The sky is in here, not just out there: How outdated language insulates us from reality
Reading | Astronomy
Harriet Witt, BA | 2024-12-06
Astronomer Harriet Witt argues that it is our scientifically outdated language that leads us into thinking of the sky as a remote reality ‘up there,’ instead of a felt experience ‘in here.’ She argues for an update to the words and concepts we use daily, so the holistic reality of our existence, and of our intimate relationship with all of nature, can again be felt.
Once the dashboard of our everyday perception is fully compatible with the Copernican Revolutionary perspective, we’ll look back and laugh at the many millennia when we thought the sun rises in the east, passes overhead and sets in the west. Today we know that the sun’s daily path across our sky is apparent motion. What actually happens over the course of the day is that we see the sun from a progression of perspectives, as we’re being rotated from west to east around our planet’s axis. When we face the sun on the western horizon, watching it appear to go down, we’re actually being back-rolled away from the sun by our Earth’s rotation. The action is with us, not with the sun. Sadly, our everyday language does not yet convey this Copernican perspective.
For many millennia, we believed that night falls—that the sky grows dark—at day’s end. Now we know that this darkening is apparent. What actually happens is that our planet rotates us away from the sun and into her shadow—into the darkness that people call “night.” The action is with us, not with the night. Sadly, our everyday language does not yet convey this Copernican perspective.
For many millennia, we believed that years come and go. Now we know that the so-called passing of years is apparent motion. What’s actually happening over the course of a year is that our planet is orbiting us around the sun in a 595-million-mile journey. Sadly, our everyday language does not yet convey the facts that a ‘year’ is a pre-Copernican word for an orbit, and that we wouldn’t experience years if our planet weren’t orbiting us through them.
With our language lagging behind our science, we have yet to embody the Copernican Revolution.
Words are the containers into which we pour our thoughts. So long as we continue pouring our thoughts into pre-Copernican language containers—i.e. speaking in terms of sunrise, sunset, nightfall and years passing—we perpetuate the notion that we live on a motionless Earth, with the universe revolving us. This static, hubristic mindset compromises our ability to solve the dynamic problems of climate change.
Nobody in our society is tasked with ‘languaging’ the Copernican perspective for living on a planet with climate change. This task is what I’ve come to think of as “Copernicus 2.0.” I borrowed this term from one of my astronomy students at Maui Community College. He used it to describe the experiential brand of astronomy that I teach. Over the decades that I’ve been developing this material with input from my students, “Copernicus 2.0” has evolved into a curriculum with thought experiments and somatic exercises. My goal is to better align our thinking with our moving, living planet.
The context for this is the following: In 1980 I started teaching astronomy under the starry sky at an environmental education center serving the Atlanta area schools. By day I taught a class called “Hello Gaia!” It was inspired and informed by NASA’s work with Dr. James Lovelock in the 1970s. The methods that Lovelock developed for addressing NASA’s questions about life on Mars catalyzed him to write his 1979 book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Since I taught “Hello Gaia!” in a forest, I was able to share and explore with my students a dynamic, holistic perspective that was too controversial for many university academics at the time.
“Hello Gaia!” was equally inspired and informed by Buckminster Fuller’s 1969 book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Thanks to Fuller, I became aware of the language lag between the Copernican Revolution and the speech patterns of our everyday lives. By continuing to use pre-Copernican terms like ‘sunrise,’ ‘sunset,’ ‘nightfall’ and ‘years passing,’ we numb ourselves to the dynamism of the only planet in the known universe that supports human life. Fuller addressed this problem with an in-depth exploration of the “Spaceship Earth” metaphor. He also advised us to replace the obsolete words ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’ with scientifically accurate words. Instead of saying ‘sunrise,’ say ‘sun-sight,’ because the sun isn’t coming up; our rotating planet is bringing it into view. Instead of saying ‘sunset,’ say ‘sun-eclipse,’ because the sun isn’t going down; our rotating planet is eclipsing it. Because Fuller inspired and informed “Hello Gaia!,” I’ve been building on his language foundation ever since.
Very unexpectedly, in 1988, my husband’s work brought us to a small Pacific island that’s closer to Samoa than it is to California. This place, Maui, has been home ever since. Because I was born and raised in metropolitan New York City, our move impacted me much in the way that an asteroid impact reshapes the course of a river. Here in the jungle, the value of my Rutgers University Phi Beta Kappa key plummeted to zero. I was ashamed of my ignorance about the Polynesians, whose skill at “way-finding” enabled them—over the course of centuries—to become native Hawaiians. For longer than anyone knows, way-finders have been successfully navigating thousands of miles of open ocean with no need of the maps or technology that Western science mistakenly claims are necessary.
What’s at the root of this mistaken claim? Finding the answer meant digging deep—questioning Western science in a way that I’d never done. It also meant looking at Homo sapiens through a lens that I—a descendant of northern Europeans—had never done. This was painful in the short run, but powerful in the long run.
I learned that, throughout the initial 99% of Homo sapiens’ existence, we were hunter-gatherers, relying on the sky as our calendar, clock and compass. Recently we invented the time-keeping devices that we depend on today. Our dependence on these clever conveniences has had consequences: It has disconnected us from the daily and seasonal cycles of sunlight by which our master body clocks regulate our health and well-being. It has also weakened the pattern-recognition skills that kept us in sync with nature’s daily and seasonal cycles throughout the 99% of our existence when our nighttime calendar-clock was the predictable arcing of constellations across our sky.
Fortunately, some indigenous people—including some native Hawaiians—retain these pattern-recognition skills, so they still know how to live by the calendar-clock of the sky. Several years ago, a group of them, in Honolulu, created an online curriculum—using state-of-the-art graphics—to share their knowledge. With the help of these online classes, I’m now aware that during the 99% of our human existence when the sky was our calendar-clock astronomy was about correlating the natural cycles we saw in the sky with the natural cycles we experienced on the ground. This meant that our astronomy was experiential. It also meant that we enjoyed an intimate relationship with the cosmos. Today, our earth-and-sky pattern-recognition skills are so atrophied that we’ve lost this intimacy. Now we conceptualize our universe as remote and impersonal, with no place or purpose for people—unless you qualify as an astronaut.
During one of our online Hawaiian classes, the teacher asked: “Have you ever seen any dates or times written on the sky?” As I suddenly realized that I’d never questioned the reality of dates and times, my face turned red. Eventually, as I did the work of questioning, I learned that the dates and times we rely on today are artifacts of the ingenuity that gave us indoor clocks and calendars. Even though these dates and times are artificial, they’ve become hardwired into the perceptual apparatus of industrialized humans. Since our perceptual apparatus shapes our thinking, it shapes the way we deal with climate change.
As we struggle with climate change, we’re recognizing the limitations of commodifying nature for the personal profit of a select few. We’re also learning to stop asking, “How can we arrive at understanding by breaking matter down into smaller and smaller pieces?” Instead, we’re learning to start asking, “What keeps life-on-Earth functioning as a whole, dynamic system?”
I can think of no way to adequately address this latter question without facing the following fact: Even though dates and times are artificial constructs, they’ve become hardwired into our perceptual apparatus because they’re integral to our system of 24 time zones. This system was fabricated by railroad corporations in the 1800s to facilitate train scheduling and increase profits.
According to this system, today’s date is the same in both the northern and southern hemispheres—despite the fact that these hemispheres are always experiencing opposite life conditions, because they’re always experiencing opposite seasons. For example, on June 21st at the north pole it’s daytime 24/7. Simultaneously, at the south pole, it’s nighttime 24/7. Life at the north pole is frenetically reproducing, while life at the south pole is dead or dormant. On September 21st at the north pole, darkness is starting to dominate. Simultaneously, at the south pole, daylight is starting to dominate. Because this system of calendar dates is how we’re scheduling our lives, we’re disconnecting from nature—and from our own nature.
Nature’s annual cyclical change in the amount and angle of sunlight is what we commonly call ‘seasons.’ Seasons are critical to life on Earth because our Sun’s light is transformed into our Earth’s life by photosynthesizing plants. With this transformation of light into life, astronomy becomes biology.
This astronomy-biology interface is the realm of Copernicus 2.0. It demonstrates that, when we regulate our lives—and therefore our thinking—by a railroad system, we disrupt the natural synchrony between our planet and her living systems. This disruption of our biological rhythms has psychological and physical consequences, which American Scientist magazine has called “social jet lag” in a cover story about the problem. This disruption is also presenting us with a question that’s being addressed by the science of chronobiology: What becomes possible when we do pay attention to nature’s cyclical time and align our actions with it? This is the context in which my students and I have been developing Copernicus 2.0. As an example of this material, I share with you a thought experiment which addresses the issue of calendar dates. It is as follows.
By this time tomorrow, we will be 1.63 million miles from where we are now, thanks to our Earth orbiting us around the sun. By this time a year from now, we will have completed a 595-million-mile journey and we’ll be back at the point in our annual orbit where we are now. The fact that we can measure a year in miles has significant implications for our understanding of time and space. Equally significant is the fact that, by this time a year from now, we’ll be completing a 595-million-mile orbital annual journey and will be back at the point in our orbital relationship with the sun where we are now. This point in our orbit where we are now is indicated by today’s date on our calendar. Even though this is a point in our orbital space, our schools are teaching that a calendar date represents a point in time.
How did a point in space come to be labeled as a point in time? Could this labeling be the result of the pre-Copernican belief that years somehow “come and go?” Can we address this confusion regarding space and time without considering the fact that dates, times, and time zones are merely artifacts of industry?
Like Bernardo Kastrup, I look forward to the day when the term “Copernican Revolution” is no longer just about accurate celestial mechanics, but also about you and me as actively involved passengers-participants in our planet’s 3.5-billion-year experiment with life.
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