The chapters of the book follow the planets, and are inspired by them to develop a comprehensive and wide-ranging discussion on topics that still occupy science enthusiasts and its opponents - UFOs, astrology, religion. We bring here the first part from the first chapter "Example Worlds - Overview". The book was published by Modan
The Planets by Dava Sobel, published by Moden, from English: Eli Galanti, cover design: Anat-Nder, 194 pages.
Avi Blizovsky adds: I have known Dava Sobel's writing for many years, as a science reporter in the late Omni magazine, where she interviewed, for example, Shana Tarter, who is responsible for NASA's short-lived mission to detect aliens SETI, wrote an excellent article about Nostradamus and his long-term influence on culture, and many books, among which we can mention the Longitude - which tells the story of the attempts and competitions to try to find which longitude we are in in order to better navigate the oceans in the days before GPS and computing.
In this book, she describes in each chapter an association that an element of heaven from the solar system evokes in her. Science is of course in the center, but around it she asks questions on subjects such as religion (Genesis - the sun), mythology (the planet Mercury), beauty (Venus), geography (the earth), madness (the moon - the element of the sky after which a psychological phenomenon is called). Mars evokes in her memories of science fiction, Jupiter brings her to talk about astrology and the moment of the discovery of Jupiter's moons - in which it was finally clarified that not everything revolves around the earth, and thus astrology and astronomy separated, Saturn brings her to talk about the music of literature, Uranus and Neptune - the night air, and Pluto Makes her think about UFOs, and about living creatures waving goodbye to us from distant worlds. By the way, the book was published in English in November 2006, about two months after the decision to demote Pluto. Sobel supports those who seek to demote Pluto, because the definition of planets was established before anyone knew about the vast variety of objects in the solar system, and this was a reality in light of the discoveries of many objects similar to Pluto in the Kuiper Belt, one of which is apparently even larger than Pluto.
Introduction (from the back cover)
Dava Sobel takes us on a guided tour to the planets in the solar system and turns them into more familiar and understandable places. She examines the roots of their uniqueness through the lens of popular science, astrology, mythology and science fiction, to art, music and history.
The chapters of the book follow the planets, and develop a comprehensive and broad discussion inspired by them. In the chapter on Jupiter, for example, Sobel deals with astrology, and in the chapter on the sun at the beginning of the universe following the description of the Book of Genesis. She tells the story of her grandfather's immigration to the United States, and following it develops a discussion of the special nature of Pluto.
All the chapters of the book walk the fine line between prose and poetry, but they are all rich in information, and along with the understanding of the solar system and its secrets, they also offer a delightful reading experience.
Planets thoroughly examines our place in the universe. This is a rare book that can delight the professional astronomer, and at the same time give a special experience to anyone who wants to deepen their knowledge of the celestial bodies.
Dava Sobel has been writing about science for about 30 years. Among other things, she was the science correspondent for the "New York Times" and wrote in many magazines, including "New Yorker" and "Omni". She won many awards for her activities to increase the public's understanding of scientific questions.
The first chapter - sample worlds - overview
My admiration for the planets began, as far as I can remember, in the third grade. I was eight years old, and that's when I learned that Earth has brothers and sisters in space, like I have older brothers in high school and college. In 1955, the presence of the neighboring worlds was a completely specific revelation, and at the same time -?mysterious, for although each planet bore a name and occupied a place in the solar family, very little was known about each of them. Pluto and Mercury, like Paris and Moscow, and even more, carried my childish imagination to very exotic utopias.
What little was known for sure about the planets revealed a world of fantastical aberrations, from unbearable extreme temperatures to time warps. The planet Mercury, for example, can orbit the sun in only 88 days, compared to the 365 days required for the Earth, and therefore, a year of the planet Mercury can pass quickly in only three months, similar to 'dog years' - seven years of animal experience crammed into One year of dog owners, the explanation for the unfortunate facts about the short lives of pets.
Each planet opened up its own realm of possibilities, its own version of reality. Venus has hidden under its eternal cloud cover hints of lush swamps, oceans of oil, and perhaps of soda, flooding rainforests teeming with yellow and orange plant life. This is what is written in the books of serious scientists, not in comic books or sensational novels.
The infinite strangeness of the planets contrasted sharply with their small number. Actually, the number of planets - nine - is enough to define them as a group. Ordinary beings appeared in pairs or dozens or in quantities ending in five or zero, but the number of planets was estimated at nine, and nine only. The number nine is as strange as outer space itself and yet can be counted on the fingers. Compared to the task of memorizing the 48 capitals of the states or the key dates in the history of New York City, memorizing the planets ensured complete mastery by evening. A series of nonsense theorems ensured control over the names of the planets, as well as the order in which they spread outward from the Sun.
The number of planets allowed me to gain control over them, to feel that I could collect them, and encouraged me to make a model of the planets made in a shoebox for the science fair at school. I collected marbles, five stones, ping pong balls and pink rubber balls, which we girls bounced on the pavement for hours and hours; I painted them with primary colors and hung them on pipe cleaners and a string. My model (which looked more like a dollhouse than a science exhibit) failed to convey a true sense of the relative sizes of the planets and the vast distances between them. To be honest, I should have used the basketball for justice, showing how it dwarfs everything else, and fixed the entire model in a giant washing machine or refrigerator carton, to better represent the vast dimensions of the solar system.
Fortunately, my crude model, devoid of any artistic talent, did not destroy my beautiful vision of Saturn, hovering in the perfect symmetry of its dizzying rings, which the scientific reports of the 50s attributed to seasonal cycles of vegetation.
After the science fair, my class put on a show about the planets. I got the role of 'Lone Star', because the play required the character to wear a red cape, and I had just such a cape, a leftover from a "Halloween" costume. In my role as a 'lone star' I expressed the sun's wish for evil, and this evil was given to me by the actors who played the planets, who joined me, each in turn, in a speech in which they described their peculiar qualities. Particularly notable were the performances of 'Shabtai', who rocked two hula-hoop hoops while reciting her lines, and of 'Haaretz', puffed up with self-importance, but forced to admit as a fact - "My circumference is 40 thousand kilometers." Thus the data concerning the circumference of the earth was impressed upon me as an indisputable fact. (It should be noted that in those days we always said "the land". "The land" did not become "the land" until I grew up and until the moon turned from a night light into an actual destination.)
My role as a single planet helped me to understand the Sun's role towards the planets as a teacher or guide. It's not for nothing that our part of the universe is called the 'solar system', where the character and special features of each planet are shaped mainly according to its proximity to the sun.
I omitted the sun from my model because I underestimated its power, and besides, it would have posed a problem that has no solution in the area of size ratios. Another reason for leaving out the sun, as well as the moon, is the clear familiarity with the two, through which they became a kind of normal components of the earth's atmosphere, while the planets were seen suddenly and not often (before sleep or in the still dark dawn sky), and therefore were more appreciated.
On the class trip to the Hayden Planetarium, the children of the city were presented with an ideal night sky, freed from the glare of traffic lights and neon lights. We watched the planets chase each other in the dome sky. We tested relative gravity with the help of well-tilted scales, which showed our weight on Jupiter (200 kilograms and more for a normal-sized teacher) or on Mars (a featherweight for everyone). We stared dumbly at a 15-ton meteorite that fell from the sky into Oregon's Willamette Valley, but few of us saw fit to fear the threat it posed to the safety of mankind.
The Willamette meteorite (still on permanent display at what is now the Rose Earth and Space Center) has been determined, incredibly, to be the iron-nickel core of an ancient planet that once orbited the Sun. This world somehow crashed, a few billion years ago, sending its pieces drifting through space. By the force of chance, this particular piece was pushed to the earth, and was thrown into the Oregon soil at a tremendous speed, burning up from the force of the friction and hitting the valley floor with the force of an atomic bomb. The meteorite lay motionless for ages, and the acid rains of the Pacific Northwest ate large holes in its charred, rusted mass.
The primordial campaign presented to me posed a real challenge to the innocence of my planetary ideas. There is no doubt that the dark and dark invader socialized in space with a multitude of rocks and other pieces of metal, which could attack the Earth at any moment. My solar system at home - until this moment a masterpiece of regular mechanism - has now become a messy, dangerous place.
The launch of the Sputnik spacecraft in 1957, I was 10 years old at the time, scared me to death. The Soviet spaceship, as an illustration of foreign military power, asserted a new meaning to the practices of defending against air raids at school, in which we crouched under the table, with our backs to the window, for simulated safety. There is no doubt that we should fear angry humans more than capricious space rocks.
All through my youth and in my 20s - while my country fulfilled the vision of the young President Kennedy and launched a rocket to the moon - secret rockets in rocket towers fueled our collective nightmares. However, until the Apollo astronauts brought the last cluster of moon rocks to Israel, in December 1972, peaceful spaceships, full of hope, landed on Venus and Mars as well, and another ship, the American Pioneer 10, was on its way to fly over Jupiter. Throughout the 70s and 80s, hardly a year passed without an unmanned foray to one of the planets. The images transmitted by robotic sensors to the Earth added more and more details on the hidden faces of the planets. Entirely new objects have come to light, and spacecraft have encountered dozens of new moons in Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, as well as multiple rings around each of the four planets.
Pluto remained unknown, too far away to visit, but in 1978 the unexpected moon was accidentally discovered through careful analysis of photographs from ground-based telescopes. If Beiti, who was born in 1981, had tried to build a model of the updated and expanded solar system when she reached the age of eight, she would have needed handfuls of candy and chewing gum to design the many new additions. My son, three years younger than her, was the first to design the model on the home computer.
However, despite the increase in the population of the solar system, the planets remained stable at the number of nine until at least 1992. In this year, a small, black body, separate from Pluto, was discovered at the edge of the solar system. Similar discoveries were soon added, until in the next decade the total number of tiny and distant bodies rose to about 700. The abundance of young worlds has made some researchers wonder whether to still consider Pluto a planet or reclassify it as the largest of the 'trans-Neptunian objects' (the 'Rose Center' has already removed Pluto from the planetary list).
In 1995, just two years after the first of Pluto's many neighbors was found, an even more unusual phenomenon was discovered. It was a new planet, orbiting another star. Astronomers already suspected that there might be systems of planets for other stars as well, and not just for the Sun, and now the first of them, 51 Pegasi, in the constellation 'The Flying Horse' (Pegasus) has surfaced. Within months, 'exoplanets' - the name soon chosen for planets outside the solar system - appeared in stars such as Epsilon Andromeda, 51 Virginis B and PSR 70+1257. Since then, more than 12 new exoplanets have been identified, and improvements in detection methods guarantee that many more will be discovered in the near future. Indeed, the number of planets in our Milky Way galaxy alone may exceed 160 billion stars. My familiar old solar system, once considered unique, is now nothing more than the first known example of a popular genre.
Currently, no exoplanets have been directly observed with a telescope, so their discoverers are forced to imagine their shape. Only their size and the dynamics of their orbit are known. Most of them compete in size with the giant Jupiter, as the larger planets are easier to identify. Indeed, the existence of exoplanets is inferred from their influence on their parent stars: a star oscillating under the gravitational pull of its unseen companions, or cyclically dimming as its planets pass in front of it and block its light. Small exoplanets, the size of Mars or Mercury, certainly orbit distant suns, but they are too tiny to disturb the star and therefore escape detection from afar.
Planetary scientists have already turned the name 'Jupiter' into a generic term, so that 'a Jupiter' means 'a large exoplanet', and the mass of extremely large planets can be estimated at three or four 'Jupiters'. Similarly, 'an earth' today represents the most difficult, the most desirable goal, among planet hunters, who are developing methods to search the galaxy for small and fragile numbers, preferably in shades of blue and green, which suggest water and life.
Whatever the concerns that preoccupy us at the dawn of this century, the ongoing discovery of extrasolar systems defines our moment in history. Our solar system, one of many, is not only the one whose importance has not been diminished, but it proves itself as a template for understanding the congestion of other worlds.
Today, even though the planets expose themselves to scientific investigation and reappear throughout the universe, they retain their emotional weight and lasting influence on our lives and all that they have ever symbolized in the Earth's sky. The gods and devils of the past were and still are the sources of inspiring light, the wonders of the night, the far horizon of our home landscape.
Tomorrow - the second part of the episode
