Talking mice.
I recently stumbled upon this (rather old) article, concerning the discovery of a socalled 'Super Earth' located in a galaxy far, far .. erm .. no, sorry; located somewhere outside our own Solar System. The excerpt from this article that caught my attention was the following (to spare you from reading the entire bloody thing):
Reading and wondering about this discovery jogged a memory in my mind; I remember imagining, as a kid, that our planet was huge, bigger than huge, enormous! So many countries, people, oceans - how can it be anything but enormous? In my mind the world had no end; it was the biggest thing there was - I had no concept of the Solar System yet, much less of the Universe. This image of Earth was only underlined by books, especially Around The World In Eighty Days, by Jules Verne. I never read it, but the title said it all to me - I mean, they only write about impossible things, right? If they write about traveling round the world, that meant that it was probably impossible to do it for real. Isn't kiddie-logic fantastic?
Then, one day, someone (could be my brother, could be just a friend, or a parent or relative even) dropped the bombshell on me - they announced to me that they read somewhere that the circumference of the world was 'only' 40.000 km (the exact figure: 40.075 km - 24.901 miles). I was shocked. The figure in itself was irrelevant at that time - I had no idea how 'big' a kilometer was. But the fact that they'd been able to measure it was simply shocking to me. Someone, at some point, had traveled all across the globe with a tape measure and measured the entire damn thing! The Earth was measurable!
In retrospect I can see that my view on the world at that point was a bit naive, and, naturally, slightly childish, but I also remember that it felt good, safe, reassuring - we lived on a piece of rock that could not be harmed, could never be destroyed; we lived on a lump of dirt that would always, always, be around to support our feet, to keep us from falling down.
Not so. Quite destroyable, even.
Not long after someone casually but drastically changed my world view, I heard a certain song for the first time. Just click this link and click 'open'.
After that I've never stopped wondering - what else is mr. Disney right about?
Cheers
In a discovery that has left one expert stunned, European astronomers have found one of the smallest planets known outside our solar system, a world about 14 times the mass of our own around a star much like the sun.There is a striking discrepancy (at least, for me) between "the smallest planets known outside our solar system" and "14 times the mass of our own" - are we really that tiny?!
Reading and wondering about this discovery jogged a memory in my mind; I remember imagining, as a kid, that our planet was huge, bigger than huge, enormous! So many countries, people, oceans - how can it be anything but enormous? In my mind the world had no end; it was the biggest thing there was - I had no concept of the Solar System yet, much less of the Universe. This image of Earth was only underlined by books, especially Around The World In Eighty Days, by Jules Verne. I never read it, but the title said it all to me - I mean, they only write about impossible things, right? If they write about traveling round the world, that meant that it was probably impossible to do it for real. Isn't kiddie-logic fantastic?
Then, one day, someone (could be my brother, could be just a friend, or a parent or relative even) dropped the bombshell on me - they announced to me that they read somewhere that the circumference of the world was 'only' 40.000 km (the exact figure: 40.075 km - 24.901 miles). I was shocked. The figure in itself was irrelevant at that time - I had no idea how 'big' a kilometer was. But the fact that they'd been able to measure it was simply shocking to me. Someone, at some point, had traveled all across the globe with a tape measure and measured the entire damn thing! The Earth was measurable!
In retrospect I can see that my view on the world at that point was a bit naive, and, naturally, slightly childish, but I also remember that it felt good, safe, reassuring - we lived on a piece of rock that could not be harmed, could never be destroyed; we lived on a lump of dirt that would always, always, be around to support our feet, to keep us from falling down.
Not so. Quite destroyable, even.
Not long after someone casually but drastically changed my world view, I heard a certain song for the first time. Just click this link and click 'open'.
After that I've never stopped wondering - what else is mr. Disney right about?
Cheers
1 Comments:
Chorus:
It's a small world after all
It's a small world afffter alll...
...la la la la la la
Have not heard that song for a looooong time now.
We tend to remember the moments when all that we thought was "real", as a child, gets crushed with actual facts.
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