The tension between fact and fable: The moon's dual nature in human consciousness

“ The pictures gave no fine detail, but did indicate that possibly the moon's hidden portion may not be as rugged as the area visible from earth.
THE MOON Although many lunar features are beyond the reach of his ground-based instruments, man does have significant facts: The moon's diameter is 2163 miles, about one-fourth that of earth. Its gravity is one-sixth that of earth, meaning that a 156-pound man on earth would weigh only 26 pounds on the moon. The moon's mean altitude in its elliptical orbit around earth is 238,857 miles. ”

“ Work in astronomy, physics and the life sciences, as well as work in the earth sciences and remote sensing, will form an essential part of the foundation for future applications benefits and will contribute to the broadening horizons of man as he acquires knowledge not only of his own planet but also about the rest of the universe.
Lunar Exploration - Apollo-type manned missions to continue exploration of the Moon should proceed. The launch rate should permit maximum responsiveness to new discoveries while maintaining mission safety and efficient utilization of support personnel. ”

“ In another sense, the imagination materially imposes upon facts. In contemplating cities, works of art, ruins, or scenes of nature, we almost always appreciate them for the associations that belong to them—the imaginations they excite. Look at a gray bleak sort of plateau between mountains and the sea, and you see little to admire. But let somebody say, “that is Marathon!” while the blood thrills at the name, a flood of glory flashes over the immortal ground ”

“ IMAGINATION AND FACT. ———
BY A NEW CONTRIBUTOR.
———
Imagination’s world of air,
And our own world.
Halleck.
The world is of such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is bounded by a sleep.
Shakspeare.
S’ai che lá corre il mondo ove piu versi
Di sue dolcezze il lusinghier Parnaso
E che ’l vero condito in molli versi,
I piu schivi allentando ha persuaso.
Tasso.
People seem to have an idea that facts are every thing in the business of the world—the only considerations in the philosophy of human progress. Opposed to what is merely imaginary, facts are allowed to have much dignity. ”

“ It will not need, when the mind is prepared for study, to search for objects. The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common. What is a day? What is a year? What is summer? What is woman? What is a child? What is sleep? To our blindness, these things seem unaffecting. We make fables to hide the baldness of the fact and conform it, as we say, to the higher law of the mind. But when the fact is seen under the light of an idea, the gaudy fable fades and shrivels. We behold the real higher law. To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables. ”

“ The story of scientific discovery has its own epic unity—a unity of purpose and endeavour—the single torch passing from hand to hand through the centuries; and the great moments of science when, after long labour, the pioneers saw their accumulated facts falling into a significant order—sometimes in the form of a law that revolutionised the whole world of thought—have an intense human interest, and belong essentially to the creative imagination of poetry. ”

“ In the moon we see a frozen torrent; in the sun we see the stream dashing on with impetuous speed.
Measured by this source of interest, the comet arrests our attention much more powerfully than even the sun, the changes being much more rapid and comprehensive. We see the whole orb transformed before our eyes. We are apt to think that the full-sized comet is merely the same as the cloudy speck which we descried some weeks before, and that the whole difference of aspect is due to difference of distance ”

“ At first it had been an almost telescopic speck; it had brightened to the dimensions of the greatest star in the heavens; it had still grown, hour by hour, in its incredibly swift, its noiseless and inevitable rush upon our earth, until it had equaled and surpassed the moon. Now it was the most splendid thing this sky of earth has ever held. I have never seen a photograph that gave a proper idea of it. Never at any time did it assume the conventional tailed outline, comets are supposed to have. ”

“ The belief in the comet's surpassing thinness and lightness is not a mere speculative opinion. It rests upon incontrovertible proof. In 1770, Lexell's Comet passed within six times the moon's distance of the earth, and was considerably retarded in its motion by the terrestrial attraction. If its mass had been of equal amount with the earth's mass, its attraction would have influenced the earth's movement in a like degree in return, and the earth would have been so held back in its orbitual progress in consequence, that the year would have been lengthened to the extent of three hours. ”

“ The famous French mathematician Lalande showed that if a Comet as heavy as the Earth were to come within six times the distance of the Moon, it would exert such a powerful attraction upon the waters of the globe as to pull up a tidal wave 13,000 feet above the ordinary sea-level and inundate the continents Every European mountain would be submerged except Mt. ”

“ We always light up facts by means of general laws. The fall of the stone was a perfect enigma, a universally unintelligible bit of experience, till the majestic imagination of Newton conceived the idea of universal gravitation. Wherever mind successfully invades the realm of chaos, poetry, the sense of the whole, comes first. There is the intuitive flash, the penetrative glimpse, got no one knows exactly whence—though we do know that it comes neither from 039 the dead facts nor from the vacant region of a priori thought, but somehow from the interaction of both these elements of knowledge. ”

“ Before man can journey safely to the moon, he must acquire information that has defied centuries of observation. An important step toward meeting this requirement is NASA's Project Ranger which, on July 31, 1964, gave man a closer look than ever before at the moon. Knowledge of the moon has been based largely on observations through telescopes on earth. ”

“ For instance, some worthy persons maintained that the moon was an ancient comet which, in describing its elongated orbit round the sun, happened to pass near the earth, and became confined within her circle of attraction. These drawing-room astronomers professed to explain the charred aspect of the moon-- a disaster which they attributed to the intensity of the solar heat; only, on being reminded that comets have an atmosphere, and that the moon has little or none, they were fairly at a loss for a reply. ”

“ That the matter and figure of a Comet, and the impetus at first impressed, make much to its motion: That Comets, which come out of larger Atmospheres, and from about their Equator, and are of a compact body, are swiftest, and especially those, that have their rise from the Sun, How the motion of the Spots of the Sun may be compared with that of Comets? How the greatest velocity and tardity of the motion of Comets may be limited? That there is a Libratory motion in Comets as well as in the Moon, &c. ”

“ It is clear that any of the routes to land a man on the moon require a development much more ambitious than the present Saturn program. Not only must much bigger boosters probably be developed, but rockets and guidance mechanisms for the safe landing and then for return from moon to earth by means of additional rockets must be developed and tested. Nevertheless, it must be pointed out that this new, major step is implicit in undertaking the proposed manned Saturn program, for the first really big achievement of the man-in-space program would be the lunar landing. ”

“ Conclusions The first major goal of the man-in-space program is to orbit a man about the earth. It will cost about 350 million dollars. The next goal, of an intermediate nature, is the manned circumnavigation of the moon. It will cost about 8 billion dollars. The second major goal, landing on the moon, can only be achieved about 1975 after an additional national expenditure in the vicinity of 26 to 38 billion dollars. The Saturn program is a necessary intermediate step toward manned lunar landing but must be followed by a much bigger development before manned lunar landing is possible. ”

“ Surveyor will telecast the moonscape, analyze lunar surface and subsurface materlal, measure moonquakes and meteorite impacts, and check the moon's surface for strength and stability. A third project, called Lunar Orbiter, is aimed at developing an unmanned spacecraft to be guided into a low-altitude lunar orbit, photograph the moon's surface, and provide more information on the moon's size, shape, and gravity. ”

“ While some areas are clearly unsafe for landing, others are believed to be sufficiently level and smooth for touchdown by the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module as presently designed; however, no knowledge of the surface strength could be obtained from the Ranger photographs. RANGER VII is the first of the Ranger series of spacecraft to provide close-up photographs of the moon. ”

“ North is at top.
Altitude: 34 miles. Area: 16 miles on a side. Smallest Visible Crater: About 150 feet in diameter. Features: Greater resolu- tion of craters in outlying ray of Tycho. THE RANGER TELEVISION SYSTEM The remarkably clear pictures of the moon telecast by Ranger VII were accomplished by a complex high quality system of television cameras and transmitters on Ranger and a ground receiv- ing network at the Goldstone, Calif., station of NASA's global Deep Space Network. This network tracks, controls, and gathers information from NASA spacecraft sent to the moon and beyond. ”

“ Ranger VII sent an aggregate of 4316 pictures of the moon as it plummeted to the lunar surface. The photographs have been made available to scientists throughout the world. It is anticipated that these photographs will receive close attention and study by lunar scientists for many years to come. The only other spacecraft to provide man with photographs of the moon is the Soviet Lunik 3. ”

“ —Scientific knowledge, even in the most modest persons, has mingled with it a something which partakes of insolence. Absolute, peremptory facts are bullies, and those who keep company with them are apt to get a bullying habit of mind;—not of manners, perhaps; ”

“ And thus we are led to another Rule:—that in collecting Facts which are to be made the basis of 56 Science, the Facts are to be observed, as far as possible, with reference to place, figure, number, motion, and the like Conceptions; which, depending upon the Ideas of Space and Time, are the most universal, exact, and simple of our conceptions. ”

“ Our horizons and our competence have expanded to the point that we can consider unmanned missions to any region in our solar system; manned bases in earth orbit, lunar orbit or on the surface of the Moon; manned missions to Mars; space transportation systems that carry their payloads into orbit and then return and land as a conventional jet aircraft; reusable nuclear-powered rockets for space operations; remotely controlled roving science vehicles on the Moon or on Mars; and application of space capability to a variety of services of benefit to man here on earth. ”

“ Some scientists believe that the primeval moon was captured by earth's gravity as it flew nearby during an early stage in the solar system's formation. Others theorize that the moon was torn from the primordial earth. Eroded by neither wind nor rain, the moon's matter immediately below the level allected by meteorites and radiation may have changed little during the satellite's lifetime. As a result, the moon may offer an opportunity to study the matter of the solar system as it was billions of years ago. ”

“ Simple people think of imagination as that quality of mind which revels in tales of fairies and hobgoblins, but imagination of this character is undisciplined and undeveloped. The scientist who deals with the sternest of facts must be highly imaginative, or his work is vain. ”

“ That men in the ranks of science should feel thus is, I think, a proof that they have suffered themselves to be misled by the popular definition of a great faculty, instead of observing its operation in their own minds. Without imagination we cannot take a step beyond the bourne of the mere animal world, perhaps not even to the edge of this one. But, in speaking thus of imagination, I do not mean a riotous power which deals capriciously with facts, but a well-ordered and disciplined power, whose sole function is to form such conceptions as the intellect imperatively demands. ”

“ In truth, the imagination is most tasked when it has to paint pictures which shall withstand the silent criticism of general experience, and to frame hypotheses which shall withstand the confrontation with facts. ”

“ The greatest scientific discoveries have been made in a sudden "flash of imagination," as when to the mind of Darwin, after twenty years' painstaking collection of facts, their explanation through the single encompassing formula of evolution occurs, or when to the mind of Newton the hypothesis of gravitation suddenly suggests itself. ”

“ In the course of scientific investigation, then, as I have tried to impress upon you, we make continual incursions from a physical world where we observe facts, into a super or sub-physical world, where the facts elude all observation, and we are thrown back upon the picturing power of the mind. ”

“ There are tories even in science who regard imagination as a faculty to be feared and avoided rather than employed. They had observed its action in weak vessels and were unduly impressed by its disasters. But they might with equal justice point to exploded boilers as an argument against the use of steam. Bounded and conditioned by coöperant Reason, imagination becomes the mightiest instrument of the physical discoverer. Newton's passage from a falling apple to a falling moon was, at the outset, a leap of the imagination. ”

“ The modern geologist affords us one of the best illustrations of the uses of the scientific imagination that we can turn to. The scientific imagination seems to be about the latest phase of the evolution of the human mind. This power of interpretation of concrete facts, this Miltonic flight into time and space, into the heavens above, and into the bowels of the earth beneath, and bodying forth a veritable history, a warring of the powers of light and darkness, with the triumph of the angels of light and life, makes Milton's picture seem hollow and unreal. ”

“ They were poetic renderings of facts which science is fast verifying, chiefly by the use of the same faculty which enriched early literature with the myth and the fairy tale. The scientist has turned poet in these later days, and the imagination which once expressed itself in a free handling of facts so as to make them answer the needs and demands of the human spirit, now expresses itself in that breadth of vision which reconstructs an extinct animal from a bone and analyzes the light of a sun flaming on the outermost boundaries of space. ”

“ We do not live on facts alone, much less on facts of a single kind. Religion and poetry, love, hope, and imagination are as essential to our well-being as science. Human life is knowledge, is faith, is conduct, is beauty, is manners; it unfolds itself in many directions and shoots its roots into infinitude; and for the general purposes of education, science is learned to best advantage when it is embodied in literature, and its methods and results, rather than the details of its work, are presented to us. ”

“ Without imagination we never could have risen to the conceptions which have occupied us here today; and in proportion to your power of exercising this faculty aright, and of associating definite mental images with the terms employed, will be the pleasure and the profit which you will derive from this lecture.
The outward facts of nature are insufficient to satisfy the mind. We cannot be content with knowing that the light and heat of the sun illuminate and warm the world. ”

“ To be scientifically minded is one of the supreme achievements of mankind. To love truth, as science loves it, to seek truth tirelessly, as science seeks it, to reveal the latent resources of the universe in hope that men will use them for good and not for evil, as science does, is one of the chief glories of our race. When, however, we have taken everything that science gives, it is not enough for life. When we have facts, we still need a spiritual interpretation of facts; when we have all the scientific forces that we can get our hands upon, we still need spiritual mastery over their use ”

“ A god who functions so poorly is not much of a god. Once more, therefore, one wonders why in a generation when, not less, but more, because of all our scientific mastery the souls of men are starved and tired, the Church is not captured by a new sense of mission. It is precisely in a day when the active and pugnacious energies of men are most involved in the conquest of the world that the spirit becomes most worn for lack of sustenance. To be assured of the nearness and reality and availability of the spiritual world is a matter of life and death to multitudes of folk to-day. ”

“ The habit of looking at a single order of facts, coldly [Pg 47] and always from the same point of view, takes from the mind flexibility, weakens the imagination, and puts fetters on the soul; and hence though it is important that there be specialists, the kind of education by which they are formed, while it is suited to make a geologist, a chemist, a mathematician, or a botanist, is not suited to call forth the free and harmonious play of all man's powers. ”

“ The instinct for vivifying by imaginative treatment the records of the past is too universal and too deeply inwoven in the very texture of the human mind to be other than a true and healthy instinct. But so oppressive has become the tyranny of documents, so fettered by what a humourist has called “factology” have become the wings of the romancer’s imagination, that p. ”

“ The hidden significance of these fables which is sometimes thought to have been detected, the ethics running parallel to the poetry and history, are not so remarkable as the readiness with which they may be made to express a variety of truths. As if they were the skeletons of still older and more universal truths than any whose flesh and blood they are for the time made to wear. It is like striving to make the sun, or the wind, or the sea symbols to signify exclusively the particular thoughts of our day. But what signifies it? ”

“ Mythology, travel, history, earth, sky, etc., but nothing that will not add in some way to scholarly attainment. Poor child! he is defrauded by his own parents. The desire for the beautiful fairy, the wicked witch, and the ugly giant is natural to a child. Every human being is endowed with an imagination which is active and insistent, and its craving is really the thirst for knowledge.
It may seem strange, perhaps, that the nursery rhyme and the fairy tale should be rungs of the ladder of knowledge. Take the case of a man at the head of a profession. ”

“ And as we love our hopes, and detest the experience that seems to contradict them, we add fanaticism to our confusion. The habits of the imagination, in conflict with the facts of sense, thus come to cloud science with passion, with fiction, with sentimental prejudice. ”

“ To inquire into what God has made is the main function of the imagination. It is aroused by facts, is nourished by facts; seeks for higher and yet higher laws in those facts; but refuses to regard science as the sole interpreter of nature, or the laws of science as the only region of discovery. ”

“ It is to know the thought by which all things are steered through all things." [1]
Examples might be multiplied, but those that have been given are enough to show the character of the man: the facts of science, as they appeared to him, fed the flame in his soul, and in its light he saw into the depths of the world by the reflection of his own dancing swiftly penetrating fire. In such a nature we see the true union of the mystic and the man of science—the highest eminence, as I think, that it is possible to achieve in the world of thought. ”

“ Thus the Facts which we assume as the basis of Science are to be freed from all the mists which imagination and passion throw round them; and to be separated into those elementary Facts which exhibit simple and evident relations of Time, or Space, or Cause, or some other Ideas equally clear. ”

“ First let us turn to the higher class of investigations, wherein that handmaid of science, a true and noble imagination, comes to supplement exact knowledge, to round out and give full form and perfect outline, either shaping a number of disjointed and apparently heterogeneous facts into a harmonious series, or evolving from a mass of confusing and seemingly inexplicable phenomena a theory or law consistent therewith. ”

“ Now the man of science at his best is like the humanist at his best, at once highly imaginative and highly critical. By this coöperation of imagination and intellect they are both enabled to concentrate effectively on the facts, though on facts of a very different order. The imagination reaches out and perceives likenesses and analogies whereas the power in man that separates and discriminates and traces causes and effects tests in turn these likenesses and analogies as to their reality: for we can scarcely repeat too often that though the imagination gives unity it does not give reality. ”

“ There is no sign of retrenchment or withdrawal by the Soviets from the public arena of space activity despite launch vehicle and spacecraft failures and the preemptive effect of Apollo 11.
The landing on the Moon has captured the imagination of the world. It is now abundantly clear to the man in the street, as well as to the political leaders of the world, that mankind now has at his service a new technological capability, an important characteristic of which is that its applicability transcends national boundaries. ”

“ And having thus appealed to facts, we found further that in the nature of things no such destruction could follow; that what we call explanation in science is at bottom only a reduction of unfamiliar mysteries to terms of familiar mysteries, and that, since to the true imaginative mind, whether of poet or novelist, the mysteries of this world grow all the greater as they grow more familiar, the necessary effect of scientific explanations is at last the indefinite increase of food for the imagination. The modern imagination, indeed, shall still love mystery ”