Downside Up

     All my life, I’ve thought of northward on a map as ‘Up,’ southward as ‘Down,’ and eastward or westward as ‘Over.’  Living in New England, we would drive ‘up’ to Canada for a summer vacation or ‘down’ to Florida for a mid-winter warmup, or ‘over’ to New York State to visit my uncle and his family.  I would look ‘down’ at my feet to see if my sneakers were tied or ‘up’ into the night sky to marvel at the familiar constellation Orion.  Everybody else I knew seemed to observe the same orientations.

     Then a few years ago I went way ‘down’ to Chile in the Southern Hemisphere to view the night sky from a barren mountaintop high in the Atacama Desert, where it has not rained in decades and the atmosphere is not only free of moisture but also free of both air and light pollution.  Severe clear.

     The night sky was spellbinding in its majesty.  Impossible to adequately describe.  Venus was casting my shadow onto the ground, I could see the Andromeda galaxy with my naked eyes, and the legendary Pleiades, those ancient beautiful seven sisters, were dazzling and nested in a bed of diamond-like lesser stars I’d never even known were there.

     But the constellation Orion was upside-down.  A few other constellations that I’d been able to see from the Northern Hemisphere and that I could still see from the Southern Hemisphere were also upside-down.  What?  I had to make a sketch on a pocket pad to figure out why.  For the first time I realized there really is no ‘up’ or ‘down’ or ‘over.’  Those are all merely arbitrary concepts.  Weightless astronauts learn this lesson quickly on arrival at the International Space Station.  At any distance from our home planet, there is no longer any ‘up’ or ‘down.’  Even on the surface of our planet, if I look ‘down’ at my sneakers and then wait twelve hours, or half an earth revolution, I’m actually positioned on my head from where I was twelve hours earlier, looking ‘up’ at my sneakers.

     It was a disconcerting lesson in orientational prejudice.  The good people in Chile have every right to say they’ll go ‘up’ to Antarctica for penguin-watching or ‘down’ to Maine for photographing moose if they wish, and I have no right to fault them for it.

Phil

Lexophiles: people who enjoy punny word puzzles such as:

When fish are in schools, they sometimes take debate.

A thief who stole a calendar got twelve months.

When the smog lifts in Los Angeles U.C.L.A.

The batteries were given out free of charge.

A dentist and a manicurist married. They fought tooth and nail.

A will is a dead giveaway.

With her marriage, she got a new name and a dress.

A boiled egg is hard to beat.

When you've seen one shopping center you've seen a mall.

Police were summoned to a daycare center where a three-year-old was resisting a rest.

Did you hear about the fellow whose entire left side was cut off?  He's all right now.

A bicycle can't stand alone; it's just two tired.

When a clock is still hungry it goes back four seconds.

The guy who fell onto an upholstery machine is now fully recovered.

He had a photographic memory which was never developed.

When she saw her first strand of grey hair she thought she'd dye.

Acupuncture is a jab well done. That's the point of it.

Those who get too big for their britches will be totally exposed in the end.

Phil

Our modest star

Our Sun is only a smallish average star in a Universe where there are stars hundreds and thousands of times larger and grander.  Yet we owe all we are to it.  Our planet with its rich resources and wondrous vistas.  All flora and fauna on it.  Our very existence.  If it were to vary its energy output by a few percent, Earth and every living thing on it would perish.  One day, as the sun begins to grow old (it is already middle-aged) and expands to become a red giant, Earth will, indeed, perish, but long before then we can only hope we will have found another planet in a younger star system and, over several voyaging generations, have made it our new home.  This is the best argument for continuing a vigorous global pursuit of space programs.  If we do not do so, then the Universe will never know humankind, with all our scientific and sociological achievements, ever even existed.

This mesmerizing video (scroll down) displays the ultimate in abstract art, because absolutely nothing is or can ever be more important than what it depicts:

http://earthsky.org/space/red-giant-pi1-gruis-convection-granulation-bubbles

Phil