Breanna Ruiz
Math 4
Jan 17 2014
Math 4
Jan 17 2014
Bryson QCCQ Reading 2
Quote:
We have been spoiled by artists’ renderings into imagining a clarity of resolution that doesn’t exist in actual astronomy. Pluto in Christy’s photograph is faint and fuzzy—a piece of cosmic lint—and its moon is not the romantically backlit, crisply delineated companion orb you would get in a National Geographic painting, but rather just a tiny and extremely indistinct hint of additional fuzziness. Such was the fuzziness, in fact, that it took seven years for anyone to spot the moon again and thus independently confirm its existence.
Comment/Connection:
I remember when I was in Elementary school, getting the news that they were no longer going to include pluto in the list of planets! How else was I going to utilize "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas" ? As a child, I just saw it as grown ups no longer wanted pluto, but now reading, I've come to see this wasn't a one night decision.
Percival Lowell was the man to help discover Pluto in the first place! He was a man who just kept pursuing what he believed despite what others thought about him. In the reading I learned that Lowell suggested there was a ninth planet due to his studies on Uranus and Neptune's orbits. The math that goes behind everything is so much for one person to even comprehend. He went through it to prove pluto and then its just stripped of the title "planet." To see that it took time, a lot of time (7 years to be exact) made me realize how important the solar system is. It is a whole other universe out there. There are so many areas we don't know like dark matter and black holes.
Growing up I has this idea of the Solar System, we have are planets they go in a certain order and they all have their own color. In the reading Bryson talks on how the schools are putting up a facade of how the planets actually are. They are not right next to each other, that space is just an illusion. We have no idea the size of the universe so how can we corollate the planets. Bryson says something of earth being as small as a pea. If the earth is a pea where does that put the other planets.
Questions:
- Is having these set assumptions of the solar system bad?
-Should Planet X be researched even further?
-Is the math behind the calculations of planets (like weight, diameter, distance) accurate?
We have been spoiled by artists’ renderings into imagining a clarity of resolution that doesn’t exist in actual astronomy. Pluto in Christy’s photograph is faint and fuzzy—a piece of cosmic lint—and its moon is not the romantically backlit, crisply delineated companion orb you would get in a National Geographic painting, but rather just a tiny and extremely indistinct hint of additional fuzziness. Such was the fuzziness, in fact, that it took seven years for anyone to spot the moon again and thus independently confirm its existence.
Comment/Connection:
I remember when I was in Elementary school, getting the news that they were no longer going to include pluto in the list of planets! How else was I going to utilize "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas" ? As a child, I just saw it as grown ups no longer wanted pluto, but now reading, I've come to see this wasn't a one night decision.
Percival Lowell was the man to help discover Pluto in the first place! He was a man who just kept pursuing what he believed despite what others thought about him. In the reading I learned that Lowell suggested there was a ninth planet due to his studies on Uranus and Neptune's orbits. The math that goes behind everything is so much for one person to even comprehend. He went through it to prove pluto and then its just stripped of the title "planet." To see that it took time, a lot of time (7 years to be exact) made me realize how important the solar system is. It is a whole other universe out there. There are so many areas we don't know like dark matter and black holes.
Growing up I has this idea of the Solar System, we have are planets they go in a certain order and they all have their own color. In the reading Bryson talks on how the schools are putting up a facade of how the planets actually are. They are not right next to each other, that space is just an illusion. We have no idea the size of the universe so how can we corollate the planets. Bryson says something of earth being as small as a pea. If the earth is a pea where does that put the other planets.
Questions:
- Is having these set assumptions of the solar system bad?
-Should Planet X be researched even further?
-Is the math behind the calculations of planets (like weight, diameter, distance) accurate?