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journeyman
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journeyman
Joined: Nov 2002
Posts: 77 |
Boys,
Well, I think you can all tell I'm not much of a techie when it comes to all of this, but I knew I just read the explanation of this moon/sun illusion whilst rummaging through some of the url's posted in here around high altitude sprites and anthropic principles etc. So here it is. I can't believe I found it!
http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/science_sky/92077
One of the things I am most grateful for living at just this time on earth is that the full moon rises just at dusk and is up in the sky the entire night long. I think that is amazing, astoundingly beautiful, and inspiringly mystical. But surely, there have been whole epochs on earth when this was not the case, when the full moon rose during the day, and was on the other side of the earth during the night.
This must have been the case for some epochs of time, don't you think. Where are our astronomers in here? And where are all the women on this thread? Are they not as enthralled as am I as they look up into that velvet deep....Sometimes I know just what those coyotes must be howling about!
Oh, and Milum, it's maGimaria, not maxi(ugh! That sounds like a feminine product)
And call me an 'anthropomoron' (I'd do that little trademark thingy claiming that word as my own, that Faldage taught us newbies to do, but I was sure I would never presume to use it, so it's lost way back in the threads....), but I take it as a sign that *The Great Mystery* does indeed love me for giving me this gift, and moreso, that I have the heart and mind (as well as the fearlessness *and* humility!) to love my *Creator* back. Which I do, with all my heart and soul. And I just thought that *I* needed to state this in here somewhere for all of you who experience the 'breath of the buffalo' so differently from me. My reality relies completely on weaving synchronicities, which so many of you poo-poo. But it matters not to me, as its my world I'm living in....and I'm actually having a rather good time...and happy to share it with all of you...
And thanks milum for bringing this up. I'm always looking for thoughts about galaxies and evolution, paleontology and other mysteries we ignore as we go about our silly tasks from day to day.
Now, does anyone want to talk about the Void?
mm
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Joined: Apr 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Apr 2000
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One of the things I am most grateful for living at just this time on earth is that the full moon rises just at dusk and is up in the sky the entire night long. I think that is amazing, astoundingly beautiful, and inspiringly mystical. But surely, there have been whole epochs on earth when this was not the case, when the full moon rose during the day, and was on the other side of the earth during the night.
the moon is full when it is on the opposite side of it's orbit around the earth from the sun. we don't get a lunar eclipse every month only because the moon's orbit is tilted a bit.
it's no more mystical than anything else you can say about orbiting bodies.
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Joined: Aug 2001
Posts: 10,713 Likes: 2
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2001
Posts: 10,713 Likes: 2 |
I couldn't pull up the 2000 issue that you referred to, but if you remember the point of it, it would be nice to know.
Easier to type it in than to summarize it:
In Brief: Moon Illlusion Explained
Lloyd Kaufman and his son James H. Kaufman, working at the IBM Almaden Research Center, have gathered concrete data to explain the ancient optical illusion that causes a full moon near the horizon to appear bigger than a moon seen overhead. By measuring viewers' perception of the distance to artificial moons projected onto the sky, the researchers showed that the "apparent distance" to the moon -- rather than the real distance -- determines its perceived size. When the moon is on the horizon, the brain picks up distance cues from the surrounding terrain and interprets the moon as being farher away. This, in turn, causes the brain to see a larger moon. (The new work opposes alternative explanations based on "apparent size.") The study appeeared in the January 4 [2000] Proceedings of the National Acdemy of Sciences. --D.M."
--Scientific American, Vol 282, No. 3 (March 2000), p.22.
(The article is signed with the initials D.M. but it's not I; after turning back a few pages in the issue I conclude that they belong to one Diane Martindale.)
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Joined: Nov 2002
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journeyman
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journeyman
Joined: Nov 2002
Posts: 77 |
Oh, tsuwm, that's such a perfect response! Mystery is in the soul of the beholder. And surely you would expect by now that *I find the Whole Thing to be mystical! And I am quite sure you do not, and therein lies your charm (for me)!
"the moon is full when it is on the opposite side of it's orbit around the earth from the sun. we don't get a lunar eclipse every month only because the moon's orbit is tilted a bit". tsuwm
Precisely! Now I find that just absolutely remarkable! And inspiring! And quite a mystery indeed that there even *is a living, breathing, expanding, evolving universe....
Then again, doesn't really matter, either way, imho...as we're all along for the ride together, in the end....
In any event, I have spent the whole morning on this only to come to find that the url I posted is not the one I meant. Oh it's somewhat related, but I actually did come across the exact question, about the moon illusion, and it had to do with the relation of the image at rising and setting to actual objects on the horizon, such as mountains or buildings. And it had something to do with that tricking the mind into creating a false image of a spatial relation that doesn't actually exist. I'm really sorry I couldn't retrieve it. And in fact, I'm not sure if the answer was really correct, although it was stated as such. It was answered on a children's science question page. I have searched through my 'history' site of all the hits my family has been making online the past two weeks. And while I certanly have a few things to talk to them about (!?!) I could not find the question page.
So, sorry, Milum. I thought I had it for you.
I'm going to turn this thing off and go lie on my back on the sand in the glorious sunshine and plug my chakras into Gaia for a recharge.
xo mm
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Joined: Nov 2002
Posts: 77
journeyman
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journeyman
Joined: Nov 2002
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from my very old mwcd (sorry, I know it's a crummy book, but it's the one I have):
"mystical: having a spiritual meaning or reality that is neither apparent to the senses nor obvious to the intelligence....involving or having the nature of an individual's direct, subjective communion with god or ultimate reality (the experience of inner light)"
and better yet:
"The Creator is the beginning of life and its ending, the Great Mystery within all things and around all things, the Universal Energy....In many Native languages the word for Creator... was a verb, indicating the movement, the activity, the motion, the pulsation of this sacred, never-ending force." - Sun Bear, Dancing with the Wheel
Yeah.
That pretty well describes what I know, how I experience it. And I find it equally fascinating that we don't all feel the same. Remarkable!
But, isn't it ultimately all One? One gigantic/infinite system/illusion/being...
m
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old hand
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OP
old hand
Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 872 |
Man has invented his doom
First step was touching the moon. ~ Bob Dylan
*** Ptolemy believed that the moon on the horizon was magnified by the thick moist layers of air through which it had to pass "just like the apparent enlargement of objects in water which increases with the depth of immersion". But if Ptolemy had a neat new camera he would had seen that the high moon and the horizon moon, would have photographed and measured as the same size. The distortion was therefore within the human's brain's idea of perception.
*** The Ponzo Illusion: In a drawing, two blocks of equal size are superimposed on a railroad track that converges towards the horizon, as if the lower block was at the near end of the track and the upper block farther away. The human brain always percieves the upper block to be much bigger, even after being told that the two blocks are identical in size. But as Abu Ali al-Hasan noted in the eleventh century and modern investigators have confirmed--this illusion ain't the whole story. The moon appears swollen even without perspective data-- for example when seen over a featureless seascape from a ship. Why?
*** Lloyd Kaufman, a professor of psychology, and his son James, a physicist, working in computer science, animated a stereo image of the full moon on a laptop computer. By looking at the display and crossing your eyes you could see the moon in 3-D, floating in space. A computer animation program then moved one of the images so that the moon seemed to be receding into the distance. You might expect, and the researchers had assumed, that people watching this animation would assign a smaller size to the receding moon. Instead the brain does just the opposite: As the stereographic Moon on the computer screen moves away, it appears to grow larger.
*** Most people when asked to point halfway (45 degrees) between the zenith and the horizon, point to a spot much nearer the horizon. Evidently we perceive the sky not as a dome but as a lens-shaped ceiling, the top of which is much closer than the horizon. The brain assumes that the moon, when near the zenith need not be terribly big since it's not too far away. But when the moon is near the horizon, the brain concludes that, if it's more distant than all those things, wow, it must be really big.
(This is, in effect, the idea that SciAm magazine found as a conclusive explanation.)
So, irregular constructions of the major ingredients of life are allowed and forgiven by Mother Evolution (that is, the absurd enlargement of the sun and moon) and life goes on, happily and unmindfully blissfully with them.
I think not. I think that the perceptive illusion of an exaggerated size of the sun and moon has an evolutionary function. Anybody else?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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an evolutionary function. Anybody else?
An "adaptation" need not confer an advantage; it need only confer no disadvantage. Perhaps adaptation is not the best word for this type of change.
Or, if there be an advantage, it has nothing to do with celestial objects, but is merely an adjunct to the very real advantage of knowing how close that bird of prey was to our long ago ancestors. I believe this was discussed in one of the links. Things directly overhead are generally closer than things on the horizon.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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It's very interesting to consider Ptolemy's contributions to astronomy and how Copernicus completely knocked them down centuries upon centuries later.
Something that is amazing about Ptolemy is how he charted the movement of the visible planets, accounted for their brief periods of retrograde movement by theorizing that each planet moved in small circles while taking the big orbit around Earth--not just turning on each axis, but an actual small repeated circular movement like a Cheerio loop repeated around the orbit. Ptolemy's belief was supported by his remarkable--incredible, really--ability to map out accurately the positions of the visible planets as they (to him) rotated around the Earth and his ability to account for retrograde movement of the planets. It was his mathematical accuracy in showing and predicting those positions that caused his theories to be respected.
Of course, he was finally incorrect. Today it's too easy to give him little consideration since we are privy to developments in astronomy.
But he's worth taking a look at just to realize how far his mind did see, if only into a universe that was not quite what it actually is--at least as far as we know today what it is.
On another note, it was interesting to read that the Pope declared that Copernicus--after his death and upon the publication of his observations and findings -- a heretic because his writings were not in accordance with the Bible, and it wasn't until 1992--after the launching of the Hubble telescope!-- that that pope stated that Copernicus was not a heretic. Copernicus gets a lot of credit for putting the sun in the center of the solar system, but Aristarchus, 2000 years (I believe) before Copernicus had done the same. His theories were not respected. There is some ancient Chinese scholar who had theorized the same, but his name escapes me.
I enjoy trying to grasp the minds of these past thinkers better no matter how inaccurate or accurate they may have been. It's the process of thinking that fascinates.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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What eventually caused the Ptolemaic view of the solar system to be discarded was that its math became too difficult. The math for the Copernican view was much simpler. I remember from an astronomy class in college being told that everything, even the equatorial bulge, could be explained in terms of an unmoving Earth with the entire universe rotating around it, but the math is very difficult. On the other hand, it all depends on your context. If you're charting a path from the Earth to Mars you'd do a lot better considering the Sun unmoving and the planets in orbit around it, but if you're charting a path from New York City to Kalamazoo, Michigan you're better off with a stationary Earth.
When you come down to it, Copernicus was just as wrong as Ptolemy, but one step further out. The Sun is not stationary, but is in orbit around the center of the galaxy and the galaxy is flying around through space at the mercy of any other large agglomeration of gravitational bodies. You choose your math to fit the problem.
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