Tag: astronomy

Friday’s Factoid 2 (by Titus and Joel)

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This week we got to see the International Space Station fly over Hawaii. I saw it first coming over the ocean. It looked just a like a big, bright star moving really fast (Joel).

The Space Station is flying over 17,000 miles per hour and is about 220 miles above the earth. It is as big as a football field. 6 astronauts are there right now but 3 will be coming back to Earth on Sunday (Titus).


Teacher’s Two Cents (by mom)

So was it worth getting the whole family up before dawn and wandering groggily out onto the golf course to get a clear view of this man-made object? I say, “definitely yes” and the boys all agree. They loved the adventure of it but I’m just a big fan of anything that helps put what we’re learning into a solid context. The Germans make a distinction between Kennenlernen and Wissenschaft. The latter follows the usual method of gathering facts about a particular subject while the former involves using whatever means possible to really get to know that subject like you would another person. So we got to get to know the ISS a little better this week and had a grand adventure to boot!

Friday’s Factoid 1 (by Titus and Joel)

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The planet with the shortest day is Jupiter which rotates in only 10 hours. The planet with the longest year is Neptune which takes 60,188 days to revolve around the sun.

But Venus takes 243 days just to rotate on it’s axis and only 225 days to revolve around the sun. That means Venus’s day is longer than it’s year!

Teacher’s Two Cents (by Mom)

2 Peter 3:8 says that “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” I guess that’s also true on Venus!
Of course there have been days that have felt like a thousand years to me here on earth, too. And more than one year has flashed by like a day.

God and the Astronomers

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I just finished a great book by Robert Jastrow (1925-2008), the founder and former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute and a self-avowed agnostic. In “God and the Astronomers,” Jastrow describes the scientific discoveries and the men who made them leading up to the development of the Big Bang theory. What was surprising was how begrudgingly scientists like Albert Einstein came to embrace this theory because it pointed to a single beginning of the cosmos. Jastrow finds the reactions of others in the scientific community fascinating because of the emotional ring to them.

He suggests that “…scientists cannot bear the thought of a natural phenomenon which cannot be explained.”

“There is a kind of religion in science,” Jastrow observes, and “this religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control.”

Jastrow continues, “If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized. As usual when faced with trauma, the mind reacts by ignoring the implications –in science this is known as ‘refusing to speculate’–or trivializing the origin of the world by calling it the Big Bang, as if the Universe were a firecracker.”

Science is left with a huge problem. If they have in fact “proven that the Universe exploded into being at a certain moment,” they are now faced with the question, “What cause produced this effect?…And science cannot answer these questions…The scientist’s pursuit of the past ends in the moment of creation…[and] the barrier to further progress seems insurmountable.”

Jastrow concludes that “at this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

Just a few quotes to inspire you to pick up a great book and read it!
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