A few months ago I listened to the outstanding Passage trilogy by Justin Cronin, which, like James Howard Kunstler’s World Made By Hand series, turned out to be thoroughly enjoyable and has made me reconsider my supposed distaste for post-apocalyptic fare.
I forget in which book it was in, but there is a passage where the characters have to go outside just after dark, and it’s mentioned that there’s a waning crescent moon. This is impossible, because a waning crescent won’t rise until the night’s nearly over.
To me, this sort of thing is common knowledge, but then I grew up with telescopes in the back yard and frequent visits to Griffith Planetarium. I can’t remember when I didn’t know how lunar phases work, but then I was always interested in astronomy so I probably learned a bit more about it then most people would.
Since seeing the astronomical error in the Cronin book, I must have been paying more attention, because I noticed a couple of similar errors in other novels. It’s my assumption that successful novelists tend to be well educated and observant of the world around them, so the errors do surprise me.
What I want to ask is this: How much general knowledge of astronomy is it fair to assume people typically have? We can safely assume everyone knows the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and why the days are long in the summer and short in the winter, and why the moon has phases even if they don’t fully think that through to understand what time of the day or night you can see a given lunar phase.
Maybe they knew this in high school or something, but I was out with a bunch of well educated adults 40-60 years old (minimum bachelors degree, but including a couple of lawyers and a doctor) at a nighttime picnic celebrating the Mid Autumn Festival and none of them seemed to have the foggiest notion of how the phases of the moon related to the relative position of the earth, sun and moon. Specifically why the full moon must rise at or near sunset. Nor what the equinoxes or solstices mean apart from the length of the day.
I’m not particularly interested in astronomy myself, but this blew my mind. I bet they’d be able to recall or figure it out, but basically stopped thinking about these “extraneous” things after middle or high school.
As the doctor said, “I make it a point to forget irrelevant stuff I had to learn immediately after the test”. He also was proud that he couldn’t possibly help his son with AP Biology. He was a surgeon, so things like the chemistry of respiration were “completely irrelevant to anything I’ve done in the last 20 years”
This is one a professor mentioned in an astronomy class I took way back when, he collected such bad astronomy references from literature. He told us there was a scene in the book Roots, I think it was, where the characters “Stayed awake until midnight to witness the rising of the full moon.” So just the opposite of the example in the OP.
For a lay person, I know a lot about astronomy because of all the things I watch and read, and I didn’t know that. I would classify that as an “obscure fact”. Even so, I agree that most people know very little about basic astronomy.
I really enjoy astronomy, and have a lot of fun sharing that knowledge with my children, who are age-appropriately fascinated*. I always mix up waning/waxing, as my brain tends to mix up 50/50 things like that. I think your average person has no clue that full moons rise as the sun sets, or that half moons are going to be directly overhead at sundown or sunrise, etc.
*my 6 year old and I are listening to a podcast right now about the moon, and all the questions that kids ask about it. (Why does it follow me in the car? Why do I see it during the day? Why does it change shape?) There are some good answers, but a lot of it is hard in podcast form. I think I’m going to set up a spot in our yard to do some regular observations to see that “at 5:30pm, the moon is here in the sky, the next day at that same time it’s further east…”. Anyone have any suggestions on best practices there?
If you can get even a small telescope or binoculars, let them look at the Moon through them. Particularly when it’s not full - the shadows should give a sense of the surface being actually 3d, and the Moon being a real place - it’s not just this thing in the sky, it’s really there, and has its own character.
I can’t speak for others, but if you’d stopped me over the weekend, pointed at the crescent moon that I remember seeing after dinner, and asked me if it were waxing or waning, I couldn’t have told you immediately. I’d have had to think a minute about an imagined 3-body model.
Me, too. If I have ever known that “a waning crescent won’t rise until the night’s nearly over,” I’ve not only forgotten the fact itself, I’ve forgotten having known it.
But I’m pretty sure that I never knew it, and can’t imagine a situation in which it would have been taught to me. Elementary or high school science classes, as far as I can recall, never went into that sort of detail. What waxing and waning meant, sure. What a crescent or a gibbous moon is, you bet. What time of night they can and cannot appear? Nope.
I just polled a bunch of fifty-something Muslim gents, all with graduate degrees, with an average income well north of half a million dollars. And most of them didn’t know this off the top of their heads and they’ve spent half a century ending the month of fasting based on the sighting of the new moon.
But I bet most of them can tell you Liverpool and Man City’s schedule for the next four weeks. And that’s probably more useful to them.
I’m not criticizing them. Just to be clear. I’m just somehow always surprised that intellectual curiosity has very little correlation with professional and social success.
I’ve always felt that people who excel in one specific field or at one specific thing often do so because they are totally dedicated to that single minded purpose, sometimes to the point of obsession. They don’t have time to broaden their knowledge due to intellectual curiosity. In fact, they often don’t even consider it as a logical option.
I just finished reading “The Left Hand of Darkness,” but Ursula K. Le Guin. I had never read her before, and figured I would try it.
Great book.
But, there was one passage, where she mentions the Envoy paying with Rubies, and noting that they were “Carbon-based gems” that took me right out of the story.
I can see this if they were scientists or even engineers. Maybe artists or musicians.
But these folks are in leadership positions in business (Marketing, HR, Finance). Their success is driven by being able to relate to, persuade, even inspire, a rather diverse group of people.
The Sherlock Holmes quote about not knowing that the earth revolves around the sun is appropriate here:
While knowledge about lunar phases is certainly interesting, it is by no means important to day-to-day living.
As to the OP, and how much “common knowledge” is actually common, this xkcd is on point, I think:
Basically, if you are an expert in something you can assume that the “average person” knows almost nothing about it.
For lunar phases, I think you would be lucky if the “average person” knows that the moon is bright because of reflected sunlight rather than its own light source. They probably know that the illuminated portion changes shape, but not why. And probably don’t realize that the lit portion changes which side it is on (waxing and waning, which terms they will almost certainly not know). Maybe they know that moonrise and moonset changes, but I would doubt it, even though the evidence is literally in front of them every day. There is no chance they know that the changing rising/setting times and the illuminated portion are related.
