Why do Don and Ra talk about a lenticular galaxy when our galaxy is spiral?

[yossarian]

I agree with zenmaster. Although Hubble did invent the galaxy classification early in the last century, before the Hubble Telescope went up (after Don died) we had photos from the Lick Observatory showing galaxies from the edge that looked lens-shaped, ones viewed from near perpendicular that looked as though they would be lens-shaped viewed from the edge and some that looked like glowing footballs. Don's education was in engineering and likely did not include astronomy at all; mine didn't. So when he talked about our "lenticular galaxy," he was asking Ra to distinguish it from their sometime using "galaxy" when they meant our solar system.

Ra apologized for the error, saying they didn't always have the right vocabulary for big systems. If Ra could mistakenly use galaxy for our planetary system, I forgive them for not getting that our stellar galaxy was correctly a "spiral" and not a "lenticular."

I think Don actually got the word from Ra. He was primed on the word from Ra.

Ra uses the word first in Session 13 to refer to galaxies and solar systems. Ra implies that galaxies themselves revolve around a lenticular universe.

Now that I think about it, Don probably never even knew the word or associated no importance to it until Ra used it first.

Don probably looked it up and so it was running through his mind when he brought it up again 10 sessions later, but to use it in a way that Ra did not originally use it in - to specify the galaxy rather than the solar system.

Pretty strange.

I was googling trying to figure out what was generally known about galaxies in the 80s but didn't come up with much.