Some Sociology of Academic Astronomy

You need a sense of humor and of all the puns, one-liners, walking into a bar, and knock-knock jokes that could be invented, the words of the practitioners themselves in all seriousness provide the insights we expect from good nightclub comics. 

The American Astronomical Society headquarters are in Washington, D.C., which sets the stage. As Edward Gibbon said in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, sentiments in the West are different from those in the East. The AAS is run like a US Senate subcommittee with lots of rules that evolved in an environment favorable to process and procedure. The Astronomical Society of the Pacific is in San Francisco. Today and tomorrow, I am sitting in at online meetings of the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers (ALPO) which was founded in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Their quarterly print newsletter is titled The Strolling Astronomer. I am also a member of the Astronomical League, which holds its annual conventions in Albuquerque and Phoenix, among other venues. 

In line with the academic community generally, the AAS has been very keen on encouraging people to declare their gender identies in their email signatures. You will see "Dale Evans (he/ him)", and "Stanley Livingston (she/ her)" and so on. Today, in an AAS sponsored message board, I met someone like "Altair Brightstar (she/they)." Apparently, she wants to be referred to in the third person feminine singular nominative, but the third person plural nominative for the objective. I take they at them's word.

I already knew an obscure campus joke from the olden tymes when all graduate students were in the same college and same lodgings. A sociologist sat down to dinner with some biologists. After some pleasant engagement, the biologists excused themselves, saying "We have to get back to the lab to start some cultures." That gave the social scientist pause: How does one start a new culture?

It came up at all because among the chatrooms on this AAS discussion board is one dedicated to "Climate." The AAS is as committed to fighting anthropogenic global warming (AGW) as they are to fighting gender discrimination. I am not. To me sex and gender, variable though they can be, are serious business, and objectively knowable (at least in context). AGW is totally different from that.

I am currently employed writing classroom instructions for factory technicians working with optics and lasers. Wanting to demonstrate that all wave phenomena can be described by the same principles, I was on an oceanography website sponsored by the University of Rhode Island: Discovery of Sound in the Sea (here: https://dosits.org). They provide teaching points on the scientific method. Their "Facts and Myths" page is in a self-test format. They offer this: "22. One way to arrive at “scientific truth” is to conduct an opinion poll of scientists." The answer: False. They say: 

"An opinion is a personal judgment or belief, not necessarily based upon fact. On the other hand, “scientific truth” is arrived at through the scientific method, which is an orderly and very well-established process for asking questions about the natural world and testing the answers. Hypotheses that have been consistently validated through observations or experimentation can eventually be advanced to the status of theory. A theory is a thoroughly substantiated explanation of some aspect of the observable world. Theories come as close to objective truth as possible."

I found that cogent because I have attended committee meetings of the AAS where "climate deniers" have been derided. Among those denigrated was Apollo astronaut Dr. Harrison "Jack" Schmitt who is scheduled to be a guest speaker at the Astronomical League Conference (ALCON) next year. That is relevant here because it is commonly cited that "90% of scientists" accept AGW. (See fact-checking on that published in Forbes here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/uhenergy/2016/12/14/fact-checking-the-97-consensus-on-anthropogenic-climate-change/  And read support for AGW consensus from NASA here https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/ ) Opinion polls do not establish scientific truth. 

So when I saw the session on "Climate" listed under Dynamical Astronomy which usually studies orbits, celestial mechanics, and motion, I asked what the relevance of climate was.  I was directed to a webpage from the AAS Subcommitte on Professional Culture and Climate. https://dps.aas.org/leadership/climate It is really about "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion." But as physical scientists, they ignored social science and just took the vernacular meanings of "culture and climate." Close enough... stars, planets, whatever.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Is Physics a Science?

Karl Marx and the Dustbin of History 

Reflections on the Sokal Affair 

Problems with Pop Sci from Sky & Telescope (Part 2)