I woke up to the sound of a buzzing. It was stuck: between a glass and screen, unable to see, but desperate to escape. I opened the window but it continued to bang it’s small head against the transparent glass frame. Frantic, myopic, and tragically unnecessary, it continued on and on.
“Percival Lowell was an influential American Astronomer who was renowned for his keen powers of observation. Today, though, he is perhaps best known for falling prey to what may have been the most prolonged visual illusion in scientific history”, I read distractedly as the sound of emmeshed voices, Christmas music, and crying children tried to steal my attention away.
“Boarding group B: Line up at the boarding gate! Group B: Boarding gate!” interrupted a tired, tall and wiry watchman, guarding a heavy, blue metal door. A sea of legs, arms, and grunts quickly raced towards the voice before it receded. I found myself among them, overwhelmed by the unspoken, yet omnipresent anxiety of: “they are going to leave me behind.”
We huddled together, like a pack of fluffy sheep, herded by our own illusory rules, hierarchies, and stories: A system perpetuated by the agreement of a collective performance.
“Lowell was convinced that he had found “Spokes” on the surface of Venus after years of observational research.” I read on as we waited to be let through the gate. “Though the planet seemed permanently enshrouded in a thick, featureless cloud cover, Lowell believed that the markings could have been surface features visible through a dense but translucent atmosphere. Even more puzzling, he insisted that because the spokes were always facing the Earth, Venus must be in synchronous rotation with the Sun, a highly unlikely relationship.”
“What a bunch of idiots!” I suddenly heard one of the grumbling sheep mutter beside me. “Look at them, just a bunch of puppets!” he continued with an uncompromising, self righteous certainty. “Look what is happening to this country.” Tall, white, muscular, with a thick goatee, my fellow sheep wore a tight black T-Shirt with the emblem of an American Flag and the words, “If this flag offends you, I’ll help you pack”. I hesitantly gazed at the source of his frustration: a group of three African-American female airport workers doing a Zumba routine.
“What an asshole” another sheep, who overheard, muttered reactively. I nodded in an assured agreement.
“Under a barrage of criticism and even some derision, Lowell in 1902 briefly recanted, publishing a retraction of his Venus work…But when the spokes showed up again in his 1903 observations, he adamantly insisted on their reality until his death in 1916.”
“Boarding group B!” croaked the tall, wiry guard at the boarding dock. The black-shirted man grabbed a pink, glittered backpack off of the floor and tossed it around his back. Making sure his young daughter had not left anything behind, they slowly walked towards the gate giggling together. I followed closely behind, watching the glittered words, Inside Out, bounce up and down as he continued his way onto the tarmac.
“Did you see that?” I asked, hopelessly confused, to the woman who had overheard.
“See what?”
“The backpack. The girl.” I said with emphasis.
“So what?” she said with fierce determination, still staring at the back of his shirt.
“Asshole” she sputtered tensely with an uncompromising, self rightous certainty.
“We now know that these features were a product of his imagination because the surface of Venus isn’t visible from earth. In 2003, researchers found that Lowell was seeing his eye faintly reflected in his line of vision. Lowell was mistaking the spokes for the blood vessels in the back of his own eye…A classic case of confirmation bias and belief perseverance.”
I finished reading, closed the book, and noticed that the man in the black shirt had drifted off to sleep in the row of seats across the aisle. I looked out of the small oval glass window, 30,000 feet up in atmosphere, to see a vast sea of rolling clouds uncompromisingly veiling the surface of the earth. My vision was constrained to the space between the transparent glass frame and white fluffy screens, along with a faint but ever-present reflection of my dark green eyes.
Citations:
Lilienfeld, S.O., Lynn, S.J., & Namy, L.L. (2018). Psychology: From inquiry to understanding (4th ed.). NY, NY: Pearson.
Jaroff, L. (2002, September 10th). What Lowell Really Saw When He Watched Venus. New York Times, Archives. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/10/science/what-lowell-really-saw-when-he-watched-venus.html
Zach Rausch 