My sister’s son, my nephew Joseph, died on April 10, at 36. At his funeral ceremony, I learned from his sister that every year on his birthday he went to the Hayden Planetarium in New York. I hadn’t realized that it was a passion we shared. It would have been great to do it together. In 2002, I wrote a piece about it, which I would like to share here, in Joey’s honor.
From the Infinite to the Infinitesimal:
What the Stars Can Teach Us about Life
Humans like to take the measure of things, and sometimes it saves a great deal of time to measure space. The other day two deliverymen were moving a refrigerator into my smallish kitchen. I offered them the tape measure several times, but they looked at it with disdain, preferring to eyeball the situation and muscle the refrigerator through. After taking several gouges out of the woodwork, they soon discovered what the tape measure would have told them: door number one would not admit the fridge.
Measuring the galaxy and beyond, however, far exceeds the capacity even of my Stanley Fat Max industrial-grade tape measure. To take the measure of the cosmos, you require the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which houses the newly built Hayden Planetarium. I used to love to go to the old Hayden-or any planetarium for that matter-which employed Zeiss’ standard planetarium super-duper gizmo, a robot-like affair that recreated the night sky on a domed ceiling. Upon entering a planetarium, which one tends to do in the clear light of day, one is able to recreate the experience of drinking in the Milky Way, normally available only in the mountains on a clear night far from city lights. This grand entrance has always been a delightful experience of being absorbed into the beyond and incidentally educated by the soothing narrative that always accompanies the show.
Rose Center for Earth and Space. Photo by Frederick Phineas and Sandra Priest, New York.
The Rose Center takes the experience to a whole new level. It is an architectural tour de force: an 87-foot sphere contained within a 95-foot-high glass rectangle. (Don’t worry. The