Craters on Moons of Planets

CRATERS

We are quick to judge scientists as atheists, and science as anti-religion. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that each language system manifests ideas, feelings, and complex understandings in different ways, and the choice of words builds a path to crystallize a thought.

That scientists have been naming planetary features after explorers, artists, painters, poets, astrologers, heroes, heroines, and immortals attests to their interest in things that cannot be fully explained. Like cavities in rocks on faraway planetary surfaces, where mystery abounds.

This work is an elegy to that spirit, with an intense love for naming (I had to take the liberty myself for Charon, whose craters have not yet been seen or given names), of bringing history, myth, and creativity to the forefront of scientific exploration-or is it the other way around?