scholarly journals The Popularization of Astronomy

1990 ◽  
Vol 105 ◽  
pp. 323-327
Author(s):  
Patrick Moore
Keyword(s):  
Hollow Sphere ◽  
German Society ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
North Pole ◽  
The North ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
The Universe

I suppose it is inevitable that astronomy should be one of the easier sciences to “popularize.” The sky is all around us; even our remote cave-dwelling ancestors must have looked up into the sky and wondered at what they saw there, even though they could have no idea of the nature or scale of the universe. Naturally, they believed the Earth to be supreme, and to have everything else arranged around it for our special convenience. Believe it or not, this point of view is not quite dead even now — and this brings me on to my first point.Some time ago I attended a meeting of the International Flat Earth Society, held in London. Its members believe that the world is shaped like a pancake, with the North Pole in the middle and a wall of ice all around. The meeting was quite remarkable, and participants were totally sincere. Later, I rather ill-naturedly put them in touch with a German society whose members maintain that we live on the inside of a hollow sphere, and I understand that they are still fighting it out; but of course this is quite harmless — and as I have often said, the world would be poorer without its “Independent Thinkers.” But other aspects of eccentric thought are less laudable, and of course I am thinking of astrology, which has experienced a curious revival in recent times.

Polar Maps

1949 ◽  
Vol 42 (5) ◽  
pp. 219-226
Author(s):  
John Kinsella ◽  
A. Day Bradley
Keyword(s):  
Northern Hemisphere ◽  
Relative Size ◽  
North Pole ◽  
Focused Attention ◽  
Polar Regions ◽  
The North ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
North Polar

It is time for us to get better acquainted with the top and bottom of the earth. The strategic importance of the North Polar Regions is becoming increasingly evident and recent explorations in Antarctica have focused attention on that part of the world. We are accustomed to looking at maps which either exclude the polar regions or which distort excessively the distances, directions and relative size of areas in these parts of the globe. Many maps in common usage do not indicate clearly that the great circles between many important cities in the Northern Hemisphere pass near the North Pole.

scholarly journals The Gaze of the Soul and of the Angel in the Renaissance Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-75
Author(s):  
Marko Uršič
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
Symbolic Form ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Marsilio Ficino ◽  
Renaissance Period ◽  
The World ◽  
Erwin Panofsky ◽  
The Universe

The Renaissance rediscovered the soul as the focus of the universe. Marsilio Ficino calls the soul the “bond of the world” (copula mundi), because it connects the earth and the heaven, immanence and transcendence, time and eternity. On the other hand, the centre of the world becomes more and more relative during the Renaissance period, and individual souls live more and more in their particular times and spaces. In Renaissance paintings, a soul's point of view is determined by perspective, as developed by Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca et al., and the very position of the eye also features as a “symbolic form” (Erwin Panofsky). However, above each individual and “mobile” soul there are the wings of the “motionless” angel: super animam mobilem est immobilis angelus, as Ficino says in his renaissance Christianity, in reviewing the Platonic-Gnostic myth of the omnipresent angelic gaze. In the archetype of the angel Ficino perceives a metaphor for the all-knowing Intellect, towards which the human soul ascends. Following the iconology of Ernst Gombrich, this paper also takes notice of the influence of Ficino's philosophy on Botticelli's paintings.

scholarly journals The Gaze of the Soul and of the Angel in the Renaissance Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-75
Author(s):  
Marko Uršič
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
Symbolic Form ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Marsilio Ficino ◽  
Renaissance Period ◽  
The World ◽  
Erwin Panofsky ◽  
The Universe

The Renaissance rediscovered the soul as the focus of the universe. Marsilio Ficino calls the soul the “bond of the world” (copula mundi), because it connects the earth and the heaven, immanence and transcendence, time and eternity. On the other hand, the centre of the world becomes more and more relative during the Renaissance period, and individual souls live more and more in their particular times and spaces. In Renaissance paintings, a soul's point of view is determined by perspective, as developed by Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca et al., and the very position of the eye also features as a “symbolic form” (Erwin Panofsky). However, above each individual and “mobile” soul there are the wings of the “motionless” angel: super animam mobilem est immobilis angelus, as Ficino says in his renaissance Christianity, in reviewing the Platonic-Gnostic myth of the omnipresent angelic gaze. In the archetype of the angel Ficino perceives a metaphor for the all-knowing Intellect, towards which the human soul ascends. Following the iconology of Ernst Gombrich, this paper also takes notice of the influence of Ficino's philosophy on Botticelli's paintings.

‘A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust’: The World and Self in Thomas Hardy's Poems

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Monika Szuba
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Phenomenological Philosophy ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Recurrent Theme ◽  
Body Subject

The essay discusses selected poems from Thomas Hardy's vast body of poetry, focusing on representations of the self and the world. Employing Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concepts such as the body-subject, wild being, flesh, and reversibility, the essay offers an analysis of Hardy's poems in the light of phenomenological philosophy. It argues that far from demonstrating ‘cosmic indifference’, Hardy's poetry offers a sympathetic vision of interrelations governing the universe. The attunement with voices of the Earth foregrounded in the poems enables the self's entanglement in the flesh of the world, a chiasmatic intertwining of beings inserted between the leaves of the world. The relation of the self with the world is established through the act of perception, mainly visual and aural, when the body becomes intertwined with the world, thus resulting in a powerful welding. Such moments of vision are brief and elusive, which enhances a sense of transitoriness, and, yet, they are also timeless as the self becomes immersed in the experience. As time is a recurrent theme in Hardy's poetry, this essay discusses it in the context of dwelling, the provisionality of which is demonstrated in the prevalent sense of temporality, marked by seasons and birdsong, which underline the rhythms of the world.

scholarly journals III. On the nature and construction of the sun and fixed stars

1795 ◽  
Vol 85 ◽  
pp. 46-72 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Central Body ◽  
Planetary System ◽  
Considerable Progress ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Great Satisfaction ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Celestial Bodies ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Made In

Among the celestial bodies the sun is certainly the first which should attract our notice. It is a fountain of light that illuminates the world! it is the cause of that heat which main­tains the productive power of nature, and makes the earth a fit habitation for man! it is the central body of the planetary system; and what renders a knowledge of its nature still more interesting to us is, that the numberless stars which compose the universe, appear, by the strictest analogy, to be similar bodies. Their innate light is so intense, that it reaches the eye of the observer from the remotest regions of space, and forcibly claims his notice. Now, if we are convinced that an inquiry into the nature and properties of the sun is highly worthy of our notice, we may also with great satisfaction reflect on the considerable progress that has already been made in our knowledge of this eminent body. It would require a long detail to enumerate all the various discoveries which have been made on this subject; I shall, therefore, content myself with giving only the most capital of them.

Reconstructing the Crime

Impact! ◽  
1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerrit L. Verschuur
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Diversity ◽  
Blast Waves ◽  
Meteor Showers ◽  
Rapid Succession ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Cretaceous Period ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Mind's Eye ◽  
The Universe

Just what happened to the dinosaurs? In the mind’s eye, travel back to the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago. First, land in a region of the world that will someday be called Oklahoma. You are in the era of dinosaurs, although there are no longer as many species about, worldwide, as there were ten million or so years before. In all, 23 species roam their individual parts of the planet. It is their lack of spatial diversity that will make them vulnerable to the catastrophe that is about to befall the earth. So imagine you are there, together with triceratops, stegosaurus, velociraptors, and tyrannosaurus rex. Mostly they live off the land, and some of them live off each other. On this day none of the animals on earth can possibly have any awareness that they are about to disappear. Such a luxury will only be granted to a conscious species that has learned to explore the universe. For those who survive the initial impact explosion and its immediate consequences, the coming months will mark a terrible example of one of Cuvier’s “brief periods of terror.” In rapid succession, all life will be subject to a holocaust of staggering proportion, horrendous blast waves, searing winds, showers of molten matter from the sky, earthquakes, a terrible darkness that will cut out sunlight for a year, and freezing weather that will last a decade. The ozone layer will be destroyed, and acid rain will make life intolerable for species that survived the first few months after the impact. You are there and you have been observing an odd phenomenon in the sky. For thousands of years a great comet has loomed, repeatedly lighting up the heavens with its glorious tail and then fading away to reappear a few years later. Long ago it was seen to break into fragments, each of which was a spectacular sight in its own right. Sometimes one of those fragments seemed to loom ever so close to the earth. For thousands of years, spectacular meteor showers have been seen whenever the earth passed through the tail of one of those comets, and sometimes dust drifted down into the atmosphere and disturbed the climate.

The continuing threat of nuclear war

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Cirincione
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The North ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Nuclear Winter

The American poet Robert Frost famously mused on whether the world will end in fire or in ice. Nuclear weapons can deliver both. The fire is obvious: modern hydrogen bombs duplicate on the surface of the earth the enormous thermonuclear energies of the Sun, with catastrophic consequences. But it might be a nuclear cold that kills the planet. A nuclear war with as few as 100 hundred weapons exploded in urban cores could blanket the Earth in smoke, ushering in a years-long nuclear winter, with global droughts and massive crop failures. The nuclear age is now entering its seventh decade. For most of these years, citizens and officials lived with the constant fear that long-range bombers and ballistic missiles would bring instant, total destruction to the United States, the Soviet Union, many other nations, and, perhaps, the entire planet. Fifty years ago, Nevil Shute’s best-selling novel, On the Beach, portrayed the terror of survivors as they awaited the radioactive clouds drifting to Australia from a northern hemisphere nuclear war. There were then some 7000 nuclear weapons in the world, with the United States outnumbering the Soviet Union 10 to 1. By the 1980s, the nuclear danger had grown to grotesque proportions. When Jonathan Schell’s chilling book, The Fate of the Earth, was published in 1982, there were then almost 60,000 nuclear weapons stockpiled with a destructive force equal to roughly 20,000 megatons (20 billion tons) of TNT, or over 1 million times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. President Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ anti-missile system was supposed to defeat a first-wave attack of some 5000 Soviet SS-18 and SS-19 missile warheads streaking over the North Pole. ‘These bombs’, Schell wrote, ‘were built as “weapons” for “war”, but their significance greatly transcends war and all its causes and outcomes. They grew out of history, yet they threaten to end history. They were made by men, yet they threaten to annihilate man’.

The Early Earth: An Ocean with Volcanoes

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Deamer
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Student ◽  
North Pole ◽  
Equal Probability ◽  
Early Earth ◽  
Planetary Evolution ◽  
The North ◽  
Tectonic Processes ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Life On Mars ◽  
Geophysical Processes

Malcolm Walter was talking about the Pilbara region of Western Australia where some of the oldest known biosignatures of ancient life, in the form of extensive fossilized stromatolites, are preserved. The first potential stromatolite was discovered by graduate student John Dunlop, who was studying barite deposits at the North Pole Dome. Roger Buick went on to investigate the biogenicity of the stromatolites for his PhD (Buick, 1985) and Dunlop, Buick, and Walter published their results (Walter et al., 1980). In a prescient paper, Walter and Des Marais (1993) proposed that the ancient stromatolite fossils could guide the search for life on Mars. I have walked with Malcolm Walter through the Dresser formation where the fossils were found. It is humbling to realize that if time passed at a thousand years per second, it would take 41 days to go back in time to the first signs of life on our planet. In any description of events that occurred some 4 billion years ago, certain assumptions must be made. I will try to make assumptions explicit throughout this book, beginning here with the geochemical and geophysical conditions prevailing on the early Earth and Mars. I am including Mars not as an afterthought but because both planets had liquid water 4 billion years ago. Most of our understanding of planetary evolution comes from observations of our own planet, but it is now clear that the Earth and Mars were undergoing similar geophysical processes during the first billion years of the solar system’s existence, with an equal probability that life could begin on either planet. In a sense, the surface of Mars is a geological fossil that has preserved evidence of what was happening there at the same time that life began on the Earth. For instance, Martian volcanoes offer direct, observable evidence that volcanism was occurring nearly 4 billion years ago; making it plausible that similar volcanism was common on Earth even though the evidence has been completely erased by geological and tectonic processes.

Recent development of Arctic air routes

Polar Record ◽  
1962 ◽  
Vol 11 (72) ◽  
pp. 261-264
Author(s):  
John Grierson
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Long Range ◽  
North Pole ◽  
The Real ◽  
The North ◽  
The World ◽  
North Polar ◽  
The One ◽  
Over The Top

Since Andrée's magnificent failure to fly to the North Pole in a balloon in 1897, two great epochs have been marked in polar aviation. The first was the epoch of adventure, lasting nearly 60 years, which attracted to its ranks such men as Roald Amundsen, Lincoln Ellsworth, Umberto Nobile, Richard Byrd, Charles Lindbergh, Gino Watkins and the real father of Arctic aviation, Hubert Wilkins. Many others added their quota of experience until enough was known, and the technique of long-range polar flying had developed sufficiently far, for a regular air line to start operations across the North Polar Basin. That was on 15 November 1954 when Scandinavian Airways System (SAS) opened the first air route over the top of the world, from Europe to North America. This heralded the second epoch—the one of consolidation, and the purpose of this article is to describe very briefly the course of developments during these last seven and a half years.

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