While cynics, religious tyrants, city lights, and poor education have done their best to turn us off to the heavens, the alluring beauty, the staggering expanse and the remarkable history in the heavens draws us in like no other discipline.
In this century, we have witnessed the most incredible explosion in scientific knowledge I can imagine. We have gone from not understanding why the stove was red, to a stunningly complete description of microscopic physics. We have gone from a complete misunderstanding of space and time, to a full picture of the intermingling of space, time and matter. We have gone from test rockets to men on the moon. We have even gone from pencil and paper to desktop machines that do 200 million computations per second. But perhaps more staggering, we have gone from a Universe which contained only a small galaxy of chemical burning stars in which the Sun was centralized, to a Universe one million times larger, born in a primeval fireball inflating faster than the speed of light; one which cooled into a delicately structured web of rich and glorious galaxies brimming with nuclear powered stars, living and dying, even exploding into spectacular supernovae after forming in dense clouds of gas and dust.
And, unlike so many other fields, astronomy is just getting started, for countless mysteries, even embarrassments remain to be unscrambled. The excitement is just beginning for us. With new observational tools such as the Hubble Space Telescope, the Space Infrared Telescope Facility, the Keck Telescopes and the Digital Sky Survey coming on line, the very near future looks to be a wonderfully fruitful time for our field.
We seek to answer the unanswerable, to ascertain our place in the Universe armed only with fact, not supposition, myth or prejudice. Can there be a mightier call? Not for me.
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