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Bob Berman

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Bob Berman at IdeaFestival 2009

Robert "Bob" Berman (born 1946) is an American astronomer, author, astronomy columnist, lecturer, science popularizer, radio personality, and astronomy editor of The Old Farmer's Almanac. He directed from 1986 to 1998 the summer astronomer program at Yellowstone National Park for the Yellowstone Institute and the National Park Service (NPS) and from 1995 to 2000 was an adjunct professor of astronomy and physics at Marymount College, Tarrytown. Berman has led many aurora and solar eclipse tours and has appeared on CBS This Morning, the Today Show, and the Late Show with David Letterman.

Quotes

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  • Originally, the seven star categories were labeled A, B, and so on, according to how much hydrogen emission was in their light. But the sequence soon got reshuffled according to the stars' temperature. For more than a century now, astronomers everywhere have known these star types—O, B, A, F, G, K, M—as intimately as chefs know their fundamental seasonings or geologists the basic kinds of rock. The letters are a continuum from the bluest, hottest, most massive stars (types O and B) to the reddest, coolest ones (type M). In between are creamy white, moderate stars of type G (like the Sun) and yellow or orange type K. There are no green stars in the universe.
  • Slowed and cooled by the thick lower atmosphere, meteors no longer incandesce as they approach the surface and are barely warm when they land. On August 31, 1991, one smashed into a lawn next to two boys in Noblesville, Indiana, who immediately picked it up and later described it as slightly warm to the touch. In fact, meteors are not hot enough to glow once they've dipped below fifty miles in altitude, having decelerated dramatically from their original fierce speed of twelve to forty-five miles per second down to anywhere from a twentieth to half a mile per second. But that's still fast enough to cause trouble.
    Discover magazine's "Risk" issue (May 1996) presented statistical evidence that we're each six times more likely to die from a meteor impact than in an airliner crash. The reason: The post-impact effects of a meteor a few miles wide can wipe out most or all of the human race, while relatively few of us will ever be crash victims.
  • Just a century ago, the local realism mind-set of science, and even common sense, held that all objects, including atoms and photons, have an existence independent of our observation of them. But that's been replaced by a more modern view—that our observation itself is necessary for the very existence of photons and electrons, a spooky prospect.
    But does an electron's wave function collapse and turn into an actual particle if a cat is watching? Would light always be waves and never discrete photons if no humans were around? Our best answers are "Who knows?" and "Yes" respectively, but obviously this whole business is Wonderland-strange.
  • Hale and Carnegie believed that great discoveries demanded the world's biggest telescope, and they set out to build it. Site tests for the area around Mount Wilson, then a dark and sleepy region outside Los Angeles, began in 1903. The men soon completed a behemoth that had a mirror sixty inches wide, the largest in the world. Then in 1917, also at Mount Wilson, they outdid themselves with the completion of the hundred-inch Hooker colossus and its nine-thousand-pound optical surface made of melted wine-bottle glass, which explains why that telescope has a green mirror, a fact capable of stumping any Jeopardy! champion. In that era before rural electrification, each telescope precisely tracked stars with a mechanical drive mechanism propelled by two-ton falling weights.
  • "Chapter 1. The Growth of Nothingness. Journeys in an Exploding Universe". Zoom: From Atoms and Galaxies to Blizzards and Bees: How Everything Moves. Hachette+ORM. 2014. ISBN 9780316217422.  (293 pages)
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