GAM 2017 Blog
- Published: Wednesday, April 26 2017 00:00
By Borahan Aydoğmuş
“There's a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.” - Isaac Asimov
As humans since our existence we gazed upon the stars. We referred the celestials as gods once. We gave them different characters and different names and always thought how far they are. Now we realize that they are like Earth, objects in space. They are not more special then us nor we are more special then them. But we forget that even though we all share a pale blue dot, we are not as close to each other as we are to the stars.
Astronomy is the oldest one of the natural sciences. The oldest astronomer as we know is Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310 – c. 230 BC), with the first solar system model. Then came scientists like Copernicus, Galileo, John Michell, and Isaac Newton. They were scientist of different times and different places and still throughout history, all of the scientists like them, even when they are in different cultures, different languages, different ideas they communicated with science. Wherever you go in this small yet so big planet of ours, everyone you met can speak the language of science. Science is a global pulpit for us.
We can communicate by science; we can overcome our prejudice with science. We used to teach astronomy to kings, sultans, pharaohs, so that the strongest person in that country understands our place in the universe. And now, we are not giving it the credit it deserves. Every horror and apocalyptic movie starts with a scientist being ignored. We have one Earth and we are destroying it, just because we are not giving enough importance to science, and by doing that we are destroying ourselves.
Since I became the president of HUAST, I realized that we could stop discriminating ourselves, separating one from other because everyone I met until now wanted to know something about our planet, our sun, and our universe. We sometimes forget how joyful it is to listen and learn science from experts. We forget how enjoyable it is to do science. Each one of us has questions and we want them to be answered. Be it a four years old child or a sixty years old person. We all are humans so we all want to know.
We are halfway to achieve our mission, One People One Sky. We already have one sky. The rest is only being one people. By joining AWB, we started to be more unitive towards enthusiast from Turkey to be one, and so far we are, with one step at a time, successful.
Borahan Aydoğmuş is 21 years old, living in Ankara/Turkey because he is studying Applied Physics/Physics Engineering at Hacettepe University. He is in charge of Hacettepe University Astronomical Society, current representative and coordinator of AWB for Turkey.
"As a young scientist I believe the idea and mission of AWB can make a big change, a good one at that, for us humans. For that cause I am giving educational seminars about various subjects to various people in order to share science and learn science with them."
