DECEMBER 6, 2022 – Sometimes little things make big impacts. In the case of books, Mao’s Little Red Book, held high by 100s of millions of Chinese, created a Great Red Wave.
Another small book with a big effect is Planets, part of the collection of A Golden Guide shirt-pocket-size books. The little gem bears no copyright date, but I think the basic science it imparts is still solid—and gaseous, mostly hydrogen and helium. By an examination of grammatical tenses, I was able to narrow the publication range from August 1989 and August 1990, to-wit: “In August, 1989, the Voyager 2 spacecraft made its final planetary encounter . . .” p. 141, and “On August 12, 1990, Jupiter and Venus will pass only 0.4 degrees apart in the sky . . .” p.113 (emphases added).
Planets is the perfect “bathroom book”: small, condensed and replete with fascinating information—far more interesting than the business section of the StarTribune, for example.
Speaking of which, back in a tall office building where I used to work—I noticed that in the men’s room every morning at around 10:00, the business section of the StarTribune would get left on the ceramic floor just outside one of the stalls. Who in the office, I wondered, followed a daily routine of sitting on the throne while reading the local business news . . . then leaving the news behind? Now, I wonder, why read the paper when Planets is [sic] out there?
Speaking of which, I’m sure our knowledge of the solar system has advanced substantially since 1989/90, but I’m also reasonably confident that much of the information that’s packed into this book is still sound. In fact, I remain amazed by how much was figured out by astronomers such as Copernicus (1473 – 1543), Galileo (1564 – 1642) and Kepler (1571 – 1630). By the pub date of Planets, our understanding had advanced by . . . light years.
While Hubble and James Webb are blowing our minds with never-seen-before imagery of the edges of the universe, the “old news” of our neighborhood planetary system still challenges the imagination. Take Uranus, for example, and I don’t mean the part of one’s anatomy that from time to time warms the bathroom throne. I mean the planet, and the 98-degree tilt of its axis. For a quarter of Uranus’s 44-year trip around the sun, the planet’s north pole faces Ol‘ Sol almost directly; likewise, Uranus’s south pole.
When Neptune was discovered in 1846, it doubled the size of the orbital territory of the solar system. Go outside at night and for a reference point, locate Jupiter—a planet with a diameter 11.2 times that of earth, yet so far away, it’s only a bright point of light in our sky. It hangs out 483 million miles from the sun (vs. earth at 93 million). Neptune, 3.81 times the size of earth, orbits the sun at a distance 5.5 times farther than Jupiter.
I can’t decide what’s more amazing: the peculiar make-up of our solar system or . . . the existence of a little bathroom book packed with facts observed and deduced about our local planetary system; described, published and distributed; and . . . read . . . by creatures on planet earth.
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
