Meaning is what brought me to astronomy. It was not aptitude, or I would have gone into literature or the social sciences, and it was not interest, or I might have well studied some other science like geology or chemistry. Only one other potential field of study really affected me emotionally, marine biology, and I eventually abandoned that because I found physics easier to assimilate than chemistry. Eventually, I forsook the sciences altogether because I lacked a natural aptitude for mathematics. I could do it by really applying myself, but I always had to struggle with it. It never came easy.
But the prime motivating factor was unmistakeably emotional, spiritual, if you like. I cannot really explain it rationally, all I can do is illustrate it with a quotation (ironically, one relating to marine biology, not astronomy):
"Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp. What is the message signaled by the hordes of diatoms, flashing their microscopic lights in the night sea? What truth is expressed by the legions of barnacles, whitening the rocks with their habitations, each small creature within finding the necessities of its existence in the sweep of the surf? And what is the meaning of so tiny a being as the transparent wisp of protoplasm that is a sea lace, existing for some reason inscrutable to us -- a reason that demands its presence by the trillion amid the rocks and weeds of the shore? The meaning haunts and ever eludes us, and in its very pursuit we approach the ultimate mystery of Life itself."
From The Edge of the Sea
- Rachel Carson (1955)