A Well-Aged Moon

They wold make me believe that the moon was made of greene cheese.

--A Pistle to the Christian Reader, John Frith (1529)

Once man had finally stepped onto dusty lunar soil, scientists thought that they would easily be able to dispel all mysteries about the moon's composition. Alas, not so. Both seismic tests on the moon's surface and experiments on earth have shown that lunar material transmits sound at a perplexingly slower rate than ordinary terrestrial rocks.

Investigating the puzzle, two scientists at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory checked what they drily called "much earlier speculations concerning the nature of the moon." Geophysicists Edward Schreiber and Orson L. Anderson carefully compared the sound-conducting properties of two lunar rocks with those of a wide assortment of cheeses. The result: Wisconsin muenster conveyed sound slightly faster than one moon rock; Norwegian goat cheese responded almost precisely like the other rock.

Reporting their playful experiment, Schreiber and Anderson prudently make no claims of having solved the puzzle. All they say in Science is that their work "leads us to suspect that perhaps old hypotheses are best, after all, and should not be lightly discarded."

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