“Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.”
--Jacob Bronowski, Polish-British mathematician
Earth vs. Venus
2nd position from sun 3rd
24 hours length of day 5,832
hours
365 days length of year 225 days
1 moons 0
59 F average
temperature 864 F
7,926 miles diameter 7,520 miles
“Destination
Venus,” Nat Geo Kids, Feb. 2023, p. 20 Photo: Pixabay
I have read National Geographic, and the Kids edition, for years. I find the children’s edition of more than one periodical to be fun, direct, timely, and a quick index to what is going on in popular culture. Grade-school textbooks are a good example of this principle. They need to get to concepts and themes quickly and can’t do the kind of context-building and nuance that adults can tolerate. So they are a better guideline in several ways. And usually, factual. But not always.
Primates—that’s us—are primarily creatures of emotion. We are first emotional beings, only
secondarily rational. This is the reason
emotion needs to be “untaught” –as children we learn to restrain and hide our
feelings. Rational thought—writing,
math, spelling, science, accounting, engineering, bridge—are trained skills;
otherwise they would be intuitive; we’d all be whizzes at it. And we don’t understand our own emotional
lives all that well, just to make social judgments about what’s appropriate
when and where and with what other people. This is the point Daniel Goleman makes in his
book Emotional Intelligence. Dale
Carnegie put it this way: “When dealing with people, remember that you are not
dealing with creatures of logic but with creatures of emotion--creatures
bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.”
And creatures whose rational faculties are far more limited
than their emotional ones. So I observed
in reading an otherwise great article about the planet Venus written for
kids. But I then saw something curious
on the chart comparing Earth to Venus.
“Position from the sun—Earth 2nd, Venus 3rd.” I read this statement again, then once more. Thus began my Journey into Uncertainty. Isn’t earth “Third planet from the sun”? I began to think about this. But isn’t National Geographic among
the topmost trusted sources on earth?
Could the planets, without my knowledge, have somehow changed
positions? The article also notes that
any visitor to Venus would burst into flame at an average temperature of 864
degrees F or be crushed by the planet’s intense pressure. Or maybe the Venusian orbit distorted to move
outside earth’s?
The Uncertainty Journey
Case Study: “Destination Venus,”
National Geographic Kids, February 2023, pp. 20-21
Questioning: Is this true – is
Venus really third planet from the sun, and earth second? I certainly thought
it was the other way around. For my entire
lifetime.
Denial: This can’t be true. We’d all be fried or crushed.
More questioning: Would we?
Did the planets trade places because of some orbital switch-out?
Sense-making: This just makes no sense; it doesn’t line up
with anything else I know.
Investigation: I’ll look this up online, then send off a
query to the magazine.
Outcome: National Geographic: Oh, you’re right! We messed up that fact. Thanks for reading so
closely.
Further questioning: How did this happen? And my favorite question as a former editor:
“How many people looked this over at the editorial offices?” And then my next-favorite question: “What
else did they miss?” Considering this is
a relatively wide error—about 26 million miles off (compared to earth at 93
million). The measures in astronomy are
based on the AU, astronomical unit, which is earth’s distance from the sun. Therefore,
switching to the #2 orbit—as this error does -- would change the very base
value of AU, with a long range of side errors that come into focus the instant they
surface.
I couldn’t find how the second and third planets got
switched. So I contacted NGeoKids. Here is what I asked the editors: “Isn’t
earth the third planet, not the second, from the sun? Has the usual order changed for some
reason? What is the effect of this
change on the AU basis of astronomy—the astronomical unit?”
The editors readily admitted the mistake. Here’s what they
had to say: “We did indeed accidentally swap the sun positions for the
planets. Thank you for reaching out and
for reading NGeoKids so carefully!” Wow. So the universe has been restored. Does this make anything better, though? Does this mean National Geo is depending on
its readers for fact-checking? This
isn’t really reassurance – just one more piece of evidence that in the search
for truth, constant vigilance must be the rule.
Perhaps this points to two operating uncertainty principles.
1) We are slow to question information that looks self-assured and
authoritative, even when we feel fairly sure it is in error; 2) Perhaps if we
questioned factual statements more often, it would serve to keep facts on track
and lend some confidence to the knowledge we rely on. However, we can’t constantly be questioning the
truth of every statement. To operate
day-to-day, we assume that 99% of factoids are reliable. That’s because we can’t live in a world we
don’t trust. This is Uncertainty Avoidance.
Human beings don’t like uncertainty because we don’t know
what to think about uncertain situations nor how to make decisions and act on
them. This is why we make up stories,
“facts” to fill in the gaps. We just
can’t leave unsure things alone. Not for
more than a minute or two. Consider this
headline about a P-51 Mustang pilot in The Week (not the Kids’ version)
(Feb. 10, 2023, p. 35): “The Tuskegee Airman Who Escaped a Lynching.” My initial take was that this obit for Harold
Brown, age 98 and one of the last of his unit, was going to be about racial
prejudice in the American South.
Wrong. On reading the copy, the lynch
mob was in fact Austrian, in the last months of WWII, when he was shot down
there. Another surprise—it was a police
officer saved Brown, who was “sent to a prison camp—his first experience of
integration.” The truth filled in
because I kept reading.
The nice thing about knowledge is that errors of fact can be
corrected by digging deeper when the red flags appear. Vancouver, Canada isn’t the capital of
anything—it may be the primary city of British Columbia, but it’s Victoria on
Vancouver Island that is the capital of British Columbia – a wrong answer I was
part of making, a victim of team groupthink, to a pub quiz question. And I was just returning from a week’s trip
there—the shame of it still haunts me. Here
is another: the number of married people (worldwide) that ends with an odd
number? Not sure about that, but this
could reflect multiple husbands / wives. Check to see if the number is in
couples, not individuals. Then on entering a medical office last week, I was
handed a fill-in form in English; the small lady beside me was handed another
in Chinese, without being asked. Her
reaction was amused (it could well have been otherwise) as she explained she
was Vietnamese.
Venus does have the most volcanoes in our solar system:
something over 1600. Its rotation is in
the opposite direction of ours, and from most planets, called retrograde
motion. NASA’s VERITAS mission in 2028 will
orbit the planet and map its terrain using radar. The European Space Agency EnVision mission in
2032 will map the sub-surface. And
perhaps both will confirm its position at 67 million miles from the sun,
compared to ours of 143 million miles…. Did I say 143? I meant 93, of course. 143 is the average distance
for Mars, as everyone knows, the 4th planet from the sun. It’s easy to get confused. That’s why every person needs to be their own
fact-checker. And that is often a
research-project-level demand. But I
could not resist restoring the solar system to its usual and correct order: the
one I know and love.
