# Prolegomenon

You recognize as a youngster that science, and music, and literature and writing—creative wonders—draw you along comfortable invisible force lines. But not opera. Overbearing, embarrassing falsetto vibrato is just wrong. As your joints grow creaky and more of your pate warms to the Sun, you know that this is a misperception. You stumble upon more of these, as you notice yourself more often assigning past vigorous feats of physical prowess to the unimportant pursuits of the unimportant young. You ponder these, your various misperceptions. And your misperceptions of misperceptions. Recursion tickles you.

$$\dfrac{\mathrm{d}^2\overrightarrow{r}}{\mathrm{d}\theta^2}+2\widehat{z}\times\dfrac{\mathrm{d}\overrightarrow{r}}{\mathrm{d}\theta}+{\left(\widehat{z}\cdot\overrightarrow{r}\right)}\widehat{z}=\frac{1}{{1+e_{p}\mathrm{cos}\mathrm{\theta}}}\overrightarrow{\nabla}\mathrm{\Omega}$$

You realize in the shower one day that your—and others’—universal cognitive foibles smacking into observable reality are an irresistible rabbit hole, wondrously vast and an endless source of material to contemplate. Like a particle in the three-body problem of celestial mechanics, your orbit is a tangled meandering, variously lured into the sphere of influence of first one and then the other of those two massive attractors, science and the creative urge. This resonates, and you realize a re-appreciation of past love.

$$\mathrm{\Omega}=\frac{1}{2}r^{2}+U=\frac{1}{2}r^{2}+\frac{{1-\mathrm{\mu}}}{r_{1}}+\frac{\mathrm{\mu}}{r_{2}}$$

Thus: what shall you write? Unuseful question. The world is big. Where shall you intend your aim? Better. Get thee to the shower!, your ever-reliable Delphic font of nearly every good idea.§ You love nature, and science—especially astronomy and math—and the scientific way of thinking, which come to you with joy and not pain. (This cannot be weird, surely—friends’ and society’s protestations notwithstanding.) The chasm awaits.

$$r_{1}=\sqrt{{{\left(x+\mathrm{\mu}\right)}^{2}+y^{2}+z^{2}}}\hspace{2.222222em}r_{2}=\sqrt{{{\left(x-1+\mathrm{\mu}\right)}^{2}+y^{2}+z^{2}}}$$

On a whim you schlep to a National Association of Science Writers conference, where you are isolated and small, sole introvert amidst a mind-bruising cacophony. Drilling through your crushing discomfort, you meet Roy Peter Clark’s Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer (you buy three copies), you hear Jonathan Coulton sing his wistful nerd anthem, “Code Monkey” (you buy three CDs), and a merciful soul tells you to read Lewis Thomas’s classic medley of essays, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (why is there no Kindle version?). This is it. A trigger, an unlatching: your dormant writing compulsion awakens.

Astronomy with math. True stories, precisely told. A worthwhile target.

$$v^{2}-\frac{{2\mathrm{\Omega}}}{{1+e_{p}\mathrm{cos}\mathrm{\theta}}}+z^{2}+C+2\int\frac{{e_{p}\mathrm{sin}\mathrm{\theta}}}{{\left(1+e_{p}\mathrm{cos}\mathrm{\theta}\right)}^{2}}\mathrm{\Omega}\hspace{0.222222em}d\mathrm{\theta}=0$$

Halfway through college, you end the pleasant agony and decide astronomy over music. Seemingly by crazy random utterly naive inevitability, you become a professional astronomer. As your mop grows thinner and your knuckles grow larger, you realize the apparent randomicity is a misperception.

The equations, if you are wondering, tell how a massless particle moves in the combined gravitational fields of two massive objects in orbit about each other.¤ Think, for example, Sun–Jupiter–spacecraft. In astronomy, we call this the restricted three-body problem. It is astonishingly complex.

§ Perhaps only Death is a greater surety—though, surely, only by a little.

¤ For completeness:

$$\mathrm{\mu}=\frac{m_{2}}{{m_{1}+m_{2}}},\hspace{2.2em}r=\sqrt{x^2+y^2+z^2}$$

and

$$\begin{array}{rcl}\overrightarrow{\nabla}\mathrm{\Omega}&=&\left[\begin{array}{l}x-\dfrac{1-\mathrm{\mu}}{r_{1}^{3}}\left(x+\mathrm{\mu}\right)-\dfrac{\mu}{r_{2}^{3}}\left(x-1+\mathrm{\mu}\right)\\\\y\left(1-\dfrac{1-\mathrm{\mu}}{r_{1}^{3}}-\dfrac{\mu}{r_{2}^{3}}\right)\\\\z\left(1-\dfrac{1-\mathrm{\mu}}{r_{1}^{3}}-\dfrac{\mu}{r_{2}^{3}}\right)\end{array}\right]\\\\&=&\left(1-\dfrac{1-\mathrm{\mu}}{r_{1}^{3}}-\dfrac{\mu}{r_{2}^{3}}\right)\overrightarrow{r}-\mathrm{\mu}\left(1-\mathrm{\mu}\right)\left(\dfrac{1}{r_{1}^{3}}-\dfrac{1}{r_{2}^{3}}\right)\widehat{x}\end{array}$$