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GELFAND’S WORLD - I watched the eclipse here as it got to about fifty percent, and then on tv as it passed from Texas to Arkansas to Indianapolis and ultimately to Niagara Falls (and finally, finally to a place called Houlton, Maine). The Television networks traveled from the one to the other, tracing out the eclipse from south to north and west to east.
There was at least one attempt to turn the eclipse into something frightening. That strange Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene tried to turn the eclipse (and a minor earthquake) into God's Wrath.
"God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent.
Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come.
I pray that our country listens."
(Marjorie Taylor Greene, reported 4.6.24)
You almost had to remember the prophetic words in the original Ghost Busters movie, where Bill Murray and Dan Ackroyd warned of Old Testament level violence, the evil of demons, and the specter of dogs and cats living together.
I guess you can treat the idea of an earthquake as a sign from God if you really try, but a total eclipse of the sun is treated by most people as equivalent to a trip to the Super Bowl, except maybe that the price of the ticket is less.
When the countdown to totality reached zero, the assembled eclipse watchers reacted by spontaneously cheering. Those who were interviewed on camera spoke of excitement and shamelessly spoke of their own emotion. This included a couple of front-line NBC announcers.
For hundreds of thousands of people, it was a party. People gathered in football stadiums and managed to have their moment without alcohol or anger towards the other team. Some commenters made that point explicitly. NBC's Al Rocker referred to it as a "shared communal experience."
Ordinary folks and announcers spoke similarly:
"Oh my gosh!
"Wow!
"You can see Jupiter and Venus!"
I have a modest interpretation to suggest about the above comments. I don't think that anyone treated the eclipse as some sudden gift of God or wrath of God type thing. We have all known the timing and path of the eclipse (and the next one, and the next one) for years. The physics of celestial bodies as determined by Newton and Einstein tell us the timing and the light-paths. But only a select few of us managed to make all the arrangements, do the traveling, and be there in the path of totality on the right day and at the right time. It was, if nothing else, a mass celebration by a relatively few people that they had made it there and were celebrating their presence in what they called "a once in a lifetime experience."
We might take a moment to consider the extremely limited amount of actual science that was taught by the networks' scientific assistants. There were a number of people who were there sporting NASA badges, but network television was careful to avoid taking us to an astronomy department in a major American university, where we would be taught about the inner workings of the sun.
For once, I'm going to agree with this approach. It was a party that involved something more massive than the Rose Parade or the World Series, and the eclipse watchers and us television viewers were entitled to our moment of happiness.
A scientific representative did manage to explain one thing about how people were reacting that perhaps goes far to explain the emotional resonance: As he explained, we get to learn something about the movements of planets and moons in school, but aside from a few very commonplace things, we don't have direct experience of how mighty the phenomena really are. The ability of something to block out the sun well enough to cast the earth into shadow and darkness is a startling experience, even when you know it is coming. To be there and suddenly no longer see the sky is remarkable and something that will be remembered.
We might take note of a modest burst in sarcasm that came with the eclipse. There were plenty of jokes about how this would affect flat earthers. I would offer a slightly less humorous addition. The same science that explains and predicts the exact course of a solar eclipse right down to the second is a powerful tool. That same tool predicted global warming, and now makes predictions about its effects. Those predictions are not (and cannot) be as precise as predicting eclipses, but they are correct and predictive in their own way.
Natural phenomena are not always so entertaining and benign as a solar eclipse. To repeat myself, every time that a southern governor holds a press conference to warn people to leave the shore because a hurricane is on the way, he is relying on the same science that factors global warming into its predictions. It's time that science be recognized for what it is and be allowed to become that same "shared communal experience."
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected].)
