I see with some amusement that our stone hugging brothers and sisters have been having fun at Stone Henge today. As I'm sure most enlightened people know today is the shortest day in the UK or the Winter Solstice as its known, when the Northern Hemisphere is at it's maximum tilted distance from the Sun, i.e. the Sun appears lowest in the sky at it's highest point. The good news is that from here on in we're approaching next Summer as opposed to retreating from last, certainly something to celebrate for warm blooded mammals like us.
The orbit of the Earth around the Sun is a great example of cycles in nature, the clue is in the name, i.e. they're cyclical, they will just keep going around for ever until some element of the system causes a tipping point and a new trajectory is established, nothing pre-planned, nothing aimed at human beings and certainly no anthropological guiding hand at work, just physics doing what it does. The exciting thing for me is not that these cycles occur in nature but that we now understand (more or less) why, something our Mayan forebears unlikely ever did.
2 comments:
You've got to hand it to the original Beaker Folk, though. Imagine the time it took them, through measurements and sight-lines, with years with clouds and bad weather, to workthe whole concept of solstice - and where it happened - out. They were real scientists.
AE, they certainly were!
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