Astronomy

984 Pages·1991·41.12 MB·English

THE BIG ENDIANS;
OR,
USES OF THE SKY
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ASTRONOMY ASTRONOMY
“Nothing was more common, in those days, than to
interpret all meteoric appearances, and other natural
phenomena that occurred with less regularity than the
rise and set of sun and moon, as so many revelations
from a supernatural source. Thus, a blazing spear, a
sword of flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows seen in the
midnight sky, prefigured Indian warfare. Pestilence was
known to have been foreboded by a shower of crimson
light. We doubt whether any marked event, for good or
evil, ever befell New England, from its settlement down
to revolutionary times, of which the inhabitants had not
been previously warned by some spectacle of its nature.
Not seldom, it had been seen by multitudes. Oftener,
however, its credibility rested on the faith of some
lonely eye-witness, who beheld the wonder through the
coloured, magnifying, and distorted medium of his
imagination, and shaped it more distinctly in his after-
thought. It was, indeed, a majestic idea that the
destiny of nations should be revealed, in these awful
hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven. A scroll so wide
might not be deemed too expensive for Providence to
write a people’s doom upon. The belief was a favourite
one with our forefathers, as betokening that their
infant commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship
of peculiar intimacy and strictness.”
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, THE SCARLET LETTER
“The Universe, as has been observed before,
is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake
of a quiet life most people tend to ignore.
Many would happily move to somewhere smaller of their
own devising, and this what most beings in fact do.”
— Douglas Adams (from LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING,
the 3rd book of the HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
“trilogy in five parts”)
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Larry Klaes <
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Basically, he looked upward for juicy and fruitful metaphors:
A WEEK: The sun-setting presumed all men at leisure, and in a
contemplative mood; but the farmer’s boy only whistled the more
thoughtfully as he drove his cows home from pasture, and the
teamster refrained from cracking his whip, and guided his team
with a subdued voice. The last vestiges of daylight at length
disappeared, and as we rowed silently along with our backs toward
home through the darkness, only a few stars being visible, we had
little to say, but sat absorbed in thought, or in silence listened
to the monotonous sound of our oars, a sort of rudimental music,
suitable for the ear of Night and the acoustics of her dimly
lighted halls;
“Pulsae referunt ad sidera valles,”
and the valleys echoed the sound to the stars.
As we looked up in silence to those distant lights, we were
reminded that it was a rare imagination which first taught that
the stars are worlds, and had conferred a great benefit on
mankind. It is recorded in the Chronicle of Bernaldez, that in
Columbus’s first voyage the natives “pointed towards the heavens,
making signs that they believed that there was all power and
holiness.” We have reason to be grateful for celestial phenomena,
for they chiefly answer to the ideal in man. The stars are distant
and unobtrusive, but bright and enduring as our fairest and most
memorable experiences. “Let the immortal depth of your soul lead
you, but earnestly extend your eyes upwards.”
ASTRONOMY
13,000,000,000 BCE
circa 13,000,000,000 BCE: There was this big bang — we’ve been waiting ever since, for the other shoe to drop.
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24,000 BCE
circa 24,000 BCE: At this point the precession of the planet Earth was such that Polaris was its pole star.
The Earth’s axis precesses (it is like a wobbling top) in a 26,000-year cycle. This cycle known as precession
is caused by the gravitational attraction of the sun and the moon, acting on the fact that the planet Earth is not
quite spherical. In about 14,000 years, Vega (the brightest star in the constellation Lyra) would become the
North Star, and then in another 5,000 years it would be Alpha Cephei (the brightest star in the constellation
Cepheus), and in the time of the Pharaohs of Egypt, the pole star would be Thuban (the brightest star in the
constellation Draco), but at the completion of the entire cycle of 26,000 years –in our current era known as
civilization– it would come to be Polaris again.
ASTRONOMY
18,000 BCE-8,000 BCE
A gigantic and exceedingly bright comet known only as “The Kreutz Sungrazer Parent” evidently whipped
around the sun in a close arc on some date and then disintegrated into a swarm of lesser sungrazing comets
due to the tugs of gravitational attraction. Brian Marsden has opinioned that perhaps the two halves of the
original split of this comet might have persisted until, respectively, 371 BCE (a comet mentioned by
Aristotle) and 1106 CE, disintegrating further on those visits into at least three pieces each.
ASTRONOMY
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9,000 BCE
circa 9,000 BCE to 8,000 BCE: The Maya were making astronomical inscriptions and constructions in Central
America.
A marked bone from this time (or as late as 6,500 BC) has been found in Zaire that probably was used as a
record of months and lunar phases.
Goats and sheep were domesticated in Iran and Afghanistan. They were yummy. Emmer wheat and barley
were cultivated in Canaan. They were yummy. Yummy yummy in the human tummy.
ASTRONOMY
3,200 BCE
Astronomy began in Sumeria and Akkadia with a period of simple description. Through the later portion of
this period, most such names were Sumerian, so some at least must have been of Sumerian origin.
• People watched the sky, and identified and assigned names to the sun, the moon, some of the
planets, and some of the stars and constellations of stars.
• The “two ways” scheme for the division of the sky was devised.
• Informal astronomical knowledge was intertwingled with mythical themes.
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3,000 BCE
circa 3,000 BCE to 2,900 BCE: Cuneiform writing was developed by the Sumerians as an outgrowth of their method
of recording numbers. Impressions of clay tokens used for showing measures of grain were becoming
standardized as the first numerals: a small measure of grain was in the process of becoming the number 1,
while a larger measure was becoming the number 10 (in approximately the same period, symbols would also
be introduced for the multiple quantities 60 and 360).
The Babylonians were able to predict some eclipses.
Tooth filling was occurring in Sumer.
Donkeys and mules were being domesticated in what is now Israel.
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At about this point, in Uruk, mud tablets were being inscribed with references to a “Festival of the Morning
Goddess, Ianna” and a “Festival of the Evening Goddess, Ianna” — presumably these would have been
references to the planet Venus in its roles as morning star and evening star.
A WEEK: The anecdotes of modern astronomy affect me in the same
way as do those faint revelations of the Real which are vouchsafed
to men from time to time, or rather from eternity to eternity.
When I remember the history of that faint light in our firmament,
which we call Venus, which ancient men regarded, and which most
modern men still regard, as a bright spark attached to a hollow
sphere revolving about our earth, but which we have discovered to
be another world, in itself, — how Copernicus, reasoning long and
patiently about the matter, predicted confidently concerning it,
before yet the telescope had been invented, that if ever men came
to see it more clearly than they did then, they would discover
that it had phases like our moon, and that within a century after
his death the telescope was invented, and that prediction
verified, by Galileo, — I am not without hope that we may, even
here and now obtain some accurate information concerning that
OTHER WORLD which the instinct of mankind has so long predicted.
Indeed, all that we call science, as well as all that we call
poetry, is a particle of such information, accurate as far as it
goes, though it be but to the confines of the truth. If we can
reason so accurately, and with such wonderful confirmation of our
reasoning, respecting so-called material objects and events
infinitely removed beyond the range of our natural vision, so that
the mind hesitates to trust its calculations even when they are
confirmed by observation, why may not our speculations penetrate
as far into the immaterial starry system, of which the former is
but the outward and visible type? Surely, we are provided with
senses as well fitted to penetrate the spaces of the real, the
substantial, the eternal, as these outward are to penetrate the
material universe. Veias, Menu, Zoroaster, Socrates, Christ,
Shakespeare, Swedenborg, — these are some of our astronomers.
ASTRONOMY
NICOLAS COPERNICUS
VENUS
At about this period, in Mesopotamian astronomy, the Sumerians were establishing their lunar calendar.
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2,807 BCE
May 10, morning: There has recently been speculation that the “Burkle crater” on the floor of the Indian Ocean at
12,500 feet depth, which is 18 miles in diameter, was produced by an impact on this date. The speculation is
that this impact produced a tsunami at least 600 feet high, which carried large amounts of ocean-floor
sediments onto the coast of Madagascar, producing four enormous wedge-shaped deposits now referred to as
“chevrons.” It is Dr. Bruce Masse of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico who has on the basis
of cultural records hypothesized that the impact object was a comet and that its strike date was precisely the
morning of May 10th in the year 2,807 BCE. (Dr. Masse does acknowledge that since his evidence for the
precise date is merely cultural, and since our oral cultures do not do an excellent job of preserving exactitude,
the creation of more lines of inference would be appropriate: “we’re not there yet.”)
Because we’re not there yet, Columbia University is just now proposing to send a graduate student to collect
megatsunami deposits from around the Indian Ocean:
Pinpointing the Causes of Holocene Megatsunami Events in Australia
Working under the supervision of Dallas
Abbott, Adjunct Research Scientist at the
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the goal of
this project is to study sets of Holocene age
chevron dunes, in Australia all of which are
inferred to be megatsunami deposits. The
project seeks to identify the ejecta from the
Burkle crater and/or tsunami deposits in bog
of lake cores from around the Indian Ocean.
This can be accomplished by looking for
intervals of abnormally rapid sediment
deposition and coarse sediment deposition
within the cores. The Burkle impact tsunami
should have emplaced chevron dunes in
Madagascar and southern Africa. The student
will be a partner in an international
consortium for tsunami research involving
social and earth scientists in Australia,
North America and Russia. To accommodate an
academic schedule the project will include
library work and lab work. The student will use
the library to find data on sediment
deposition in lakes and coastal areas around
the Indian Ocean. The student will also search
for, order, and look at maps of Holocene
coastal dune deposits in Madagascar and
southeastern Africa. The student will spend
one day a week at Lamont looking for impact
ejecta in deposits from continental and deep
sea cores.
SKY EVENT
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