COLUMN: Lunar eclipse sheds light on Nature's beauty, mystery
THERE WERE
three major pieces of local news last
week: the lunar eclipse, the return of Shannon Lucid to Earth and the
president's visit to Houston, which engaged my interest in the same order.
The lunar event fills people with both fear and peace. It was believed that the dim moonbeam enabled the nimble movement of phantoms and rendered a portion of living beings moon-struck.
Meanwhile, her silver serenity has inspired the genius of the most gifted. Goethe and Beethoven joined to compose a paean to moonlight. The moon was once the major nighttime light provider and reigned over the sky succeeding the day's supremacy of the sun.
People sought guidance for the rhythms of lives from the phases of the moon: crescent, gibbous or full. But the moon became somehow upstaged in the scene of modern life with most people more and more divorced from nature and instead gambling with the weather forecast on television.
Last Thursday night, however, the moon, which had been eclipsed by the city lights, became conspicuous on account of her own eclipse. People unglued themselvse from their studies and couches and went outside all over campus, the streets and balconies, admiring the veiled moon. I, on the other hand, couldn't believe my eyes until I turned on the tube and saw her half-bedimmed face on the screen.
Like the revisiting of Haley's comet and the alignment of the nine major planets of the solar system, this eclipse again gave us theoccasion to picture the travel of the heavenly bodies and to perceive the courses of our own existence in concomitance with theirs.
While only rarely do these noticeable performances of the celestial bodies spark average people's amateur interest in astronomy, scientists' endeavors to explore the universe have been constant and on an ever-larger scale.
The universe is still the object of the most profound and primitive curiosity of human beings, latent in some, patent in others. Since Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon in 1969, astronauts have been progressively expanding human experience in space.
People's attention has also been extended from mere mechanical aspects to the biological and psychological impact on humans and other organisms.
After each space voyage, the astronauts are warmly welcomed and questioned about their experience and observations, just like a family member back from a long journey.
These are the moments that unite human beings into one race. It was the photograph of Earth from the space shuttle that gave birth to the phrase "earth village."
The German philosopher Kant said that the law of nature in the constellations of the universe and the law of ethics in the inner world are the two eternal pursuits of mankind.
We didn't reach any universal set of laws of ethics and, compared with the feats in science, our achievements in implementing moral ideals don't even begin to come close to par.
Politics is one of the major areas of social life that epitomizes the weakness of human nature in the face of depravity. Every revolution of the political engine stirs up turbid whirlpools of greed and bitterness; the current glitzy political campaigns are riddled with scandals and scandals of scandalizing.
This imperfect society is where we breathe; therefore each member is obliged to act or react to ameliorate it.
But at times, amid the dins about gains or losses, rights or wrongs, the uninteresting notes of nature and science come upon us like a sonata suddenly reaching its unprepared but readily enchanted audience.
Scientific observations and discoveries offer relief and even enchantment in an otherwise dull life. In a sense, science is like poetry. It reveals the laws or the habits of our environs and thereby reconciles us with them.
Joe Xi Huang is a third-year graduate student in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology.
This item appeared in the Opinion section of the October 4, 1996 issue.
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