to wind up.

Live long and prosper.

Be well, everyone.