Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, p. 15
It was sometime in 1970, just after Christmas, that the Oracle of Ottawa, set up his first observatory on the trunk lid of a 1967 Chevy Belair, in Pembroke Ontario, after I convinced my Mom that the legs of the tripod would not damage the paint. I can't remember if I got the telescope for Christmas or if I "sourced" it myself with the Christmas tips from my paper route. I was twelve years old at the time.
This was all started from watching the Apollo 11 Moon Landing on July 20th 1969. It is one of those events, that even at the time of this writing, I can remember with total clarity. The whole family watched the whole thing, my Mom declared a special event dispensation as regards to the usual rules of bedtime. I remember thinking, hell, if I am only twelve years old and we are walking on the Moon, the future is surely unlimited. Why in 2015, which seemed eons away, the Oracle of Ottawa should be surely getting regularly smashed at some bar at the end of some galaxy.
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| Dominion Observatory, Ottawa Ontario |
With my crappy little refracter telescope set up, I picked the brightest object in the sky, and put my eye to the scope, and was pretty bummed that the image in the eyepiece was the same as looking with the naked eye, just bigger and somewhat brighter. And it was damn hard to focus a draw tube telescope, (twist and draw..), but I never even conceived that you could get one with a rack and pinion focus. Spirits lifted in later observation sessions when the moon was out. All my brothers and sisters lined up for a look, even my Mom came out and was truly amazed. My Dad of course took a pass. He assured me that he would always take my word for it that the Moon was still there... Oh, and did I mention how cold it could get in Pembroke Ontario in the middle of winter? A very early conclusion was that astronomy was very hard work.
Later on in the early 1970's, our family had moved to Arnprior Ontario, Consolidated Paper refugees, as my Dad took a job at the Gillies Mill in Braeside Ontario. It was a happening little town back then, and a mere half hour from Ottawa, the Oracle of Ottawa's horizons sort of widened, to say the very least. One example of that was when our boy scout troop went to the Dominion Observatory in Ottawa for a tour, and if the weather was favorable, a moment for everybody at the eyepiece of a real professional telescope! But as luck would have it rained cats and dogs for the whole evening and it all looked pretty hopeless until the clouds unexpectedly parted just long enough for everyone to get a peek at Venus, which was just like I saw it with my telescope but bigger and brighter.
Then came the teenage years, first jobs, first rock concerts in Ottawa, that just happened to be a golden time, for concert goers. And yes the Oracle of Ottawa saw Queen in their first appearance in the western hemisphere, you can check that... It was a trial run before the official tour started in the US. Interest in astronomy and all that hard work took a bit of a back seat. But as to the origins of it all, the Oracle of Ottawa was always interested. And my favorite cosmologist was Sir Fred Hoyle. I have always believed he was right. The most admirable thing of the man was that he went his own way and stuck with it no matter what the world thought.
Lately the comments about the stupidity of the Steady State universe are not so confident as they once were. And even though Sir Fred is long gone from us, the Universe just seems to be getting older and bigger... We will talk about that in postings to come...
