Broca's Brain (29 page)

NO PHOTOGRAPHIC
maps of the surface of Venus exist, because the planet is perpetually enshrouded by opaque
clouds. Nevertheless, surface features are being mapped by ground-based radar. Already it is apparent that there are craters and mountains, and other topographical features of stranger aspect. The success of the Venera 9 and 10 spacecraft in obtaining photographs of the planet’s surface suggests that someday photographs may be returned from aircraft or balloons in the lower Venus atmosphere.

The first prominent features discovered on Venus, regions highly reflective to radar, were given unassuming names such as Alpha, Beta and Gamma. The present Venus nomenclature committee, under the chairmanship of Gordon Pettengill of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposes two categories of names for Venus surface features. One category would be pioneers in radio technology whose work led to the development of the radar techniques that permit mapping the surface of Venus: for example, Faraday, Maxwell, Heinrich Hertz, Benjamin Franklin and Marconi. The other category, suggested by the name of the planet itself, would be women. At first glance, the idea of a planet devoted to women may appear sexist. But I think the opposite is true. For historical reasons, women have been discouraged from pursuing the sorts of occupations now being memorialized on other planets. The number of women after whom craters have so far been named is very small: Sklodowska (Madame Curie’s maiden name); Stickney; the astronomer Maria Mitchell; the pioneer nuclear physicist Lisa Meitner; Lady Murasaki; and only a few others. While by the occupational rules for other planets women’s names will continue to appear occasionally on other planetary surfaces, the Venus proposal is the only one that permits adequate recognition to be made of the historical contribution of women. (I am glad, however, that this idea will not be applied consistently; I would not myself want to see Mercury covered with businessmen and Mars with generals.)

In a fashion, women have traditionally been commemorated in the asteroid belt (see
Chapter 15
), that
collection of rocky and metallic boulders which circle the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. With the exception of a category of asteroids named after heroes of the Trojan War, it used to be that all asteroids were named after women. First it was largely women of classical mythology, such as Ceres, Urania, Circe and Pandora. As available goddesses dwindled, the scope broadened to include Sappho, Dike, Virginia and Sylvia. Then, as the floodgates of discovery opened and the names of astronomers’ wives, mothers, sisters, mistresses and great-aunts were exhausted, they took to naming asteroids after real or hoped-for patrons and others, with a female ending appended, as, for example, Rockefelleria. By now more than two thousand asteroids have been discovered, and the situation has become moderately desperate. But non-Western traditions have hardly been tapped, and there are a multitude of Basque, Amharic, Ainu, Dobu and !Kung feminine names for future asteroids. In anticipation of an Egyptian-Israeli détente, Eleanor Helin of the California Institute of Technology proposed calling an asteroid she discovered Ra-Shalom. An additional problem—or opportunity, depending on how one views it—is that we may soon obtain close-up photographs of asteroids, with surface details that will cry out to be named.

Beyond the asteroid belt, on the planets and large moons of the outer solar system, no nondescriptive names have so far been bestowed. Jupiter, for example, has a Great Red Spot and a North Equatorial Belt, but no feature called, say, Smedley. The reason is that when we see Jupiter we are looking at its clouds, and it would not be a very fitting or at least not a very long-lived memorial to Smedley to name a cloud after him. Instead, the present major question on nomenclature in the outer solar system is what to name the moons of Jupiter. The moons of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune have satisfying or at least obscure classical names (see
Table 2
). But the situation for the fourteen moons of Jupiter is different.

TABLE
2
NAMES OF THE SATELLITES
OF THE OUTER PLANETS

The four large moons of Jupiter were discovered by Galileo, whose theological contemporaries were convinced by a vague amalgam of Aristotelian and Biblical ideas that the other planets could have no moons. The contrary discovery by Galileo was disconcerting to fundamentalist churchmen of the time. Possibly in an effort to circumvent criticism, Galileo called the moons the Medicean satellites—after his funding agency. But posterity has been wiser: they are known instead as the Galilean satellites. In a similar vein, when William Herschel of England discovered the seventh planet he proposed calling it George. If wiser heads had not prevailed, we might today have a major planet named after George III. Instead we call it Uranus.

The Galilean satellites were assigned their Greek mythological names by Simon Marius (commemorated on the Moon by a crater 27 miles across), a contemporary of Galileo and a disputant with him for the priority of their discovery. Marius and Johannes Kepler felt that it would be extremely unwise to name celestial objects after real people and particularly after political personages. Marius wrote: “I want the thing done without superstition and with the sanction of theologians. Jupiter especially is charged by the poets with illicit
loves. Especially well-known among these are three virgins, whose love Jupiter secretly coveted and obtained, namely: Io … Callisto … and Europa … Yet even more ardently did he love the beautiful boy Ganymede … and so I believe that I have not done badly in naming the first Io, the second Europa, the third, on account of the splendor of its light, Ganymede, and lastly the fourth Callisto.”

However, in 1892 E. E. Barnard discovered a fifth moon of Jupiter with an orbit interior to Io’s. Barnard resolutely insisted that this satellite should be called Jupiter 5 and by no other name. Since then, Barnard’s position has been maintained, and of the fourteen Jovian moons now known, only the Galilean satellites had, until recently, names officially sanctioned by the IAU. However unreasonable it may be, people show a strong preference for names over numbers. (This is clearly illustrated in the resistance of college students to being considered “only a number” by the college bursar; by the outrage of many citizens at being known to the government only by their social security number; and by the systematic attempts in jails and prison camps to demoralize and degrade the inmates by assigning them a numeral as their only identity.) Soon after Barnard’s discovery, Camille Flammarion suggested the name Amalthea for Jupiter 5 (Amalthea was in Greek legend the goat that suckled the infant Zeus). While being suckled by a goat is not precisely an act of illicit love, it must have seemed, to the Gallic astronomer, adequately close.

The IAU committee on Jovian nomenclature, chaired by Tobias Owen of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has proposed a set of names for Jupiter 6 through 13. Two principles guided their selection: the name chosen should be that of “an illicit love” of Jupiter, but one so obscure as to have been missed by those indefatigable cullers of the classics who name asteroids, and must end with an
a
or an
e
depending on whether the moon goes around Jupiter clockwise or counterclockwise. But in the opinion of at least some classical scholars, these names are obscure to the point of bewilderment,
and the result leaves many of the most prominent Jovian paramours unrepresented in the Jupiter system. The result is particularly poignant in that Hera (Juno), the wife so often scorned by Zeus (Jupiter), is not represented at all. Evidently, she was inadequately illicit. An alternative list of names, which includes most of the prominent paramours as well as Hera, is also shown in the table below. Were these names employed, it is true they would duplicate asteroid names. This is in any case already a fact for the four Galilean satellites, where the amount of confusion thus engendered has been negligible. On the other hand, there are those who support Barnard’s position that numbers are sufficient; prominent among these is Charles Kowal
^*
of the California Institute of Technology, the discoverer of Jupiter 13 and Jupiter 14. There seems to be merit in all three positions and it will be interesting to see how the debate turns out. At least we do not yet have to judge the merits of contending suggestions for naming features on the Jovian satellites.

TABLE
3
PROPOSED NAMES FOR JOVIAN SATELLITES

But that time is not long off. There are thirty-one known moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. None has been photographed close up. The decision has recently been made to name features on the moons in the outer solar system after mythological figures from all cultures. However, very soon the Voyager mission will obtain high-resolution images of about ten of them, in addition to the rings of Saturn. The total surface area of the small objects in the outer solar system greatly exceeds the areas of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Moon, Mars, Phobos and Deimos together. There will be ample opportunity for all human occupations and cultures to be represented eventually, and I daresay provisions for nonhuman species can also be made. There are probably more professional astronomers alive today than in the total prior recorded history of mankind. I suppose that many of us will also be commemorated in the outer solar system—a crater on Callisto, a volcano on Titan, a ridge on Miranda, a glacier on Halley’s comet. (Comets, incidentally, are given the names of their discoverers.) I sometimes wonder what the arrangement will be—whether those who are bitter rivals will be separated by being placed on different worlds, and whether those whose discoveries were collaborative will nestle together, crater rampart to crater rampart. There have been objections that political philosophers are too controversial. I myself would be delighted to see two enormous, adjacent craters called Adam Smith and Karl Marx. There are even enough objects in the solar system for dead political and military leaders to be accommodated. There are those who have advocated supporting astronomy by selling crater names to the highest bidders, but I think this goes rather too far.

THERE IS A
curious problem about names in the outer solar system. Many of the objects there have extremely low density, as if they were made of ice, great fluffy snowballs tens or hundreds of miles across. While objects impacting these bodies will certainly produce craters, craters in ice will not last very long. At least for some objects in the outer solar system, named features
may be transient. Perhaps that is a good thing: it would give us a chance to revise our opinions of politicians and others, and will give eventual recourse if flushes of national or ideological fervor are reflected in solar system nomenclature. The history of astronomy shows that some suggestions for celestial nomenclature are better ignored. For example, in 1688 Erhard Weigel at Jena proposed a revision of the ordinary zodiacal constellations—the lion, virgin, fish and water carrier that people have in mind when they ask you what “sign” you are. Weigel proposed instead a “heraldic sky” in which the royal families of Europe would be represented by their tutelary animals: a lion and a unicorn for England, for example. I hate to imagine descriptive stellar astronomy today had that idea been adopted in the seventeenth century. The sky would be carved into two hundred tiny patches, one for each nation-state existing at the time.

The naming of the solar system is fundamentally not a task for the exact sciences. It has historically encountered prejudice and jingoism and lack of foresight at every turn. However, while it may be a little early for self-congratulation, I think astronomers have recently taken some major steps to deprovincialize the nomenclature and make it representative of all of humanity. There are those who think it is a pointless, or at least thankless, task. But some of us are convinced it is important. Our remote descendants will be using our nomenclature for their homes: on the broiling surface of Mercury; by the banks of the Martian valleys; on the slopes of Titanian volcanoes; or on the frozen landscape of distant Pluto, where the Sun appears as a point of bright light in a sky of unremitting blackness. Their view of us, of what we cherish and hold dear, may be determined largely by how we name the moons and planets today.