Perspectives of astronomy
We are surrounded by the sounds and slowly fading images of a distant world. As each sound is recognized, each new sight put into perspective, we hopefully come to a clearer view of the Universe as a whole. In the present we find evidence of our origin and this evi¬dence is not unintelligible to the methods of science. However, while we live in a world where news in many forms is still reaching us from the distant past, the future chapters of the world will not be read out to near generations of ours. In the time a thousand histories of the Universe have been written by man, the Universe itself has barely begun to turn another page. We must content our¬selves with predicting how the story has progressed, and accepting how the chapters may proceed from here. Astronomy is one version of that story.

It is a difficult and ambiguous task to see the forest for the trees, to place the many aspects of astronomy in perspective. As in most disciplines, there are few absolutes and in many respects astronomy is still wondering about the relative ordering of things. Here, for example, the debate is at the level of deciding which of two objects is bigger or brighter or further away. These are obviously vital questions; certainly they are some of the simplest. Nonetheless, they can be amazingly difficult questions to answer. This is especially true in astronomy because we have quickly gone beyond the scales of common experience and are attempting to encompass parts of the Universe whose distances, sizes, energies and lifetimes are vastly different from anything we have previously encountered.
And there lies a major part of the timeless appeal of astronomy.

Astronomers have produced a new vocabulary to describe the exotic objects that they have discovered and predicted; they have invented new names for the vast distances they have encountered; and, to place astronomy in a wider perspective, they have de-veloped a new science. One of these, ASTROPHYSICS, is astronomy in an absolute context, the context of physical processes where the terminology and observations are reducible to accepted units of length, time and energy. These standard, absolute units link the laws of physics with common experience; astrophysics links the physical processes in stars with the experiences of the terrestrial laboratory.

We can gain a feeling for the Universe from observations of the relative properties of its constituents: but we only begin to have an understanding in terms of our own experience when the absolute properties of the Universe are revealed. The first absolute determi¬nations of distances to planets, stars and galaxies, each heralded the birth of a new epoch of investigation. As we survey our Uni¬verse, we must take a series of bold steps away from home. We embark on a journey of incomparable proportions, a journey of changing perspectives and ever-widening horizons. a journey that is far from over.

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