Carl Sagan: “A pale blue dot...that is us. That is home. That is where we are. On it, everybody you loved, everybody you know, everybody you heard of lived out their days.”
It’s hard for our students to imagine, but, before the Apollo missions, the only images we had of our world were conjectural, cartographical. Suddenly, at the end of the 1960s, we had pictures of this “pale blue dot’’, taken from space. We could see “Earthrise” from the Moon. We could “see ourselves as others see us”. Look at the pictures at www.nasm.educepsrpifearthearth.html What impact have these images had on our environmental awareness?
What do poets, particle physicists and astronomers have in common? They are trying to make sense of the unknown, and expressing their discoveries and perceptions in terms of the known. Each uses metaphor to bridge the gap.
There’s a language project here. Visit a glossary of astronomy and physics at http:zebu.uoregon.edujsglossaryglossary.html Explore some of the terms, and explain the metaphors which underlie them. This site also contains some very playful ideas. Try “The Grandfather Paradox” - no responsibility accepted for the consequences.
Wouldn’t James Joyce have been delighted that the word “quark” was taken from “Finnegans Wake”?
