THE SOUTHWORTH PLANETARIUM 207-780-4249 www.usm.maine.edu/planet 70 Falmouth Street Portland, Maine 04103 43.6667° N, 70.2667° W Founded January 1970 "Look at the bright side: we might have a white Memorial Day." THE DAILY ASTRONOMER Tuesday, December 22, 2015 Falling Down Two minutes after the winter solstice, in a vast remote forest disturbed only by the excited whispers of the unearthly things, a profane bellow erupted from the night and was followed by a tectonic thud that likely rippled the linoleum on Mount Olympus. These atmosphere-igniting yawps quickly subsided into a despairing moan so protracted that the lurid satyrs, believing it to have been an ardent summons issued by the translucent maiden, hastened forward eagerly. When they instead beheld an unsightly mass of clumsy human nursing his back and wining, they retreated rapidly into the deeper forest, cursing richly at their profound disappointment. Five minutes after the winter solstice, the remains of the human laid back to recover. Through the pine tree spires silhouetted by the gibbous moon he saw the giant Orion, as vigorous and youthful as it had been when the druids replicated it in a configuration of stones thousands of years before. Unlike humans, immortal constellations live untroubled by deteriorations of flesh, blood and bone. Realizing that he couldn't just lie there all night, the man attempted to rise. And, had he not slipped again on the very same ice patch on which he fell the first time -and, curiously, had already forgotten about-he might have managed to stand upright again. Instead, he collapsed back into a heap on the forest floor, looking even more absurd and helpless than he appeared the first time, his anguish compounded by the ignominy of not one, but two tumbles. The first could be dismissed as a simple accident borne of strolling through a dark forest without, dingbat, a flashlight that he had forgotten. The second tumble was just applied stupidity. "There's astronomy in this," he finally said after recovering his breath. "The ice; the dark; Orion; the onset of winter; the thirty or so compound fractures.." During such trying moments, such ruminations worked like an elixir. He raised himself up to a recumbent position, careful to place his elbow on rough topsoil. "Everything in the Universe is ultimately interconnected." Yes, we know you preferred it when he was falling. "Take the simplest thing in the forest," he said, addressing the many pairs of blinking luminescent yellow eyes regarding him from a oak tree hollow. "such as this ice patch on which I fell." He pounded the ice ten times hard for emphasis. "Two months ago it was a small pool of water or, perhaps, wasn't here at all, but exists now, albeit it cracked and in shards. But, it is here now because of that." He pointed to the star adorned sky. "The cosmos made this ice patch and, of course, brought me down here to languish in the midnight dark of the deep forest." If it makes you feel better, we preferred it when he was falling. He pressed his finger into the ground. "This very Earth just a few minutes ago passed the point of the winter solstice. The north pole, which you can eventually reach if you continue to walk behind me for a few thousand miles, was directed as far from the Sun as possible because our entire planet is tilted in the deepest voids of space. Our furiously hot, tirelessly energetic Sun passes low in the sky and even at its apex barely ascends more than 23 degrees above the horizon. Throughout winter, its altitude increases slowly, but the atmospheric absorption robs us of much of its heat until it reaches a much higher angle in the spring and summer. Our land, so lush and luxuriant in May, grows iron-hard and barren. Is that any less fantastic a notion than that of Demeter, so distraught at her daughter's abduction, she permitted ice to cover the world and starve its people?" Invigorated by these meditations, he pushed himself up his feet and, after gasping at a sudden sharp pain, began to slowly walk. "Our top half of Earth turns away from the Sun because it is moving around it. Were it to remain stationary, but at the same distance from the Sun, which is physically impossible, it would maintain a constant orientation and the Sun's altitude wouldn't change. Were that to occur now, we'd be trapped in perpetual winter; let it happen six months from now, we'd then know an unending summer." He wasn't talking to anybody in particular. He had walked away from the tree stump and proceeded deeper into the forest core. At his approach, the whispers had gone silent and even the creatures in flight had settled onto high, wind-perturbed branches out of anxiety at the sight of this interloper. "Earth moves because of the Sun; or, more correctly, because that strange, mystical force of gravity propels it along its 600 million mile long circuit at more than a thousand miles a minute. It looks so static up there amongst the stars, but this mammoth planet is streaming along like a bullet. The gravity, itself, is the indentation the Sun induces in its local space-time geometry. Earth, like the other planets, reacts to that distortion by moving along it. Matter distorts space-time; the tilted planet moves; the Sun's angle changes; the world grows colder; the water loses heat energy to its surroundings; it freezes; the kinetic friction coefficient between a rubber sole and ice is low and as a walker pushes onto the ground, Earth pushes back according to Newton's action-reaction law. The walker pushes on the ice and his foot moves forward farther than it would have done had it been on the rough soil and he loses his balance. Earth's space time distortion causes him to crash with great dignity onto the ground and he is left in a heap to admire the rising Orion." Through the moonlight, he spied a moss softened tree stump next to a large maple that still held onto a few desiccated leaves. One of these late season leaves glided to the ground as he maneuvered gingerly around another ice patch in front of the stump and sat down. At that moment, he spoke to the moon hovering high over in the west. It silvered the ground, casting the sylvan grove in a grid work interplay of light and shadow. "We're now about 7,000 miles closer to summer than we were a few minutes ago. Yet, we'll still pass through moments when you, Moon, will cast a crystalline luster onto a snow burdened forest where we frail humans cannot tread. Space-time will render the world dormant first before awakening it to its vernal rejuvenation." At that moment, he fell silent and focused on the vapor clouds forming from his breath. His physical pain and abject humiliation forgotten, he rose from the tree stump and inhaled as deeply as he could, drawing the elemental energies from the chilled air. And, he felt it then, the fleeting exhilaration that everyone experiences all too infrequently. When one feels as though one could just step out of the bodily constraints as though it were a uniform rapidly removed; as though the spirit has shrugged away all its burdens and, like chaste Diana who sought only the raptures of unfettered winds and mountain summits, could push itself effortlessly off Earth and resist its imprisoning pull. Under the influence of this most ancient magic, he bolted rapidly forward, onto the ice patch he had so quickly forgotten.... and you know what then happened.