Ad Astra

I am constantly amazed by the profundities casually spouted from the mouths of babes. The other night, as I marveled at my nearly three-year-old son as he stared with a sense of wonder at the moon and the stars above us, he said, “The stars are far, far away.” He then paused pensively before matter-of-factly adding, “We need to go there.” Ad Astra.

First Light

Recently, my eldest son had his telescopic “first light.” He had already been showing a great interest in everything having to do with rockets and stars, and was routinely pointing the moon out in the sky, even when it was a barely perceptible sliver in the bright blue of midday. He had seen telescopes used by characters in educational cartoons, and understood that telescopes, “let us see far away.” He had also shown a fascination with helping me repair things, with proud declarations like, “We can fix it!” about everything from the clogged toilet to toy cars in need of fresh batteries.

I checked with him, asking, “Do you want to look through Daddy’s telescope.” He responded with a quick, “Yeah,” in his sweet little affirming voice. Thus I decided to bring my 8-inch Dobsonian reflecting telescope onto the front porch while I tended top sirloin on the grill. I excitedly set up the telescope after flipping the steaks one more time, a bated breath held since before his birth.

This particular telescope had graced my equipment stores since my fledging foray into astronomical studies in college. I had always been fascinated by the sky, the stars (and the wind) being my primary draws to physics, but I hadn’t begun to learn to do real field astronomy until Professor Ron Smith, a teacher with passion for his subject that to this day I have yet to see eclipsed, took me under his wing as a freshman. He had in fact helped me purchase the telescope as a birthday present the year we met.

The telescope’s finder was slightly off alignment, but I quickly had a crater, well defined by its position at the edge of the lunar terminator, centered in the eyepiece. I helped my son up to the eyepiece, careful to keeps his hands back lest he be left staring at a small magnified piece of blank sky. I carefully bobbed him up and down at the eyepiece until I thought I could see the light of the moon incident on his eye. “Do you see the moon?” I asked him expectantly. “Yes!” he responded in delight.

I showed him Jupiter in a similar fashion, and then let him down to manipulate the telescope (under supervision, of course). Besides showing him a real telescope at work for the first time, this day had been about letting him get to know, and hopefully develop and interest in, the equipment. He tipped the tube forward from the back, trying to look in the base of the telescope. Next, he ran to the front to look down the tube, cackling with glee at his parabolic reflection at the base. I told him that he was a good little astronomer.

A couple days later, it was foggy at home, and I knew there would be no chance to do any astronomy. I explained to my son that we couldn’t see the moon or the stars or the planets because of the fog. He later made sure that my wife knew what the fog had done, “We can’t see the moon, or the stars, or the planets.” He also made sure she knew, “I’m a good astronomer.”

Changing of the Guard

As an undergraduate in physics, I spent my fair share of hours huddled with other students in instructors' offices of varying shapes and sizes. I was sometimes a lazy student, and thus fell victim to the tendency to beg for answers when deadlines loomed too near. It had seemed largely custom for instructors to eventually lead students by the hand to the longed for quantity or expression. Every once in a while, though, I'd take a class with a professor who would always make me work for my answers.

I vividly remember one particular office visit with Dr. Tenn where I asked him about a problem in his Modern Physics class. He was a serious man of small stature with fading dark hair. Dr. Tenn seldom showed any overt signs of emotion or humor, but his lectures betrayed an unspoken passion for his subject. His office was rather large for a professor's office, with many bookshelves containing physics and mathematics books and periodicals collected over a long career as a dedicated purveyor of knowledge, and several metal filing cabinets that housed, among other things, the physics department's student files about each of us. His office was also quite literally surrounded by classrooms, depriving it of any windows, and making it easy to lose track of time while within its walls.

I don't remember the particular problem I was seeking an answer to during the encounter, but I went into that office looking for the answer, not the solution. Dr. Tenn greeted me and had me sit down in a chair next to the side of his desk. I reviewed the problem with him expectantly, hoping that the visit would be short and fruitful. Fruitful, of course, in the sense that it would minimize the amount of time I'd have to spend "solving" the problem. To my initial chagrin, he knew my designs and simply pointed out the proper starting point. Dr. Tenn then turned back to his computer, leaving me to my struggle in the seat beside him.

After several minutes of trying to rework the problem, I felt a sudden rush as I saw the path to the solution come into focus. I checked my work with Dr. Tenn. His eyes lit up as he resolutely clasped his hands together and proclaimed, "And you did it yourself!" He was genuinely excited for my discovery. He was teaching for the all the right reasons.

I had several excellent professors throughout my college career, but any time I think about an exemplar of what it really means to teach, I think of that day in Dr. Tenn's office. After beginning this writing, I checked the department’s web page to see what Dr. Tenn was teaching, only to find him listed as Professor Emeritus at the bottom of the faculty page. His retirement, though well deserved after nearly four decades of teaching, deprives the coming generations of physics students of a great mentor and resource.

It is my sincere hope that my own attempts at educational outreach meet with even a fraction of the success that Dr. Tenn’s did for me and for countless other students privileged enough to seat before him over the years.