The End of Knowledge

The title is a bit of a teaser.

For the past 50 years, I have immersed myself in matters astronomical. A voracious reader, I've pored through astronomy publications and periodicals, and drained the Internet of virtually every bit of information I can glean from it. I have about 30 years of visual and telescopic amateur astronomy, in addition. Hell, by grade seven I could talk the average person's ear off about stuff they wouldn't even have understood.

Where does that leave me? At this point, my base of general astronomical knowledge is as great as any amateur's. Ask me virtually anything about astronomy, or cosmology, or even astrophysics, and 99 percent of the time, I'll have an answer.

Let me be clear: I don't pretend to have the skills and knowledge of someone with a degree in astronomy; there are areas, such as orbital calculations, that I've not really touched on, more for lack of resources than for anything else. I haven't done calculations involving gravity (though I did deduce the rules for planetary velocity at about age 18).

Point is, to learn anything more about astronomy, I would just about have to enroll in a university. I'm running out of Internet resources; I scan the astronomy news sites daily. More and more, I find myself branching out into physics, particle physics, and quantum theory--there are plenty of resources out there, including lectures.

I watch television shows about astronomy, but generally the only new things I learn from them are minutiae (this morning, I learned that the first name of Mr. Penzias, who with Robert Wilson discovered cosmic background radiation in the 1960s, is Arnold.)

My best bet is to search university public resources, as some universities put their curriculum online. To that end, I've begun to take out my math and play with it again, so to speak. I finished high-school math a year early; and I keep my mind nimble; so it really shouldn't be a challenge.

That's it; just bitching/bragging on a beautiful spring morning.

My knee bursitis, by the way, now appears to be ebbing. Last night, my legs were merely stumps, not bloody stumps; and I'm looking forward to a day of good legs, as soon as I've done my priming walk of about 300 metres. Riding the bike actually seems to be helping; the trick is to go slow and build up gradually. My legs at this point do not have a lot of strength or stamina.

Be well,

-Bill