Posts Tagged ‘solar system’
“The earth is what we all have in common”*…
Explore a catalog of NASA images and animations of our home planet: “Visible Earth,” from @NASAEarth.
* Wendell Berry
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As we peruse our planet, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965 that NASA turned on planetary science mode on the Mariner IV spacecraft (which had been launched on November 28, 1964 from Cape Canaveral) as it flew by Mars. Over the next two days, Mariner IV captured the first “close up” pictures (21 in all) of the planets surface. The images taken during the flyby were stored in the on-board tape recorder; each individual photograph took approximately six hours to be transmitted back to Earth.
While waiting for the image data to be computer processed, the team used a pastel set from an art supply store to hand-color (paint-by-numbers style) a numerical printout of the raw pixels. The resulting image provided early verification that the camera was functioning. The hand drawn image compared favorably with the processed image when it became available.
“The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful.”*…
As Tom Siegfried explains, the “music of the spheres” was born from the effort to use numbers to explain the universe…
If you’ve ever heard the phrase “the music of the spheres,” your first thought probably wasn’t about mathematics.
But in its historical origin, the music of the spheres actually was all about math. In fact, that phrase represents a watershed in the history of math’s relationship with science.
In its earliest forms, as practiced in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, math was mainly a practical tool for facilitating human interactions. Math was important for calculating the area of a farmer’s field, for keeping track of workers’ wages, for specifying the right amount of ingredients when making bread or beer. Nobody used math to investigate the nature of physical reality.
Not until ancient Greek philosophers began to seek scientific explanations for natural phenomena (without recourse to myths) did anybody bother to wonder how math would help. And the first of those Greeks to seriously put math to use for that purpose was the mysterious religious cult leader Pythagoras of Samos.
It was Pythagoras who turned math from a mere tool for practical purposes into the key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. As the historian Geoffrey Lloyd noted, “The Pythagoreans were … the first theorists to have attempted deliberately to give the knowledge of nature a quantitative, mathematical foundation.”…
More at: “How Pythagoras turned math into a tool for understanding reality,” from @tom_siegfried in @ScienceNews.
Apposite: Walter Murch’s ideas on “planetary harmony” (and Lawrence Weschler’s book on him and them)
* Henri Poincare
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As we seek beauty, we might recall that it was on this date in 1595 that Johann Kepler (and here) published Mysterium cosmographicum (Mystery of the Cosmos), in which he described an invisible underlying structure determining the six known planets in their orbits. Kepler thought as a mathematician, devising a structure based on only five convex regular solids; the path of each planet lay on a sphere separated from its neighbors by touching an inscribed polyhedron.
It was a beautiful, an elegant model– and one that fit the orbital data available at the time. It was of course, nonetheless, wrong.
“Space is to place as eternity is to time”*…
Josh Worth (@misterjworth), with a mesmerizing interactive reminder that space is vast: “If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel.”
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As we scrutinize scale, we might recall that it was on this date in 1988 that NASA, undaunted by distance, launched the Space Shuttle Discovery (which had been out of service for three years), marking America’s return to manned space flight following the Challenger disaster. By its last mission in 2011, Discovery had flown 149 million miles in 39 missions, completed 5,830 orbits, and spent 365 days in orbit over 27 years.
“The exploring of the Solar System… constitutes the beginning, much more than the end, of history”*…
“Solar System Interactive,” from Jeroen Gommers, is a simple– and simply beautiful– tool for understanding the relative orbits of the planets (and lest we forsake Pluto, the dwarf planets) the circle the Sun…
In a simplified graphical presentation the planets are seen orbiting the sun at a relatively high speed. The user is encouraged to grab any one of these planets, drag it around the sun manually and experience the orbit periods of the other planets as they are driven along their orbit at relative speeds, uncovering the “interplanetary clockwork.”
Click here to give it a whirl.
* Carl Sagan
As we watch ’em go round, we might send synthetic birthday greetings to Charles Percy Snow, Baron Snow; he was born on this date in 1905. A chemist and physicist, Snow taught at his alma mater, Cambridge, before joining the British Civil Service, where he had a distinguished career as a technical adviser and administrator. He is probably better remembered these days for his writing (e.g., a biography of Anthony Trollope; the sequence of novels known as Strangers and Brothers). But he is surely best remembered for his 1959 Rede Lecture, “Two Cultures” (subsequently published as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution). Snow argued that the breakdown of communication between the “two cultures” of modern society – the sciences and the humanities – was a major hindrance to solving the world’s problems.
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: ‘Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?’
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, ‘Can you read?’ – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had…
“The solar system is off center and consequently man is too”*…
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On a dry lake bed in Nevada, a group of friends build the first scale model of the solar system with complete planetary orbits: a true illustration of our place in the universe…
* Harlow Shapley, Through Rugged Ways to the Stars
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As we reach for the stars, we might recall that it was on this date in 1988 that NASA launched the space shuttle Discovery, marking America’s resumption of manned space flight following the 1986 Challenger disaster. It was the first of Discovery‘s two “Return To Flight” assignments; it flew the “twin” missions in 2005 and 2006 that followed the Columbia disaster in 2003.
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