The Honor of Being Forgotten

One of the ways in which astronomers differ from physicists is that we know an absurd number of small facts about the Universe. As you may have surmised, the Universe is a fairly complicated place, and astronomers revel in collecting details about the various bits of stuff within it. While this process is frequently dismissed as "stamp collecting" (the lowest blow that one can level at an astronomer, no offense to the philatelists among the CV readership), it's actually an essential feature. At its best, astronomy is a search for underlying patterns and missed opportunities that can be used to contstrain fundamental physical processes. In the past, I've likened astronomy to gathering an enormous bag of puzzle pieces, but maybe there's multiple puzzles in the bag, and probably some of the pieces are lost, or chewed on, and perhaps someone threw some extra pieces from some other puzzle in there. ...