Concluding Post: Kelli Pape

I'm not yet sure what kind of skills from this class can really transfer to my future career as I'm planning to go into health management or medical social work. However, I appreciated the general emphasis on what the aims and methods of science are, because I'm involved in research and it helped me conceptualize the fact that we are aiming to use factual observations to uncover that which was already true. And even if you're wrong, you still learned something new from the process - what doesn't work. Plus understanding, nay, mastering astronomy opens you up to more interesting small talk topics for strangers than the weather! I was interested in learning about the historical foundations of astronomy, because it's quite fascinating that scientists back at the beginning of the second millennium, with their limited tools and knowledge, were able to observe mathematical relationships which are still very much applicable today. I was most surprised by learning that black holes are infinitely dense and infinitely small volumes of mass which would not even swallow the earth up from a distance of 1AU, because I had apparently bought into the pop culture misconception that they are the size of an entire solar system destroying everything within light-years of them. It really intrigued me that an astronomer such as Professor Bell would openly claim that they are the most boring thing to study in his field.