I recently gave my high school astronomy students their final exam. I wrote it myself, and I’m quite proud of it. The last part is an essay question: “Five years from now, what will you remember as being the most awesome thing you learned in your astronomy class?” I got a ton of really great answers that not only boosted my ego but also proved how much the students had learned over the past year.
This response, from Michael Joseph Rosenthal, was by far my favorite:
That our universe is the largest and greatest party you could ever imagine. For starters, all the “guests” arrived on time, and immediately began to mingle. Soon enough there were larger groups interacting with each other, stars from the Hydrogen. Eventually these groups of dancing particles began to dance with each other, in elaborate lines around ever-guiding heavy weights, Black Holes. If they make missteps it doesn’t matter, because they can always form new, different groups. And from all these interactions and reactions, wonderfully fascinating things emerge. From supernovae come pulsing bombshells spewing charge into their region of space, and quiet little drifters that last an eternity, and element-rich planetary nebulae that can get together to form little children that scurry around their parents, clinging to them as they hurtle through an ever-expanding universe. And one of these little rocks, through an equally intricate dance, came to life, and from that a race with intelligence enough to comprehend all of this and more. To see all that dances around them and recognize their connections and beauty, to look up and write History in the sky, so that even today we can look up and see the stars of Orion hunting Scorpio across the heavens. And that even as we are a part of this explosion of creation, destruction, expansion and reformation, the dance of every atom and particle in the universe, that we have not even begun to glimpse it at all. That steps on the Moon could lead to strides across galaxies, that a bit of math could find the song we dance to, and even other universes, and that through our work now, we could become a constellation on a distant planet, newly settled by man.
I think he got my message.
