The thing about astrophysics, see, is that astrophysics is impossible.
Imagine, if you will, an astrophysical object. As an example, picture a black hole swallowing a star.
Are you picturing it?
Now think about where you’re looking from. Chances are, you’re at some point up above the black hole, watching the star swirl around, seeing something like this:
Where are you in this situation? On a spaceship? Looking through a camera on some probe?
Astrophysicists don’t have spaceships that can go visit black holes. Even the longest-ranging probes have barely left the solar system. If an astrophysicist wants to study a black hole swallowing a star, they can’t just look at a view like that. Instead, they look at something like this:
The image on the right is an artist’s idea of what a black hole looks like. The three on the left?
They’re what the astrophysicist actually sees. And even that is cleaned up a bit, the raw output can be even more opaque.
A black hole swallowing a star? Just a few blobs of light, pixels on screen. You can measure brightness and dimness, filter by color from gamma rays to radio waves, and watch how things change with time. You don’t even get a whole lot of pixels for distant objects. You can’t do experiments, either, you just have to wait for something interesting to happen and try to learn from the results.
It’s like staring at the static on a TV screen, day after day, looking for patterns, until you map out worlds and chart out new laws of physics and infer a space orders of magnitude larger than anything anyone’s ever experienced.
And naively, that’s just completely and utterly impossible.
And yet…and yet…and yet…it works!
Crazy people staring at a screen can’t successfully make predictions about what another part of the screen will look like. They can’t compare results and hone their findings. They can’t demonstrate principles (like General Relativity) that change technology here on Earth. Astrophysics builds on itself, discovery by discovery, in a way that can only be explained by accepting that it really does work (a theme that I’ve had occasion to harp on before).
Physics began with astrophysics. Trying to explain the motion of dots in a telescope and objects on the ground with the same rules led to everything we now know about the world. Astrophysics is hard, arguably impossible…but impossible or not, there are people who spend their lives successfully making it work.
(David Strumfels) -- With a chemistry background, not astrophysics, I have to wonder where quantum mechanics stacks up. TO give one example, the hydrogen atom:
We see the electron orbiting about the proton nucleus, an image we probably saw in high school, and the quantized orbits added by Bohr don't alter what we see significantly (though it is a significant addition). Now, physics teaches us that an object in orbit about another orbit possesses angular momentum -- which means it is changing direction continuously.
But the electron here possesses no angular momentum, according to quantum mechanics. It's worse that that; the electron has not exact space at anytime we specify. It is attracted to the nucleus, yes, but outside of that it could be anywhere in the universe, though mostly like close to the nucleus. I hesitate to go into this further, except that the electron occupies well defined orbitals, which describe its spatial distribution through all space. The orbitals are squares of the wave function describing the electron, and has a simple formula like this:
And this is just the simplest of all atoms, hydrogen. Try to work out more complicated atoms, and you run up against the three body equation, meaning there is no exact solution at all. Same with molecules molecules ... you get the idea.
In the end I won't judge, because I understand neither astrophysics or quantum mechanics well enough to draw a comparison. As for molecules, I can only give a picture, in this case of hemoglobin. Here there is structure built upon structure, built upon structure -- the final structure being the atomic orbitals of hydrogen and other atoms.
