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

IDIOM’S DELIGHT 33
Incidentally, at the end of that album there is a quiet voiceover:
“There is no dark side of the moon. As a matter of fact, it’s
all dark.” In a sense that line is correct: the Moon is actually very
dark, only reflecting less than 10 percent of the sunlight that hits
it. That makes it about as dark as slate! The reason it looks so
bright is that it is in full sunlight, and that means there’s a lot of
light hitting it. Ironically, even though six Apollo missions landed
on the near side of the Moon, they only explored the tiniest fraction
of the surface. In essence, even the near side of the Moon is
largely unexplored, and it’s still very far away.
Now, to be honest, there may be a part of the Moon that’s
always dark. Near the poles there are deep craters with raised rims
around them. From that region the Sun is always near the horizon,
just like at the poles on Earth. Since the craters on the Moon can
be deep, the Sun may always be hidden by the rim of the crater.
Sunlight never reaches the bottom of such craters! There is tantalizing
evidence of ice at the bottom of such craters, untouched by
the warming rays of the Sun. If it’s true, there are two major implications.
One is that the ice can be used by lunar colonists for air
and water, negating the need to carry it along with them from
Earth. That saves a vast amount of money, fuel, and effort.
The other implication is that the phrase “dark side of the
Moon” actually has a limited truth to it—as far as the dark crater
bottoms go! Maybe I need to start a “Not-So-Bad Astronomy”
web site.
QUANTUM LEAP
Sometimes the advertising executives we discussed earlier aren’t
satisfied with being “light-years ahead” of their competitors. They
come up with a product so revolutionary that it leaves the others
in the dust. It’s more than light-years ahead, it’s a whole new product.
How to describe it?
Sometimes they say it’s a “quantum leap” ahead of the others.
But how big a leap is that, really?
The nature of matter has been a mystery for thousands of years
(and really, it still is). Contrary to our modern bias that ancient