David Gergen engages Kitty Ferguson

Note:
This is a selection of questions from the interview if you would like to read the full interview it can be found at www.pbs.org/newshour


DAVID GERGEN: The first question you must often get is, how is it that a graduate of the Julliard School of Music has come to write a book about astronomy?
KITTY FERGUSON, Author, Measuring the Universe: Well, I guess I could say that Julliard had a fantastic physics department, but that's not the case. I think to understand that, you have to go back to my childhood. And my book begins with a story about how my father took my brother and me out when I was nine years old to measure the height of the windmill on my grandparents' farm. And this was a huge adventure. Both my brother and I had all sorts of ideas of how we might do this, very complicated ideas. But what my father taught us was very simple, and I was positively elated when we had done it. I felt that we had somehow outwitted that old windmill without even touching it. We measured its shadow, and by measuring its shadow, we learned its height. And this was not an isolated incident in my childhood. My father would we sat at the dinner table, he would rearrange the salt and peppershakers or the butter to explain how the planets orbited the sun, or how the electrons move around an atom. And I grew up -- because he was a musician. He taught music in the schools. He was not a mathematician or a scientist. But I grew up thinking there was nothing odd about somebody who was a fine musician also having this passion for science and math. And I also grew up thinking of science and math not as something necessarily you had to do for a living, or that you had to do in school, or that a bunch of other people did that didn't include me. It was really something for an adventure, a summer outing. And I think that feeling has stuck with me through my whole life, even though -- maybe partly because I didn't take that much math and science in school. It was always a -- you know, a fun thing.

DAVID GERGEN: The central point for so many astronomers for some 1,700 years was that man was at the center of the universe, the Earth was at the center of the universe, and that lasted right from essentially the ancient days right up until the 16th century.
KITTY FERGUSON: That's true. There was somebody, though, living at the time of Eratosthenes named Aristarchus, who proposed that it was it was actually the sun that was in the center of the system, and that the earth and all the other planets orbited that. And that idea was not accepted in that time. There was really no reason for anybody to accept it then. There was no evidence that that was so. In fact some of the evidence that might have indicated it was so was missing. But we have to admit that he thought of it. This is 200 years B.C.. But yes, we did think we were the center of the whole thing. Everything revolved around us.

DAVID GERGEN: That was the system that came from -- Ptolemy figured that out.
KITTY FERGUSON: That's right, and earlier, from Aristotle before that, and then was really brought to -- I guess you can say, brought to a head with Ptolemy, because he managed to systematize everything into circles and spheres, and it was a brilliant achievement, his. We sometimes say, you know, Ptolemy was wrong, Copernicus was right. But Ptolemy's achievement was one of the -- just really the premier intellectual achievements of all human history. There's no doubt about it.

DAVID GERGEN: Is it the coming of the telescope that changed our understanding that the Earth was no longer at the center of things, but rather the Sun -- the Earth went around the Sun -- the Copernican revolution?
KITTY FERGUSON: Well, the interesting thing is that Copernicus lived before the telescope, so that's not where he got the idea. And, of course, you want to know what suddenly happened, what was different for Copernicus? One of the things that was different for Copernicus was that the Ptolemaic astronomy by this time had become very cumbersome, complicated astronomy. And Copernicus was a good enough mathematician to be totally annoyed with this. It just wasn't -- also, Copernicus had a belief that a simpler explanation was much more likely to be the right explanation, and that was nothing new with him either, but he applied it to this plan or this systematization of the universe.

Full Interview

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