A couple of posts ago I mentioned what I understand to be the anomalous nature of not having a widely-accepted proper name for that thing in the sky which lights up the night, looks about the same size as the Sun and is often shown as a crescent in children’s books: the so-called “Moon”. Well, it turns out this is just the start, and relates to a number of other ruminations I’ve had over the years. Although we intellectually accept that we are on a tiny blue speck orbiting the proverbially unregarded yellow star in the Perseus-Carina-Cygnus Arm of the Milky Way, which is in turn just one of countless other galaxies like grains of sand, as Brian Aldiss once put it, emotionally we tend still to operate day to day by the “sandwich” model of the Universe, where we live on a flat surface with the ground underneath us, the sea off somewhere across the way and the sky above us, with the Sun and Cynthia rising and setting above us. But is it psychologically healthy to do this? Is it a sign of having well-adjusted brains? Or, should I say, being well-adjusted brains, if we are indeed our brains.
I’ll start with Cynthia. As I mentioned the other day, I chose to call her Cynthia because that is in fact the name of one of the Greek goddesses associated with the big round hunk of rock some astronauts went to to prove a point about capitalism in a rather heavily government-assisted program half a century ago. Other Western options include Diana, Artemis and Selene, and there are wider possibilities which it might be only fair to include considering the heavy Greco-Roman bias for the names of the larger planets, moons and asteroids. Other sky lores are available. Such deities include Ge, Coyolxauhqui, Meztli, Tecciztecatl, Aucimalgen, Mama Killa, Qango, Tsuki Yomi, I mean I could go on, there are lots of course. The Latin word “luna” and its descendants, found in Romance languages and for some reason apparently Russian as well, is itself a euphemism for the earlier “mensis”, which became too strongly associated with menstruation and presumably made it sound to them that there was a “period” in the sky, which considering the taboos many cultures have around it led them just to call it “the light”, “lumina”, which then became “luna”. The Etruscan goddess is Tiur, with other names, and it seems to me that they could just have called Cynthia after that, but they didn’t. There are also kennings, which I’ve considered using directly or as an inspiration, but old Germanic literature doesn’t seem to have much occasion for mentioning the big light in the night sky for some reason. The options there seem to be “moon-wheel”, which is obviously a bit unsuitable but is a nice idea, conjuring up a rotating half-light, half-dark sphere viewed from its equator, “year-counter”, “waxer” and “waner”. I suppose I could’ve called it “sky-rabbit”, but the word “sky” is problematic too. In order to avoid the rather jarring and eccentric “Cynthia”, I do try to circumlocute references to her.
A couple of you have said it all seems a bit unnecessary, and I have sympathy with that idea. That said, calling our moon something other than “Moon” asserts her individuality. Just on the question of gender, although moon goddesses are more common than moon gods, the Old English word “mona” is actually masculine and “sunne” feminine. Once again, sun gods are more common than sun goddesses, such as Apollo, Helios, Ra and Sol Invictus. It’s not unusual for Germanic folk to get things the “wrong” way round, such as using nights instead of days to count time (“fortnight”), winters instead of summers on a longer timescale and considering the tail rather than the head as the “start” of an animal (“redstart”).
There is a secondary point regarding Cynthia: she may not count as a real moon, in spite of the fact that the word “moon” is now out there being used for ones which are. Isaac Asimov came up with the concept of the gravitational “tug of war”: the ratio of gravitational pull on a satellite between its planet and the Sun. He looked at the thirty-two known satellites in the Solar System at the time and found that of all of them, only Cynthia was pulled more by the Sun than Earth. He also found that the most distant moon of Jupiter know at the time, Sinope, was only slightly more attracted by Jupiter than the Sun. The Sun attracts Cynthia, however, more than twice as strongly as Earth does. Looking at the orbits of the planetary moons as they move around with their planets, you get a kind of “spirograph” pattern with them looping the loop. Cynthia alone doesn’t do this but is always concave to the Sun. It’s more like she’s just drifting along as our companion. Among the official planets, but not Pluto, Cynthia is also much larger relative to the size of her primary than any other body considered to be a moon. Hence the “Moon” is arguably not a moon at all but a companion planet. This, I admit, is a little like the botanical “nut” and “berry” situation, where bananas are officially berries but blackberries aren’t, and peanuts aren’t nuts but nutmegs are, but consider these sentences and which one sounds less peculiar: “The Moon is not a moon”, or “Cynthia is not a moon”. I would say the first sounds much sillier than the second. In fact I think we’d all agree that Cynthia is no moon, but we’d probably be thinking about someone we know called Cynthia who is not a ginormous ball of rock in space, which would be entirely sensible of us. For me, then, the word “moon” has a murky history where it was used to refer to said massive craggy sphere but that’s all in the past now apart from the few hundred million speakers of English who haven’t gotten with the program yet.
Then there’s the question of the definite article. We say “THE Earth”, “THE Sun” and “THE Moon” (well I don’t, but most people do), as if to pick them out and make them special. Now I do say “the Sun”. “The” is used a bit oddly in English compared to the use of definiteness in other languages which have that distinction. There are, for example, languages where omitting a definite article makes a noun indefinite, which doesn’t happen with us, and it often has other rôles common to many other languages which are absent in English where it tends to be more widely used, with proper nouns for example. “Earth” and “Sun” in these usages are indeed proper nouns, which don’t take the definite article in English. However, both words have other meanings: “earth” means “soil” for example, and “sun” refers to any star with planets. It’s fairly common for “Sol”, the Latin for “Sun”, to be used as a name for the Sun in the same way as Sirius A or Betelgeuse might be used as names for those stars, and again this has a Western bias which in fact is unusual for a star name, many of which are Arabic. The Arabic word for “The Sun” is “Al-Shams”, ignoring certain grammatical considerations. There are also Bayer designations to be taken into consideration, which are Greek letters followed by the genitive of the constellation the star is seen in from Earth. Clearly this can’t apply to the Sun here because it (“he”?) moves through the Zodiac once a year, but from α Centauri for example, the Sun is a bright star in the constellation of Cassiopeia and from τ Ceti, twelve light years away, it’s a rather fainter star in a constellation made up by Carl Sagan called the Six-Leggèd Unicorn (Monoceros Sextupedalis), at the base of whose tail we are situated. The constellation is unusually large compared to the ones in our sky.
Speaking of sky, this is also a bit of a planet-bound concept. It’s the view we have of the atmosphere and the rest of the Universe from our vantage point which is not blocked by the body we’re situated on. Space is not “up there” but all around us, and we are also in space. This is news to nobody of course, but it isn’t how we think of things in general. Wherever one happens to be within the atmosphere, the sky is above and Earth below. In order to be “in space” conceptually, we probably need Earth to occupy less than an eighth of our field of vision. The actual situation is complicated mathematically because it’s technically impossible to see an entire hemisphere regardless of one’s distance from a sphere, although one gets so close to being able to do so that this is rather fussy. The sky often refers to something which is almost an optical illusion where the rest of the Universe is obscured by the gas and clouds in the atmosphere, so it does exist during the day, but a clear sky at night is just a good view of part of our environment, to the naked eye up to about two million light years away but which we perceive as a black dome with pinpricks of light in it, plus Cynthia. Once again, we all know this. I’m aware I’m not saying anything new here, but although I reject the Saphir-Whorf hypothesis that our language completely determines our world, I do think it’s significant.
An illustration of how new this isn’t can be found in the work of the mid-twentieth century architect Buckminster Fuller. It was he who popularised the idea of “Spaceship Earth”, emphasising our interdependence on each other in a hostile void and the need to ensure that the systems which keep us safe here are maintained. Ironically, he was also a frequent flier. He used to speak of “Universe” as a proper noun without articles, which is of course similar to how I suggested dropping them for “The Earth”. The rationale behind this was “the aggregate of all humanity’s consciously apprehended and communicated (to self or others) Experiences”, a definition I feel is rather anthropocentric but which also acknowledges the fact that what we perceive just is the world to us. This brings to mind the error apparent in John Norman’s thought of confusing his own preferences with the wider idea of essential human nature, and as Norman has inadvertantly illustrated, the folly present in that confusion, which is something whereof we should all be aware. Buckminster Fuller’s frequent flying, environmentally unsound though it may have been, did also give him the insight of authentically experiencing Earth as a globe, and this influenced his use of the English language. For instance, he would talk of “world-around” rather than “worldwide”, in a move practically the opposite of the flat earthers in the recent satirical novel ‘The End Of The World Is Flat’, and it’s notable that this links to what might be seen as a more rational and just approach to humanity than “worldwide”, which suggests we’re not living on a globe. I personally find the specific phrase clumsy and would prefer to substitute “global” as more succinct and less intrusive, which makes it more likely to be accepted. He also substituted “in” and “out” for “down” and “up” respectively and used to talk about “going outstairs” instead of “upstairs”, emphasising the fact that we’re all clinging to the surface of a ball in space. That sounds precarious, but it’s worth considering our situation as precarious in a different way and therefore serves us as a reminder of that.
He also replaced “sunrise” and “sunset” with “sunsight” and “sunclipse”. The second sounds a bit artificial to me but the first is fairly okay, although still quite attention-grabbing in a way which doesn’t help unobstrusive adoption. Then again, calling Cynthia that doesn’t exactly seem unobtrusive either, so maybe I’m being hypocritical. In my unfinished novel ‘Unspeakable’, I refer to the limb of this planet concealing and revealing the Sun rather than sunset and sunrise, or something like that (I can’t remember the exact wording). Another approach is to refer to the terminator, which in astronomical terms is the locus of points on a body tangent to the Sun, enabling the synonymity of “my location crossed the terminator”, which can refer to either sunrise or sunset and emphasises movement and rotation rather than the illusory stasis we imagine we’re in.
Then there’s this:
The Australasian branch of the Society For Putting Things On Top Of Other Things is in a sense actually doing the opposite to what the Staffordshire branch didn’t do. Do they really deserve the praise of the chair? Although the angle isn’t perfect, what the Australasian branch have in fact done is put twenty-two things underneath other things. Alternatively, a less Eurocentric view would allow for the Staffordshire branch not to have done anything wrong and to have at least not undone the work of the Society. Then again, it appears that the Society as a whole does in fact grasp that Earth is round and gravity pulls towards the centre, and as a side issue the Society For Putting Things On Top Of Other Things does succeed in doing something very similar by putting things underneath other things, because the end result is that something is still on top of something else. What it’s actually doing, from a non-gravity dominated perspective, is putting things next to other things. If there is also a Society For Putting Things Underneath Other Things, they are not their enemies and in fact there could be a federation of societies for putting things next to each other to which they would both be entitled to belong. Their real enemies are such groups as the Society For Taking Things Off Other Things. Incidentally, a less well-known society is the Society For Putting The Letters “SPR” At The Spreginnings Of Sprertain Words, but their rôle is rather different, though also interestingly similar.
However, it is in fact important to know what’s on top of things on this planet, dominated as we are by gravity, and it would be dangerous to remove this distinction from language. It’s scant comfort to a crew trapped in a sub at the bottom of the ocean that they’re in another sense at the top of the ocean with a force pulling the water towards them, and their rescuers would be confused if they were to have the situation described to them as “the intermarine is situated next to a major phase change in matter” without specifying that that phase change was liquid to solid and therefore more likely to be at the bottom of the ocean than the surface. There’s a time and a place for these things and they aren’t always appropriate. Nonetheless, our intuitions can be misled by using language based on outmoded concepts such as these, which are particularly outdated for two reasons: they are based on a flat Earth, which was superceded in Ancient Greek times, and also a geocentric view, which began to be replaced five centuries ago.
Another aspect of this is the realisation that spacetime is a single set of relationships rather than two separate things, meaning that, for example, a unit such as a light year is a measure of spacetime and not just distance as we’d usually understand it. Relative to us, light travels in a diagonal line, and its spacetime coördinates are four-dimensional, as is everything else. Hence when we consider Earth’s rotation and her orbit about the Sun, among other forms of motion, we are in a sense referring to angular motion when we use ideas about the passage of time to some extent. At midday any location on the Equator is 90°from the terminator in all directions across the surface of the globe. Although the situation is harder to describe in different places on Earth, the fact is that time of day can still be considered to be an angular measurement in our planet’s rotation. Likewise with the year, which is close to amounting to a degree’s movement per day although it’s slightly under on average and Earth also accelerates and decelerates somewhat according to time of year, being fastest near the northern summer solstice and slowest half a year later. Of course, the whole Solar System is orbiting the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way once every 225 million Earth years or so, meaning that Earth is describing a shape locally similar to a helix but in fact part of a larger approximate helix. Moreover, the Great Attractor in the direction of Virgo is pulling the Local Group of galaxies, including our own, towards it, and space itself is expanding, although that has little bearing on most of the rest. It might mean that whatever is pulling us all towards Virgo will be more distant in the sense that it will take longer than might be expected at a constant velocity because it will in a sense be in a different place.
There’s also the question of the light cone. This is in fact a sphere of influence rather than a cone, concerning the distance between points which can influence each other in a given time. Say a star explodes. After ten years, the explosion will be visible ten light years away, after a hundred, it will be visible a hundred light years away and so on. Its sphere of influence spreads out at a maximum speed equivalent to light’s. Therefore it may not make much sense to consider that anything really occurs simultaneously. If something is happening now ten light years away, it’s impossible for it to make any difference here for at least a decade. For this reason, again in ‘Unspeakable’, I used a calendar system based on the Crab Nebula pulsar about five thousand light years away, with the date beginning at the instant light reached the location in question, and with units of time based on the period of the pulsar, which is very gradually slowing. Hence because the Crab Nebula was first observed on Earth in the year 1054 CE, I chose that as the year zero for us, but for Antares that calendar would begin in about 1600 CE because it’s more than five hundred light years further away from that supernova. I was trying to illustrate the ties between time, space and causality by doing this, and in fact I’m quite keen on the idea that such a calendar would work for real. In practical terms it would make very little difference on this planet because it only takes light forty-two milliseconds to cross Earth’s equatorial diameter, but using the period of the pulsar as a unit of time takes it away from Earth- or solar-based units. The current period of the Crab Nebula pulsar is approximately 33.1 milliseconds, a figure insufficiently accurate to base a calendar or clock system on. SN1054 took place on 4th July 1054, which was Julian Date 2106209. Today’s date as I write this is 18th September 2021, or Julian Date 2459476.08125 (it’s 1:57 pm). The tropical year 2000 was 365.24219 days long, which is 31 556 925.22 seconds. However, it makes more sense to treat this in terms of days rather than years, which makes it 353 267 days since we saw SN1054, or 30 523 046 400 seconds, bearing in mind that the exact time of night was not known. In terms of current pulsations, which will have slowed a bit by now, that makes 922 146 416 918.429 with spurious accuracy. I have to say that using base ten to express this is not ideal, and in the case of timekeeping, we are in fact used to not using that radix anyway, as is the case with angles.
A little while ago, I wrote a post considering what Latin would be like today if Rome hadn’t fallen, bearing in mind that Latin does survive as an everyday widely-spoken language in the form of languages such as French, Romanian and Catalan. In particular, something to consider here is that scientific nomenclature would probably have arisen directly from spoken language rather than having been mainly based on Latin and Greek but without native sensibilities or a firm grasp of the language itself. Hence elements could be referred to by their atomic numbers directly, which does happen today for placeholder names to some extent, as in “ununpentium”, now known as moscovium but clearly dependent on Western Arabic numerals used in decimal and employing place value. Similarly, when Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were discovered, they were given classical names in accordance with the spirit of the names of the other planets but perhaps not in direct accordance with how “modern” Romans would have named them. Hence it’s easy to imagine a language which is somewhat like Italian and Romanian but uses different, though still classically-based, technical terms. It’s also possible to decouple these terms from the vagaries of history and the techology available when they were first discovered, leaving us with a more logical scientific vocabulary. There are in reality tendencies to address this in human anatomy, where we no longer speak of Fallopian tubes and the Achilles tendon but uterine tubes and the calcaneal ligament. It would be interesting to address this across the board and see how it changed our way of thinking, but it’s also difficult to anchor it accurately because new discoveries are being made all the time which could turn this upside down. Whatever we came up with would become a kludge in the long term and need a rethink.
To conclude, we are imprisoned on this planet and in our present state by the way we use language. It’s very uncomfortable and interferes with communication and clarity to mess about with it too much, but it’s also profitable at changing how we perceive the world, and might enable us to come up with new outlooks and solutions in the long run. Hence although all this is a game, it’s quite a serious game and it’s worth playing if we achieve some kind of conceptual breakthrough as a result.
A Box Of Chocolates 