A Crack in the Cosmos
drb.ie
drb.ie
I will say, once you really digest it, it becomes impossible to look at the crescent moon at night and not immediately triangulate the position of the sun, even though the sun is not visible. Truly internalizing your place on this "floating sphere of rock and water" is as close to a religious experience as I have had.
But I'll never walk on the moon, and I'll never see an earth-rise. I am convinced the moon is a ball of rock, but my mortality and inability to go and see tenders my heart towards those who firmly believe in other 'unconfirmed' ideas, say, that the moon is a bowl of fire or that lightning bolts are Zeus having a go on some poor soul. It makes me sad and afraid in a way the young, strident, physics loving, atheist me in the past could not understand.
> How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?
We do owe something to the supernatural, for killing it. I just don't know what. Love? Then again, maybe we owe something to Socrates, for killing him.
You do you (or let your 'heart' do you), happy to not feel member of such group in any way nor sharing such concerns. Life is too short and there are properly amazing things to experience each day, that's a better focus of experiencing this world IMHO.
If anything, men we owe much to like Darwin, Newton and Lematire were religiously trained and lived religious lives - their belief and experience is vastly different from yours (projecting an atheist belief system on you based on your comment) and you have no way to relate to it. But the fact that our greatest advanced came from minds running that operating system is not something you can waive away.
You wouldn't see one even if you were on the Moon, which doesn't rotate with respect to the Earth. (In the spirit of your comment, you can satisfy yourself about this intuitively by reflecting that we always see the same face of the Moon, so somebody on that face wouldn't see the Earth changing position in the sky, either.)
While the Moon is tidally locked with Earth, a slight wobble in the Moon's motion (an effect called lunar libration) allows us to see more than 50% of its surface over time.
Therefore for an observer positioned on the Moon's limb (the boundary between the near and far sides), this wobble would cause the Earth to slowly rise just above the horizon and then dip back down. This movement would be extremely slow, taking place over many days, and would only involve a portion of the Earth's surface, not the entire planet rising completely into the sky. But it is the closest thing to earth-rise and set, you can get from the surface of the moon.
The wobble is caused by the moon speeding towards earth (on approach in its elliptical orbit) and then slowing down (on receding away) while still having a constant spin on it axis.
I do that too, like the moon is lit from the right, slightly from above so yes obviously the sun is over there, up, aaaand... nope, it's sunset. Something's not right, is the light curved?
Anyway, that's the day I learned about the lunar terminator illusion[1]. Honestly, even knowing about the phenomenon, it still feels quite mind-bending to think about it.
I don't intuit the cylindrical projection mentioned in that article. I "feel" an arc over the hemispherical sky. I know the terminator is perpendicular to that arc and the moon chases the sun towards the horizon.
I wonder if latitude or other local terrain and climate features influence what sort of mental model one develops about this...
Even if they had known that, they would not have known which are the minerals that contain nickel or cobalt, despite the fact that minerals containing cobalt have been used for coloring glass for many millennia.
There have been several places, including China, where in ancient times alloys of copper and nickel have been made. Nevertheless, even in those places the smiths did not know that the nickel minerals contain another metal. They knew only that when adding nickel minerals to copper minerals, a better copper is obtained after smelting. This was similar to what the ancient Romans did, who knew very well to make brass, and who used zinc oxide for a lot of things, including in medicine, but who had no idea that brass and zinc oxide contain a distinct metal, zinc.
The metals nickel and cobalt have been discovered only during 18th century, at the start of modern chemistry, when people, especially in Sweden, have started to classify all the known chemical substances and minerals and to search for new minerals and substances. In the Sweden of the 18th century there was some kind of classification mania, which has been very useful for mankind, because its result was the start of the modernization of biology, chemistry and mineralogy.
Before modern chemistry, the Europeans knew 7 metals in pure form, because the 8th metal, the adamant of the ancient Greeks and Romans had been forgotten (i.e. natural nuggets of Os-Ir alloy), while 2 other metals had been discovered and used by the natives of other parts of the world, i.e. zinc in Asia and platinum in South-America.
When not counting the semi-metals As, Sb and Bi (which are fragile, because they do not have a metallic crystal structure, even if they have free electrons), cobalt and nickel have been the first true metals discovered in modern times, after the 9 metals (7 + Zn + Pt) that had been in use for many centuries or millennia.
I wonder if anyone's tried to find it.
> And so (as I’ve argued in more detail elsewhere) the first global franchise [Christian faith] was set up on an anti-science basis.
Supposedly, Socrates wasn't disenchanted with the disenchantment because he thought it was nonsense, but because it didn't address existential/moral issues that he found pertinent.
I'm not sure this drive is best characterized as anti-science. There's a difference between denying scientific research as today understood and denying a inherently materialistic worldview as one's overarching context of life. The latter is often married to science, but it doesn't have to be.
No shortage of science was and is done by deeply religious individuals. And indeed religions co-opted science in various ways. And we had materialist* views pretty far back (clearly in both Greece and India).
What's changed recently IMO, is that at those ancient times, a materialistic worldview was a sort of "Yeah, and?" sort of deal, since it offered little in terms of giving a direction to the life of an individual. Nowadays, there is at least a technological eschatology, with people expecting or looking forward to luxuries, longevity, and other such things as have usually been the promises of religions. Funnily enough, insofar as this eschatology contains a place for human agency, its mostly been taken up by organizations and corporations few would see as anything but morally corrupt. It's a weird eschatology where the idea is that if you pump enough juice in the greed machine, at some point a phase transition occurs and all of it can be converted in stable welfare for all.