I've done my best with the illustration above to demonstrate a fact concerning the relationship of the earth to the sun. Unfortunately, it is difficult to render a really good likeness of the plain of the ellipse (the path that the earth takes in circling the sun) in a two dimensional side-on view. Bear with me, we do not have a perfectly circular orbit of the sun, but let's set that aside for now and discuss what this illustration does show--the seasons.

Okay, not only is our orbit of the sun a little flawed (only just a little), but so is the relation of our axial rotation to the axis of the sun. We tilt. And because we tilt, we get variations to the plain of the perpendicular. Say what! Simply put, at different times of the year (one year equals one rotation of the sun), some parts of our little sphere tilt toward the sun while others tilt away. This phenomenon is where the seasons come from. When the northern hemisphere (the part above the little yellow line in the illustration) is tilted toward the sun (as in the right hand of this model), it is summer there and winter in the southern hemisphere (the reverse being true on the left side of the model). And if you want to get real technical, since this model illustrates exactly twelve positions of the earth in rotating the sun, the extreme left equals December twenty-something and the extreme right June 21st approximately with each of the months corresponding.

Now, as I happen to be a dweller in the northern hemisphere, I am going to render further explanation in those terms. As the earth moves to the section of the picture hidden from view, my part of the world is in Spring. As it moves to center, my part is heading into Autumn, which is where I am going to end up real soon, but not soon enough without air conditioning (pass the lemonade).

"Wait a minute," you say, "we've known about the seasons since time began, but all this scientific stuff has only been around for a few centuries, since Copernicus." Well, that's true. And if you happened to have been born before Copernicus, then you would have believed in a flat earth around which the sun revolved to make night and day. The observable phenomenon in the northern hemisphere was that the sun also appeared to go south for the winter like the birds. Of course, what moves around what all depends upon where your center of the universe is. However, it should be noted, there are few people anymore who light bonfires in the dead of winter to entice the sun to return, and we stopped slabbing and stabbing them in celebration of the sun's return a while back too.

Gees, look how mundane it all got as soon as someone introduced the truth. It must have sent theologians and philosophers on their heels a bit. If the earth is round and revolves around the sun, then maybe man is not the end-all in the creation. That's pretty heavy stuff, especially if you've believed it, built religions on the notion for a couple thousand years. It does pretty much take all those mythologies that existed before and pitch them into the waste basket. No wonder fellows like Gallileo and Copernicus spent time in jail on charges of theological heresy.

Ah, but did it really get mundane? Well, consider, if the earth is round that means you can sail around it, discover new lands, find new riches. And objects like the sun and the moon are no longer just cardboard cutouts in the sky but spheres like ours. Maybe we can go there or to the other planets or beyond. In a sense, instead of looking at the universe as a static creation, fixed and without potential, everything in it becomes suddenly a possibility, suddenly ours for the taking if only we can get there. Yah, the mystery of a music of spheres is gone, but it is replaced with the amazing question of "what will we find when we get there," when we unwrap this gift of space.

	Thoughts on Summer			Summer Music
	Summer Season Page			Angel-Pie's Main Page

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