Interview with Dr. Fiorella Terenzi - on "Heavenly Knowledge"

The paperback edition of
Heavenly Knowledge
released April 1999
by Avon Books.

- Your childhood inspiration began with your grandmother and her love of the stars. How did this begin?

It began in the countryside just outside of Milan, where my grandmother and I would go for walks during nighttime and look at the stars. She believed that the stars have eyes to watch us. I remember feeling as if the stars were gazing back at me, feeling as if a stellar heart was beating with mine, and in those moments, all of the loneliness I felt as a child disappeared. I felt at peace, a oneness with the Universe I had never felt before. My grandmother would say, " Remember this, most people cannot look straight into a star's eyes. They are frightened and ashamed. But not you, Fiorella. You will always be able to feel the stars looking back at you when you search with an open heart."

I often think of my first extraterrestial gaze and how I was awestruck, feeling both like the center of the universe and like an invisible micro-dot, lost in incomprehensible space. At that time, I knew nothing of quasars and black holes, or of radio telescopes, and I was unaware that a time would come in my life that I would spend "peering" through one investigating the cosmos. I only knew that the sky had suddenly opened up to me, and I would never again be the same.

The first human must have felt something similar to this when she stepped out of her cave turning her eyes skyward feeling shaken, empowered, humbled and mystified. I began to have questions; Am I a part of all of this? Does it know me? Can it show me how to construct my own internal universe?

- You believe that there will be a new way to live in the next century, even a new science.

We have become blinded by a technological curtain of abstract mathematical theorems and complex astronomical machinery, and we forget to feel the wonder of infinite space. We are failing to communicate with loquacious celestial objects. We fall into the 20th Century trap of believing that the only knowledge we can gain from the universe are objective facts and not poetic truths about our lives.

- You propose what you have named "A Cosmology for the 21st century." Tell us about it.

I feel it's time to bring the beauty, the poetry and the sense of wonder back to astronomy. I do embrace the fabulous new discoveries of astrophysics, but I do not want to stop there. I want these discoveries to swim in our imaginations, to open our hearts to new ways of thinking and feeling about life, about men and women. I want you to hear how the music of the spheres resonates with the music of our hearts. I dream a cosmology for our time in which reason and imagination are not enemies, but rather partners in appreciation of the wonders of the Universe. A new cosmology in which all the bodies in the Universe are respected as teachers, inspirers and, yes, even as lovers. I dream a cosmology in which the Goddesses of the night sky are represented in equal number as the Gods.

- Do you believe that we can both objectively learn about the universe and commune with it?

It was centuries ago when science separated from philosophy to become a purely empirical enterprise that examined objects, measured them, charted their movements and predicted their future behavior. Astronomy was separate from purely human concerns. From then on, studying the stars had to be done dispassionately. After all, this was science -- we dare not let our feelings and yearnings and personal quandaries become entangled in examining these celestial phenomena. We must be objective, the new scientists told us. Our job is to master the universe, not commune with it. Yet there I sat, strapped to a giant, state-of-the-art telescope convinced we could do both -- objectively learn about the universe and commune with it. And as the 20th Century draws to a close, I believe it is high time we started some serious (and joyful) communing with the universe. Perhaps it will take a woman scientist to show us how to combine these opposite approaches of gazing at the stars.

- What is the difference between the Science of Venus and the Science of Mars?

The science of Mars has given us a materialistic world view, with celestial objects reduced to only objects of study, and not subjects with which we can also commune. The science of Mars has isolated humankind in a world of Things. Everything gets reduced to Us and Them, and our relationship to these Things out there is about possession, even if this means only possesing knowledge about them. The Science of Venus aims toward a dynamic relationship with data, a dance between the knower and the known, giving a human perspective to our work, creating a science which aspires to cooperate and converse with Nature rather than to only quantify or dominate it. If we indulge in metaphors for our lives drawn from what we observe, and find lessons and poetry and music in what we see in the lenses of our microscopes and telescopes, we are not less devoted to scientific truth. There is a growing campaign among my female colleagues in all of the sciences to give a human perspective to our work, to create a science which aspires to cooperate and converse with Nature. We seek a science of Venus rather than a science of Mars.

-You've said that in pointing your telescope toward the night sky, you have found a universe of human emotions, and a universe that is trying to explain who we are.

Yes, I believe the Universe is trying to explain who we are. The Universe can teach us how to change, grow and even how to evolve. In my family when I was growing up, it was said that as a person is at five years old, so shall she be at thirty -- and sixty and ninety. The die is cast in our infancy and all that remains for us to do is to live out our immutable nature. Gazing at the sky with the benefit of the galactic histories we astronomers have been able to deduce from our data, I know that such immutability does not apply even to those seemingly most undeviating of all objects, stars.

- Give us an example of how we, or even a star can change.

In 1572, there occurred the most spectacular astronomical event ever witnessed on Earth with the naked eye -- a star, Tycho, in the constellation Cassiopeia, exploded in a supernova so bright that it outshone every object in the sky, with the exception of the Sun and the full moon. By the time this supernova had earned its name, it was already known that these stars themselves were not new -- only the immense thermonuclear explosions that gave them their super-visibility. For some types of supernova, the end marks the beginning of something truly original. The expelled hydrogen atoms become fused, creating helium, and when that helium burns, it creates carbon, the carbon, burning at extraordinarily high temperatures, forms neon, oxygen, and finally silicon, ending with the fusion of the silicon to form iron -- a core of iron. Voila, a new core for a new star! The transformation is complete. So from an incredibly dramatic death comes a magnificent new star with a life of its own. It is a phenomenon straight out of virtually every cosmology for time: out of death comes rebirth.

- You use the universe as a mirror for understanding how people live and love, struggle and overcome, fall and excel. What is the biggest lesson we can learn?

We are facing a Universe that is filled with emotional wonder. A Universe that is trying to offer us examples of how we can change and do better. One of the most fundamental examples I have learned by observing with my telescope, are the categories we use for dividing the celestial population. They are objects that produce their own light and objects that only reflect light, or the 'Shining and the Shined-Upon'. In the first category are the objects that burn their own interior fuel, preeminently stars, as well as the objects that burn from the friction they create as they race through gasses, like meteorites ignited by the friction with our atmosphere. And in the second category are all the heavenly bodies that bathe in the light transmitted to them. It would be easy to claim that the objects which produce their own light are the heroines and heroes of the firmament -- they are the self-starters, dependent on no one but themselves for energy, for their very existence. In the human population, they remind us of the great innovators and luminaries; the Da Vincis and Marconis, the Curies and Edisons, the Plankes and Einsteins.

These men and women ignited themselves; they drew on their own inner resources to create something new and previously unimaginable. They dared to shine among those who did not produce their own light. As if in testimony to their greatness, these self- generating heavenly bodies are surrounded by lesser, non-luminous objects that orbit them like acolytes. But there is so much more to the story than simply The Shining and The Shined-Upon, the heroes and the acolytes. The synergy between these two kinds of celestial objects is one of the primary miracles of the universe. We on Earth, the Shined-Upon, are in the thrall of our great shining star, the Sun. We are eternally dependent on it for our energy, for all the life that blooms and swims and walks on our surface. But it is also true that this life could never arise on a burning object, not on any star. Not a single life-building molecule could survive on the Sun with its surface temperature of 5,800 degrees Kelvin. The miracle of organic life requires us, The Shined-Upon -- our cool, unkindled surface, our fertile, incubating waters, our steady, ever-dependable circuit neither too dangerously close nor too dangerously far from the burning Sun. For me, the lesson here is simple, though always important to be reminded of. Every role is equally important. We are all in the same game and we are all dependent on one another. But there is another lesson for me in all of this, one that easily escapes my consciousness in my daily life, and that is, " Do not be blinded by the shining light of a star. It may be hiding a deeper truth about a relationship.

-Are relationships between the stars and planets like that of some human relationships? Are binary stars like human lovers?

I feel we are sitting on archives of celestial wisdom when I gaze at binary stars such as at Sirius A and Sirius B, a pair of binary stars that circle a common center of mass with a balance and precision so exact that you can set the Cosmic Clock by their alternating eclipses. Almost identical in size and shape, they are held together by their mutual gravitational attractions-- that is why neither one dominates the other, neither pulls its opposite off of its analogous orbit or consumes it in its flaming gases. Yet though they are similar in mass and configuration, each star has distinct properties, different surface brightness and temperature -- a unique identity. These two have danced in unison for millions of years, each taking its solo turn while the other spins patiently in eclipse awaiting visibility. I envy these two heavenly bodies with their perfect harmony, their mutual respect, their eons of total devotion to one another. They are perfect lovers. Of course, it takes some leaps of imagination to learn about love and sex from the stars... Another interesting observation I have made is that more than half the stars in the known universe come in perfectly matched pairs, the Binary Stars. With numbers like that, I am sure they are trying to tell us something. It is not simply the idea of perfect synchrony that I find so enviously attractive here, it is the feeling of its cosmic rightness, the sense of it being inherent to the Natural Order of things for two similar but distinct bodies to coexist in perfect harmony. This is a feeling that you can only get by peering out at space through a telescope.

- In your book, you make unique connections between the Universe and our own self-knowledge. How does it connect?

I can use the example of The Hidden Heart. Throughout the ages, virtually every poet, philosopher, and theologian has come to the conclusion that all true and important worldly knowledge begins with self-knowledge: "Know thyself," "To thine own self be true." At first look, the idea of knowing oneself appears to be simple. But then comes the realization that one cannot be the observer and the observed at the same time. In physics, there is a phenomenon known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which states that the very act of examining an object changes the nature of that object. The simplest example of this principle is found in cases where light is needed to examine the object -- the object, of course, reacts to the heat of this light, so it is not exactly the same object that it is in total darkness. There is no doubt in my mind that a variation on this principle applies to personal self-examination. In astrophysics, the problem of knowledge of the galactic core has a similar obstacle. At this historical moment in space technology, we are unable to get far enough away from our own galaxy to get a good look at it. Our solar system is located 30,000 light years from the center of our galaxy, and the Sun takes 200 million years to complete one orbit around the center of our galaxy. To get outside our galaxy in order to look back, we would need a spacecraft able to travel, self-sustained, for thousands of thousands of years, all the while transmitting data back to Earth. But for all our technological progress, we remain far from that capability. So for now, we live in a castle so vast that we can never find our way outside to see how its exterior looks. In a similar way, it is difficult for humans to acquire self-knowledge. We find it hard to get outside of ourselves to look back and see ourselves and our behavior completely. As always, peering through my telescope offers me a clue to a human puzzle. Astronomy suggests a new technique for gaining self-knowledge; parallel affinity. One way that astronomers learn about our own galaxy is by peering out at our "twin" galaxy, Andromeda. Though twice the mass of the Milky Way, Andromeda has a similar spiral structure, and so we use Andromeda as a "mirror" to understand our own galaxy. I have found that this is also a good way for looking at myself - seeking my "mirror-image" in other people and studying that person for clues to my own character and patterns of behavior, comparing their past experiences with my own, checking how they reacted and what steps they took passing through particular phases of their lives.

Check out Fiorella’s website