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Heavenly Knowledge An Astrophysicist Seeks Wisdom in the Stars

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Having studied astronomy and science all my life I have read numerous books on various scientific topics. Many are dry and difficult to read, many are pleasant, but a few are really extraordinary. I recall back to Loren Eisley's books that deals with anthropology in a very poetic fashion. After reading Dr. Terenzi's book, I got the same feeling I remember after reading Dr. Eisley's books. She paints a unique picture of the study of astonomy on a personal level, not just using facts and figures and formula, but using your imagination and sensabilities to understand the universe, and at the same time understand yourself. She paints parallel pictures of galaxy interactions, and inter-personal relationships, and along the way tells her unique story of how she became a scientist, then a writer and musician, all the while synthesizing them into a whole. If you like astronomy, and poetry, you will love Dr. Terenzi's book!

"I dream of a cosmology in which reason and imagination are not enemies but rather partners...in wonder," says the author. My perusal of this slender volume in a famous unnamed bookstore chain (but which borders a coffee-shop) suggested an unwarranted cover price. But peruse I did. I value the author's insight that "purely objective scientists have fostered a materialist worldview" which finds humanity "isolated in a world of things" and results in "religious nihilism" [p. 15]. Her solution: "We [women, that is] seek a science which learns more by conversing...with Nature than by putting it on the rack to force it to reveal its secrets....[p. 9]" Evidently, men don't qualify for an intuitive, aesthetic, feeling approach to science. Why? Evidently, she has only met brutes. She tells a sad story of a friend seduced by a serial Romeo, and so turns her passion toward the stars in a kind of post-modern feminist mythology of the heavens. She yearns for "a dynamic relationship with data, a dance between the knower and the known...to indulge in metaphors for our lives based on what we observe [p. 9]." Through her telescopes, she glimpses an erotic union between two heavenly bodies engaged in exquisite dance round their common center of gravity. An interesting if slender volume, which should sell well if only for the voluptuous cover photo (itself strangely antithetical to the feminist spirit of the book). One can only imagine her lectures, or wish her book had sampled her celestial music, discussed her philosophy and technology of processing interstellar electromagnetic signals into music, or pondered what that might mean to our understanding of the nature of the universe. Ever seen those faces and pyramids on Mars imaged by Voyager then filtered away by NASA computer programmers? One need not believe they are "really," physically there to wonder who determines how such signals are filtered and processed, anyway? And why? Would that this author had delved a little deeper into such mysteries, we would have had a far finer work.

I love this book. Fiorella writes beautifully to weave a synthesis of her personal experience, poetry, music, philosophy and metaphysics, all around her love for the great science, astrophysics. After we have studied the common thread throughout the arts, sciences, philosophies and theologies we turn to the Light of the stars for inspiration, for from it we have come and to it we shall return.

Dr. Fiorella Terenzi, Heavenly Knowledge: An
Astrophysicist Searches for Wisdom in the Stars (Avon,
1998)

availability: amazon

samples of the celestial music she talks about in the
book... First, it's simply impossible not to like a chanteuse
with a PhD in astrophysics. That's just not a point
anyone can argue. Period. End of story.

Terenzi's book gives us an intriguing mix of astronomy
and astrology (but no, don't start thinking we're
going to be talking about Polaris in the eighth house
of Scorpio rising, or whatever); hard science backed
with hypothesizing about what we can learn from the
relationships of the stars themselves. It's
fascinating stuff, certainly thought-provoking. If
self-help manuals were written in this style (and by
people with advanced degrees who actually knew what
they were talking about and could effectively
communicate it), they might be worth something.
There's a little something for everyone here: sex,
rubbing elbows with the high and mighty, a bit of
autobiography, more than a bit of sex, relationships
gone bad, Thomas Dolby, Timothy Leary, and did I
mention sex?

Seems to me (as an unrepentant male chauvinist) that
Terenzi links the extrascientific (for lack of a
better term) hypothesizing a bit too strongly to the
feminine essence-- after all, Einstein did speculate
on some of the same things (though not usually in
public)-- but it is rather hard to refute the
empirical bent of traditionally male-dominated
science, so I'm willing to cut her some slack based on
her background. But hey, we males can dream, too! ***

This book is truly astronomical!!!