After reading this, I asked myself, “what does cause the moon’s phases, after all?” So I went and read about it, and the little diagram in this article made it clear, although there are a few things about it that I still don’t entirely understand. A 3-D model of the system would probably help.
I’m quite educated, too, and I know a lot about science. I probably did hear about the cause of the moon’s phases at some point – in high school or so, because I’ve never taken an astronomy class – but I forgot about it since it just isn’t such an important part of my life. I know a lot of trivia, too, but astronomy has never been one of my hobbies. I think I understand what causes the seasons, but I’m sure that if I were to explain it from memory to Dopers, I’d find out that my understanding has a lot of gaps in it.
I’m probably ready to agree that people should know that the moon revolves around the Earth and that the Earth revolves around the Sun. But there are many things that you may believe that everyone should know, that you know merely because they interest you. Not everyone has the same hobbies.
Feeble attempt to salvage some pride: So how exactly was I supposed to know that you didn’t actually think that when it’s a common enough misconception to make it onto Snopes? Especially after assertions were seriously made about Arthur Conan Doyle which I addressed in the same post?
I don’t understand what rotation and revolution have to do with anything in the OP of this thread. Why would you appeal to those concepts in order to explain that the moon goes around the Earth?
I mean, of course, another way to say this is that the moon revolves around the Earth. But what I’m asking is, what was the purpose of introducing this term and contrasting it with the term “rotate?” What’s the relevance of rotation to any good explanation of the Moon’s revolutions? Why introduce the term “revolve?” And so on.
That’s not quite my position. Rather, I contend that feelings of anger, bemusement or elitism about the situation is a waste of time. As a teacher, I’m sure you’ve encountered students who weren’t interested in what you were teaching, and many more you might have been certain would forget most of the sbject matter once they’d passed the course. There’s a certain futility in trying to force this to change. Ideally, I guess, you’ll inspire 10% or 15% to pursue careers in science or engineering and those’ll be the ones who keep technology advancing, benefitting the other 85-95% who, ideally, will have some vague idea of how “science” works and the ability to look things up when they get curious about specific points, but the rest of the time they’ll happily get on with their lives.
Playing devil’s advocate for a second, what about all the advances humankind made before we realized these things? In fact it would seem that some of the concepts discussed here would not have been known without the invention of the telescope, for example.
Except my point was not to point out the relative complexities of things one might be capable of understanding, but to the practicality of the things one chooses to invest their time in. While I agree it seems natural to me to be curious about the world around me, I don’t mock someone for concentrating on the steel between their hands rather that the sky above their heads.
Regarding Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the fairies, this statement just isn’t true. His book The Coming of the Fairies wasn’t fiction – it purported to be fact. And not a tongue-in-cheek “fact” like that book “The Snouters”, or Doyle’s own “explanation” of those Shifting Coffins (if Joe Nickell is to be believed). Doyle REALLY DID BELIEVE that fairies existed, and said so not only in this book, but elsewhere:
Fascinating. Just as well, then, that I was talking about the Holmes quote on not filling up the head with useless information, and nothing to do with fairies.
Good point, and it supports my reluctant agreement that ignorance of basic astronomy is a sad but excusable orientation.
As a youth I was an avid stargazer, enchanted by cosmology, loved astronomy in college, have always owned a telescope. But after college I took a job overseas and spent a couple of years in the deserts of Saudi Arabia where we had fewer than 10 cloudy nights out of 365 and not one lumen of man-made light for hundreds of miles in every direction. Just walking from my quarters to the mess tent every evening was enough to discover what a quantum difference the effect of locality has. The sky was a riot of stars and the Milky Way was not just vivid, but spectacularly so. You couldn’t help but notice that some of the “stars” changed relative positions and some didn’t. Even retrograde motion was obvious with casual routine observation. Knowledge of the sky (and the consequent development of geometry and navigation) was as natural to the ancient inhabitants of those sands as a good working knowledge of the best sushi bars is to modern urban denizens.
Maybe some people think ignorance of basic astronomy is good because the French are like that and it goes without saying that anything the French do is superior.
