Chasing the Sun 8

The first half of "Enter the Greeks".

What a truly fantastic introduction to astronomy. We have only just got up to Aristotole but there are some really good bring it all together insights.

He really teased out what was so different and new about the Greeks. Rather than observation only, sensing patterns of sorts and direct link to the mystical they introduced some kinds of mathematical concepts, namely spheres, spheres and more spheres and the ideas that it was made of stuff, not earth, possibly water, most probably air, but don't forget there has to be fire.

We are about to hear about the bigger and grander Aristotle, however we find out about Pericles Socrates and Plato. The Australian translation of Plato, "Well built wrestler" is probably "Iron Man"

I think the author has fallen into the trap we call "Sparks Notes" these are high school notes that summarize any topic enough to swot on to get you through with a pass, but not honours. For the latter you would have to had actually read the sources and done the hard yards. The sad thing is that so few people do this nowadays any ways.

Pythagoras just really needs to be read in full. To summarize is to trivialize, its odd not because it lame but because there are so many other things making an odd-i-verse. Pythagoras famously had a golden thigh, but to really get your mind around this the Greeks seriously reported this as they would any other obvious fact. He also ran a kind of ancient game show in which you had to be silent for 5 years before you could become part of the studio audience.

You really have to read widely to see that ancient Greece was a kind of Silicon Valley of the ancient world, but not with companies, but colonies and talent could flow from one to another when conditions were not right. This is just my take on it from studying a MBA and the classics.

You got a real feel from the state of play when a dude, possible Thales, but I don't think so was shown a meteorite that fell in broad day light, and he concluded as you would that there was material of sorts in the heavens, possibly the Sun. He was nearly put to death as an atheist. This is where this book is so brilliant as you in the earlier chapters get the great minds like Jung going to primitive tribes and getting an understanding of what make people so hung up about how the stars are hung.

Standing back, Astronomy with just a tiny fraction of information is a real exercise in lateral thinking. That group of stars is a fish. It just looks like to points to me. It is a bit like finding account books nice because they have all that red in it. But you can see although lateral thinking gives you a real edge as it is effectively random thoughts that would make you totally unpredictable to your enemies. You can also see that you would have to put a lid on it and only have the leaders doing lateral thinking and the followers doing prescribed conformal thinking. You can also see, that you would have to have the odd public execution of someone caught lateral thinking when the plan was conformal thinking.

At any rate I can see this as a kind of Rosetta stone to decode why my local environment has its eyes firmly fixed on the horizon and Facebook.

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