Astronomy Was My First Language of Science

May 21, 2026

As a child I had two obsessions, the universe and dinosaurs, and they came with the same kind of question. What was out there beyond the planets I could already name? How could anyone know what happened millions of years ago? Both made the world feel much larger than the part of it I could see, and both pointed at the same puzzle. How do you learn anything about something you will never touch?

My parents let me follow those questions as far as I wanted. There were books and documentaries, and there was the freedom to disappear into whatever had caught my attention that month. Nobody told me science belonged to a certain kind of person. It just seemed like the obvious response to a world that was strange and full of things I did not understand yet. I decided early that I would be a scientist, and for most of my childhood that meant an astronomer.

My picture of astronomy back then was telescopes, planets and discoveries. The statistics and the long tables of measurements came later, and to my surprise they did not spoil anything. What drew me in as a child turned out to be the same thing I loved once I studied it properly. Astronomy is the science of understanding things you cannot get close to.

Almost everything we know about the universe arrives secondhand. We get light, positions, small changes in brightness and whatever else an instrument manages to record. A star dims by a tiny amount, and that can mean a planet is passing in front of it. Another star vanishes for a few seconds, and the length of that absence says something about the object that blocked it. My undergraduate thesis was about exactly this kind of event, with an extra complication. Only one observer had recorded it, so we had a single line across the object’s shadow. A single line gives you a minimum size, not the size. What you can do is work out which sizes are likely, and how likely each one is.

That was where I understood that science is not a collection of facts. It is a way of reasoning from incomplete evidence. Instruments have limits, measurements carry uncertainty, and the explanation you like best is not always the one the data supports. Sometimes the honest answer is a range, a probability or a list of caveats.

The habit never left. Even as I moved into other fields, I kept ending up in the same situation. Something real is happening, we cannot observe it directly or completely, and we have to reconstruct it from what reaches us. Astronomy taught me to enjoy that work instead of treating missing information as an obstacle.

It also changed my sense of scale. As a child, the size and age of the universe felt close to frightening. Later those numbers became quantities to measure and compare, even if they never became intuitive. It still seems remarkable to me that we can study objects we will never reach and events that ended long before there was anyone around to notice them. We are very small, but we are not helpless in front of what surrounds us.

Astronomy is also why I care about explaining science and not only doing it. Long before I could read an equation, other people handed me the universe through books, pictures and patient explanations. They made it accessible without making it less mysterious. Years later I wrote a book of my own for the same reason.

I no longer think that loving a subject means staying inside it forever. Questions lead elsewhere, and scientific lives rarely follow the path we draw for them as children. Mine now runs through navigation, tracking and estimation more than through telescopes. But astronomy is where I first learned to ask questions, to live with uncertainty and to turn wonder into something more precise. It was the first language in which science made sense to me, and I can still hear its accent in the way I think.