I decided for absolutely no reason at all to research the solar system today.
I think it occurred to me while reading a story about Mars -- the fourth planet from the sun (apparently) -- that I couldn't actually name the other two planets between earth and the sun.
Besides being embarrassing, this also makes it sort of hard to get a mental picture of the space in which our planet exists.
As I find it very hard to pay attention to anything that I cannot immediately picture, I did a very brief google search, and ended up on this incredibly useful website, clearly intended for people who had not yet taken 5th grade science class. (So, me, basically).
While reading the entry on Venus, I discovered this:
"On June 8 2004, Venus passed directly between the Earth and the Sun, appearing as a large black dot travelling across the Sun's disk. This event is known as a "transit of Venus" and is very rare: the last one was in 1882, the next one is in 2012 but after than you'll have to wait until 2117. While no longer of great scientific importance as it was in the past, this event was the impetus for a major journey for many amateur astronomers."
I tried to remember what I was doing in June 2004 when this happened, but nothing immediately came to mind. Thus, I consulted my voluminous library of journals, which detail fairly accurately day-to-day mood since I was about 13.
Shockingly, there seems to be a complete lack of entries from May to August 2004, which I can assume was due entirely to the fact that I alternately spent most of that time in a park somewhere making out with a loafing Strandite and then crying about him while on public transportation. That, or I just lost that journal, which is entirely possible.
But, good news. It turns out that I will get a spectacularly clear view of the next transit of Venus, if, for example, in 2012 I happen to be living on an island in the Pacific ocean, just south of Japan and east of the Philippines.
Also, on a side note, I was assured by this very rational and down-to-earth website that the occurrence of this rare astronomical phenomenon has absolutely nothing whatever to do with the world maybe possibly ending in 2012.
Totally, totally reassured.
This is only tangentially related to the solar system, but I feel like sharing anyway...
ReplyDeleteI am reading a Brief History of Time, which has given me a whole new appreciation for how complicated the study of the universe becomes when left to extraordinarily smart people who have no inclination towards applied knowledge of any sort (except Feynman) and who seem capable of focusing all their intellectual powers on really really hard math, presumably to escape the burden of having to try to solve the world's less interesting but far more pressing problems (except Feynman again). It has not really helped me understand the universe or our place in it any better (all attempts at describing relativity or quantum mechanics through analogies convinces me that it can only be understood with math, which I don't speak). But it makes for good bedtime reading because it sort of puts things in perspective. That, and I find it easier to drift off to sleep while thinking about black holes and arrows of time than when thinking about all the things I should have done today/this week/this year, but didn't. Like the dishes. Dirty dishes seem to be a universal constant, like the speed of light. No matter how fast you wash them, or how many times, they are always there. They can't be overcome. At least that seems to be the case in the universe of my kitchen.
I'll leave your other readers (Aradan) to ponder how I got from Steven Hawking to dishes in just a few hundred words. I have to go back to not doing things that I will try to avoid staying awake thinking about later tonight by reading about string theory.