A Definition I’ve Wanted
Some Space Science that I care about
I am a big fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson, and he is an astrophysicist. As I started listening to what he’s been up to for the past little while, I got curious:
What’s the difference between an Astrophysicist and an Astronomer? Oh, and I was reminded of Cosmology an hour ago; what’s that got to do with anything?
After a visit to a knowledge graph-turned-search engine, I found a relatively-forgotten blog that started to cover the difference. Quoting Wikipedia on the matter, here’s the layman’s rephrasing that leans on my penchant for Set Theory.
Definitions
- Cosmology is the study of the Universe at large: who, what, when, where, how, and - occasionally - why (metaphysically and physically)
- Astronomy is the large field that is a proper subset of Cosmology:
- It concerns itself with the motion of celestial bodies, which is heavily physics-based
- When there’s evidence of some interaction of another science - e.g. “Was something here before our probes landed?” - we start to see the prefixed sciences: astrobiology, astrochemistry, etc
- Astrophysics is a proper subset of Astronomy, dealing strictly with the physical phenoma
- The line is very blurry with Astronomy-proper, which is more than okay for many of this particular section of the scientific community
- History shows that Astrophysics is often close with engineering disciplines, which may make it more applied in nature
That’s as far as I can tell.
That blog that I mentioned previously pointed me towards a wonderful physicist: Sean Carroll and his blog.
I also discovered Fermat’s library, which is serving as a hub for tools for academics to work with their publishing.
Lastly, thanks to this post on that forgotten blog, I’ve found a comical tool to drive creative, constructive output: Squibler Writing Prompt Generator
- And what’s a tool without a community around it