Given the way the news always talks about the bad things happening in our world, we really are getting better in some areas.. It might take a little historical joggling of our memories but we do have evidence of progress in certain knowledge. Most of us remember the stories about Galileo. He was a famous scientist way back in the 1600s.
We might even remember that he got in trouble with the authorities of those days because he promoted the Copernican idea of earth orbiting the Sun rather than the Sun rotating around the earth. There were no public polls to learn what people believed the authorities had the final say about such things, However, I would venture that most thought about sunrise and sunset they meant the sun rose, moved across the sky, and then set. It was the suns movement not the earth’s rotation. It still looks that way.
Interestingly enough a recent poll by the National Science Foundation here in the USA found that something like one out of four of the people still thinks the Sun rotates the Earth. So in the last 400 years the scientists have converted about 75 % of the people to their view. Galileo was certainly ahead of his time.
However, the arguments about the heavens and the planets are still going strong. There is a lot for science to settle about the Solar systems mysteries.. They discovered the planet Pluto back in 1930. Then in 2006 it was decided it was not a planet but a dwarf planet. Here I thought Pluto was one of the Disney dogs, oh well. Picking on something just because of its size doesn’t seem politically correct but is neither a dog nor a planet so I guess it’s OK.
The original meaning of planets was wandering star. That is because if you can figure out which ones of the lights in the night sky are planets you can see them actually move, over time, as they wander across the sky. Sometimes they actually appear to move backwards but it is not reverse it is just us moving faster like when you pass a pedestrian in your car. Because they are so far away we aren’t aware of our movement.
Sedna was discovered in 2003 and it also orbits the sun. Then just recently they discovered a new orbiting thing whose scientific name if VP-113 but because of the VP they call it Biden. Who knew those astronomers had a sense of humor, but then he is kinda far out just like those new things..
One interesting thing about their orbits is how vastly different than ours they are. Their orbits take several thousand of our years to go around the sun. Some astronomers have put the pencil to it and they have calculated an implication from those orbits of an earth size but denser planet out there somewhere. It could explain why the new orbits are so different. In this age who says we haven’t much left to discover?
