Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from ...

PART I
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Bad Astronomy
Begins at Home
There’s an old joke about a family packing up to move. When
their neighbors ask them why they are moving, they reply, “We
heard that most fatal accidents happen within ten miles of home,
so we’re moving twenty miles away.”
Sometimes I wish it were that easy. As a relatively new parent,
I hear a lot about how much education my daughter gets at home.
We teach her how to talk, read, do math, socialize, watch TV, argue
with us, get her way, be petulant if she doesn’t, and so forth. But
often it’s the things we don’t mean to teach that stick. Kids are natural
scientists. They watch, absorb information, repeat experiments,
and their laboratory is their immediate neighborhood: home, parents,
friends, television.
Unsurprisingly, not all the information they gather is accurate.
Astronomy may be the study of everything outside the Earth—
that’s not a bad definition—but bad astronomy starts at home.
Why travel to some distant galaxy halfway across the observable
universe when you can find examples of errant science right in your
own fridge, or even in the bathroom? Science is a way of describing
the universe, and the universe surely includes egg cartons and
your toilet.
In the next few chapters we’ll see how, like charity, bad astronomy
begins in the home. Unfortunately, it doesn’t stay there. You
may try standing an egg on its end on the first day of spring at
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