Earth Rotation Day Quotes

Today is an ephemeral ghost... A strange amazing day that comes only once every four years. For the rest of the time it does not "exist." In mundane terms, it marks a "leap" in time, when the calendar is adjusted to make up for extra seconds accumulated over the preceding three years due to the rotation of the earth. A day of temporal tune up! But this day holds another secret—it contains one of those truly rare moments of delightful transience and light uncertainty that only exist on the razor edge of things, along a buzzing plane of quantum probability... A day of unlocked potential. Will you or won't you? Should you or shouldn't you? Use this day to do something daring, extraordinary and unlike yourself. Take a chance and shape a different pattern in your personal cloud of probability!

There are so many impatient people in the world. It seems everyone wants something right this second. We don't want to wait in lines, we get fidgety when our food takes too long to cook, and we have no tolerance whatsoever for anyone who holds us up from doing anything we want to do the moment we want to do it. I'm bothered right now that I'm having to wait till the end of this sentence to see what word I end up on. On, who knew? It's particularly hard to wait for things that are days or weeks or even months away. Calendars mock you, clocks pester you, and the rotation of the earth seems to slow by at least forty percent. I suppose, however, that if you were preparing to take over the world and you needed one final piece to fall into place, but that piece had to be slowly dragged over the dirt so it didn't die, that would be really hard to wait for. I'd feel sorry for whoever that happened to, but then again they were trying to take over the world and all. So please, no sympathy for Azure.

A sunrise is a wondrous marvel, but in reality the sun never rises. It is the earth that rotates to face the sun. Life too can be a wondrous marvel, but like the earth, we must turn our eyes toward brighter things.

When I pore over the data that establish the mysterious prescence of dark matter and dark energy throughout the universe, sometimes I forget that every day- every twenty a fourth out rotation on Earth- people get killed in the name of someone else's conception of God, and that some people who do not kill in the name of God, kill in the name of needs or wants of political dogma.

We, and not the rotating mechanics of planet Earth, would now decide when it was “night” and when it was “day.

They crossed the boundary from Christmas Eve to Christmas Day within that timeless void where Earthly rotations meant nothing, the one true everlasting Silent Night.

The sun had reached the horizon, and the crickets slowed their chirping as the air began to cool. Sunset and sunrise, he thought, the edges of the day, were the only times you could see the sun move. It touched the top of the ridge and began to disappear. He reminded himself that it was the earth's rotation, that the sun itself only seemed to move, but what difference did that make? He felt he was watching time itself pass. The last bright quarter shrank to an eighth, a sixteenth, a point, and then nothing, the sun's dark negative lingering in his retina.

Each day, the moon’s gravitational field tugs at the earth as it rotates underneath. At CERN, this tiny stress caused the total length of the LEP tunnel to stretch and contract by about a millimeter (one-twenty-fifth of an inch) every day. Not such a big deal in a seventeen-mile-long beam pipe, but enough to cause a tiny fluctuation in the energy of the electrons and positrons—one that was easily detectable by the high-precision instruments. After some initial puzzlement at the daily energy variations, the CERN physicists quickly figured out what was going on.

Flames burn so long as they are fed. Rivers rage so long as it rains. The sun rises so long as the earth rotates. Prayers are answered so long as they are uttered. Hope exists so long as there is a new day. Miracles never cease so long as there is faith. Love endures so long as kindness rules all actions. Dreams thrive so long as they are pursued. Never give up so long as you live.

Eventually they climb sixteen steps into the Gallery of Mineralogy. The guide shows them a gate from Brazil and violet amethysts and a meteorite on a pedestal that he claims is as ancient as the solar system itself. Then he leads them single file down two twisting staircases and along several corridors and stops outside an iron door with a single keyhole. “End of tour,” he says. A girl says, “But what’s through there?” “Behind this door is another locked door, slightly smaller.” “And what’s behind that?” “A third locked door, smaller yet.” “What’s behind that?” “A fourth door, and a fifth, on and on until you reach a thirteenth, a little locked door no bigger than a shoe.” The children lean forward. “And then?” “Behind the thirteenth door”—the guide flourishes one of his impossibly wrinkled hands—“is the Sea of Flames.” Puzzlement. Fidgeting. “Come now. You’ve never heard of the Sea of Flames?” The children shake their heads. Marie-Laure squints up at the naked bulbs strung in three-yard intervals along the ceiling; each sets a rainbow-colored halo rotating in her vision. The guide hangs his cane on his wrist and rubs his hands together. “It’s a long story. Do you want to hear a long story?” They nod. He clears his throat. “Centuries ago, in the place we now call Borneo, a prince plucked a blue stone from a dry riverbed because he thought it was pretty. But on the way back to his palace, the prince was attacked by men on horseback and stabbed in the heart.” “Stabbed in the heart?” “Is this true?” A boy says, “Hush.” “The thieves stole his rings, his horse, everything. But because the little blue stone was clenched in his fist, they did not discover it. And the dying prince managed to crawl home. Then he fell unconscious for ten days. On the tenth day, to the amazement of his nurses, he sat up, opened his hand, and there was the stone. “The sultan’s doctors said it was a miracle, that the prince never should have survived such a violent wound. The nurses said the stone must have healing powers. The sultan’s jewelers said something else: they said the stone was the largest raw diamond anyone had ever seen. Their most gifted stonecutter spent eighty days faceting it, and when he was done, it was a brilliant blue, the blue of tropical seas, but it had a touch of red at its center, like flames inside a drop of water. The sultan had the diamond fitted into a crown for the prince, and it was said that when the young prince sat on his throne and the sun hit him just so, he became so dazzling that visitors could not distinguish his figure from light itself.” “Are you sure this is true?” asks a girl. “Hush,” says the boy. “The stone came to be known as the Sea of Flames. Some believed the prince was a deity, that as long as he kept the stone, he could not be killed. But something strange began to happen: the longer the prince wore his crown, the worse his luck became. In a month, he lost a brother to drowning and a second brother to snakebite. Within six months, his father died of disease. To make matters even worse, the sultan’s scouts announced that a great army was gathering in the east. "The prince called together his father’s advisers. All said he should prepare for war, all but one, a priest, who said he’d had a dream. In the dream the Goddess of the Earth told him she’d made the Sea of Flames as a gift for her lover, the God of the Sea, and was sending the jewel to him through the river. But when the river dried up, and the prince plucked it out, the goddess became enraged. She cursed the stone and whoever kept it.

Descartes, in his Third Meditation, said that God re-created the body at each successive moment. So that time was a form of sustenance. On earth time was marked by the sun and moon, by rotations that distinguished day from night, that had led to clocks and calendars. The present was a speck that kept blinking, brightening and diminishing, something neither alive nor dead. How long did it last? One second? Less? It was always in flux; in the time it took to consider it, it slipped away. In one of her notebooks from Calcutta were jottings in Udayan’s hand, on the laws of classical physics. Newton’s theory that time was an absolute entity, a stream flowing at a uniform rate of its own accord. Einstein’s contribution, that time and space were intertwined. He’d described it in terms of particles, velocities. A system of relations among instantaneous events. Something called time

Henry yearned to instill in the students a delight in knowledge as much as he wanted to drill them in a particular subject. Vividly he explained one of his favorite themes, the seasons—their source in the tilt and rotation of the Earth and its revolution around the sun, their relationship to the changing lives of animals and people throughout the year, their parade of strikingly different forms of beauty. Such talks made learning seem central to the enjoyment of life rather than some kind of adornment—and, Henry hoped, it set a tone for the school day. Henry

All living things respond to the same 24-hour rhythm, in tandem with the Earth’s rotation. Halberg coined the terms “chronobiology”—the influence of time and certain periodic cycles on biological function—and “circadian” (from Latin circa = about; and dies = day) for daily biological rhythms. He created the Chronobiology Laboratories at the University of Minnesota and became known

The stars of the Milky Way galaxy trace a big, flat circle. With a diameter-to-thickness ratio of one thousand to one, our galaxy is flatter than the flattest flapjacks ever made. In fact, its proportions are better represented by a crépe or a tortilla. No, the Milky Way’s disk is not a sphere, but it probably began as one. We can understand the flatness by assuming the galaxy was once a big, spherical, slowly rotating ball of collapsing gas. During the collapse, the ball spun faster and faster, just as spinning figure skaters do when they draw their arms inward to increase their rotation rate. The galaxy naturally flattened pole-to-pole while the increasing centrifugal forces in the middle prevented collapse at midplane. Yes, if the Pillsbury Doughboy were a figure skater, then fast spins would be a high-risk activity. Any stars that happened to be formed within the Milky Way cloud before the collapse maintained large, plunging orbits. The remaining gas, which easily sticks to itself, like a mid-air collision of two hot marshmallows, got pinned at the mid-plane and is responsible for all subsequent generations of stars, including the Sun. The current Milky Way, which is neither collapsing nor expanding, is a gravitationally mature system where one can think of the orbiting stars above and below the disk as the skeletal remains of the original spherical gas cloud. This general flattening of objects that rotate is why Earth’s pole-to-pole diameter is smaller than its diameter at the equator. Not by much: three-tenths of one percent—about twenty-six miles. But Earth is small, mostly solid, and doesn’t rotate all that fast. At twenty-four hours per day, Earth carries anything on its equator at a mere 1,000 miles per hour. Consider the jumbo, fast-rotating, gaseous planet Saturn. Completing a day in just ten and a half hours, its equator revolves at 22,000 miles per hour and its pole-to-pole dimension is a full ten percent flatter than its middle, a difference noticeable even through a small amateur telescope. Flattened spheres are more generally called oblate spheroids, while spheres that are elongated pole-to-pole are called prolate. In everyday life, hamburgers and hot dogs make excellent (although somewhat extreme) examples of each shape. I don’t know about you, but the planet Saturn pops into my mind with every bite of a hamburger I take.

The facts that so impressed Newton-that the planets all orbit in roughly the same plane (the ecliptic) and in the same direction-reflect their role as repositories of angular momentum, spun off as the original gas cloud condensed. Other features reflect the long influence of history, wearing down the rough edges, so to speak. The fact that the same side of our Moon always faces Earth is one such feature: rotation of the Moon would raise powerful tides, which act as friction. Presumably, in the distant past, there was such a rotation, but it has been damped out. (For similar reasons, the length of Earth days is increasing. Geological records, which show daily fluctuations in tidal deposits, indicate that during the Cambrian era, 650 million years ago, days were roughly twenty-one hours long.)

Yet, the cosmic view comes with a hidden cost. When I travel thousands of miles to spend a few moments in the fast-moving shadow of the moon during a total solar eclipse, sometimes I lose sight of Earth. When I pause and reflect on our expanding universe with its galaxies hurdling away from one another, embedded within the ever-stretching four-dimensional fabric of space and time, sometimes I forget that uncounted people walk this Earth without food or shelter, and that children are disproportionally represented among them. When I pour over the data that established the mysterious presence of dark matter and dark energy throughout the universe, sometimes I forget that every day, every 24 hour rotation of Earth, people kill and get killed in the name of someone else's conception of God, and that some people who do not kill in the name of God kill in the name of needs or wants of political dogma. When I track the orbits of asteroids, comets, and planets, each one a pirouetting dancer in a cosmic ballet, choreographed by the forces of gravity, sometimes I forget that too many people act in wanton disregard for the delicate interplay of Earth's atmosphere, oceans, and land, with consequences that our children and our children's children will witness and pay for with their health and wellbeing. And sometimes I forget that powerful people rarely do all they can to help those who cannot help themselves. I occasionally forget these things because however big the world is in our hearts, our minds, and our outsized digital maps, the universe is even bigger. A depressing thought to some, but a liberating thought to me.

Descartes, in his Third Meditation, said that God re-created the body at each successive moment. So that time was a form of sustenance. On earth time was marked by the sun and moon, by rotations that distinguished day from night, that had led to clocks and calendars. The present was a speck that kept blinking, brightening and diminishing, something neither alive nor dead. How long did it last? One second? Less? It was always in flux; in the time it took to consider it, it slipped away. In one of her notebooks from Calcutta were jottings in Udayan’s hand, on the laws of classical physics. Newton’s theory that time was an absolute entity, a stream flowing at a uniform rate of its own accord. Einstein’s contribution, that time and space were intertwined. He’d described it in terms of particles, velocities. A system of relations among instantaneous events.

No direct evidence yet documents Earth’s tidal cycles more than a billion years ago, but we can be confident that 4.5 billion years ago things were a lot wilder. Not only did Earth have five-hour days, but the nearby Moon was much, much faster in its close orbit, as well. The Moon took only eighty-four hours—three and a half modern days—to go around Earth. With Earth spinning so fast and the Moon orbiting so fast, the familiar cycle of new Moon, waxing Moon, full Moon, and waning Moon played out in frenetic fast-forward: every few five-hour days saw a new lunar phase. Lots of consequences follow from this truth, some less benign than others. With such a big lunar obstruction in the sky and such rapid orbital motions, eclipses would have been frequent events. A total solar eclipse would have occurred every eighty-four hours at virtually every new Moon, when the Moon was positioned between Earth and the Sun. For some few minutes, sunlight would have been completely blocked, while the stars and planets suddenly popped out against a black sky, and the Moon’s fiery volcanoes and magma oceans stood out starkly red against the black lunar disk. Total lunar eclipses occurred regularly as well, almost every forty-two hours later, like clockwork. During every full Moon, when Earth lies right between the Sun and the Moon, Earth’s big shadow would have completely obscured the giant face of the bright shining Moon. Once again the stars and planets would have suddenly popped out against a black sky, as the Moon’s volcanoes put on their ruddy show. Monster tides were a far more violent consequence of the Moon’s initial proximity. Had both Earth and the Moon been perfectly rigid solid bodies, they would appear today much as they did 4.5 billion years ago: 15,000 miles apart with rapid rotational and orbital motions and frequent eclipses. But Earth and the Moon are not rigid. Their rocks can flex and bend; especially when molten, they swell and recede with the tides. The young Moon, at a distance of 15,000 miles, exerted tremendous tidal forces on Earth’s rocks, even as Earth exerted an equal and opposite gravitational force on the largely molten lunar landscape. It’s difficult to imagine the immense magma tides that resulted. Every few hours Earth’s largely molten rocky surface may have bulged a mile or more outward toward the Moon, generating tremendous internal friction, adding more heat and thus keeping the surface molten far longer than on an isolated planet. And Earth’s gravity returned the favor, bulging the Earth-facing side of the Moon outward, deforming our satellite out of perfect roundness.

There is one change from the Newtonian philosophy which must be mentioned now, and that is the abandonment of absolute space and time. The reader will remember a mention of this question in connection with Democritus. Newton believed in a space composed of points, and a time composed of instants, which had an existence independent of the bodies and events that occupied them. As regards space, he had an empirical argument to support his view, namely that physical phenomena enable us to distinguish absolute rotation. If the water in a bucket is rotated, it climbs up the sides and is depressed in the centre; but if the bucket is rotated while the water is not, there is no such effect. Since his day, the experiment of Foucault's pendulum has been devised, giving what has been considered a demonstration of the earth's rotation. Even on the most modern views, the question of absolute rotation presents difficulties. If all motion is relative, the difference between the hypothesis that the earth rotates and the hypothesis that the heavens revolve is purely verbal; it is no more than the difference between 'John is the father of James' and 'James is the son of John'. But if the heavens revolve, the stars move faster than light, which is considered impossible. It cannot be said that the modern answers to this difficulty are completely satisfying, but they are sufficiently satisfying to cause almost all physicists to accept the view that motion and space are purely relative. This, combined with the amalgamation of space and time into space-time, has considerably altered our view of the universe from that which resulted from the work of Galileo and Newton. But of this, as of quantum theory, I will say no more at this time.

Queen Anne of England established the Longitude Act in 1714, and offered a monetary prize of over a million in today’s dollars to anyone who invented a method to accurately calculate longitude at sea. Longitude is about determining one’s point in space. So one might ask what it has to do with clocks? Mathematically speaking, space (distance) is the child of time and speed (distance equals time multiplied by speed). Thus, anything that moves at a constant speed can be used to calculate distance, provided one knows for how long it has been moving. Many things have constant speeds, including light, sound, and the rotation of the Earth. Your brain uses the near constancy of the speed of sound to calculate where sounds are coming from. As we have seen, you know someone is to your left or right because the sound of her voice takes approximately 0.6 milliseconds to travel from your left to your right ear. Using the delays it takes any given sound to arrive to your left and right ears allows the brain to figure out if the voice is coming directly from the left, the right, or somewhere in between. The Earth is rotating at a constant speed—one that results in a full rotation (360 degrees) every 24 hours. Thus there is a direct correspondence between degrees of longitude and time. Knowing how much time has elapsed is equivalent to knowing how much the Earth has turned: if you sit and read this book for one hour (1/24 of a day), the Earth has rotated 15 degrees (360/24). Thus, if you are sitting in the middle of the ocean at local noon, and you know it is 16:00 in Greenwich, then you are “4 hours from Greenwich”—exactly 60 degrees longitude from Greenwich. Problem solved. All one needs is a really good marine chronometer. The greatest minds of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could not overlook the longitude problem: Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal, Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, Gottfried Leibniz, and Isaac Newton all devoted their attention to it. In the end, however, it was not a great scientist but one of the world’s foremost craftsman who ultimately was awarded the Longitude Prize. John Harrison (1693–1776) was a self-educated clockmaker who took obsessive dedication to the extreme.

Space is cold and stiff, but Time is alive. Space divides, but Time brings everything to everything else. It does not course outside of you and you do not swim upon it like a drifting log. Time flows through you: you yourself are in flow. You are the river. Are you grieving? Trust Time: soon you will be laughing. Are you laughing? You cannot hold fast your laughing, for soon you will be weeping. You are blown from mood to mood, from one state to another, from waking to sleeping and from sleeping again to waking. You cannot go on wandering for long. You come to a halt, you are tired, you are hungry, you must sit down, you eat, you stand again, you begin anew to wander. You suffer: from the distance unattainable, you glimpse the Deed which you long. But the stream is constantly moving you and one morning the hour of action has arrived. You are a child, and never (so you think) will you escape the helplessness of childhood, which locks you into four windowless walls. But look: your wall itself movable and yielding, and your whole being becomes re-fashioned into a youth. From within yourself there rise hidden springs that leap up to yourself. Posibilities open up before you like flowers, and one day the world has grown all around you. Softly, Time transports you from one curve to another. New vistas and horizons unfold at your side as you pass by. You begin to love the change: you've discovered an extraordinary adventure is afoot. You sense a direction, you feel a new impulse, you can smell the sea. And you see that what changes in you changes also in everything around you. Every point you hurriedly pass by is itself in movement. Every point is being whirled in some direction: its own long history is following its course: but each point knows the ending of its history no more than you know that of yours. You glance up to heaven, Sublime is the rotation of its suns, but these are each heavily laden with their planetary systems as with grapes, and they dash away from one another into already-prepared distances and unfathomable spaces. You smash atoms and they swarm about in more confusion that if you had stamped your foot on an anthill. You seek a mainstay and a temperament law in the temperate mid-region of our earth, but here, too, there is nothing but constant event changing history, and no one can forecast for you even next week's clouds.

The problem of having a life-possible temperature over a fair part of area for a fair part of the time has been solved by Earth by a deep inclination (25° 27' to the perpendicular of the plane of orbit) to give the seasons, by a rapid rotation to give reasonable days and nights, and by an orbit that is only slightly eccentric to act as governor. This latter is very tricky: ask any demiurge who is in the business of making and positioning planets.

The most surreal consequence of melting ice and rising seas is that together they are a kind of time machine, so real that they are altering the length of our days. It works like this: As the glaciers melt and the seas rise, gravity forces more water toward the equator. This changes the shape of the Earth ever so slightly, making it fatter around the middle, which in turns slows the rotation of the planet similarly to the way a ballet dancer slows her spin by spreading out her arms. The slowdown isn’t much, just a few thousandths of a second each year, but like the barely noticeable jump of rising seas every year, it adds up. When dinosaurs roamed the Earth, a day lasted only about twenty-three hours.

every day—every twenty-four-hour rotation of Earth—people kill and get killed in the name of someone else’s conception of God, and that some people who do not kill in the name of God, kill in the name of needs or wants of political dogma.

Oxygen comprises 21% of the Earth’s atmosphere. If oxygen were 25%, fires would erupt spontaneously. If it were 15%, human beings would suffocate.17 •​If the carbon dioxide level in our atmosphere were higher than it is now, a runaway greenhouse effect would develop. We would all burn up. If the level were lower, plants would not be able to maintain efficient photosynthesis. We would all suffocate.18 •​If the centrifugal force of planetary movements did not precisely match the gravitational forces, nothing could be held in orbit around the sun.19 •​If Jupiter were not in its current orbit, the Earth would be bombarded with space material. Jupiter’s gravitational field acts like a cosmic vacuum cleaner attracting asteroids and comets that might otherwise strike the Earth.20 •​If the rotation of the Earth took longer than 24 hours, temperature differences would be too great between night and day. If the period were shorter, atmospheric wind velocities would be too great.21 •​If the twenty-three-degree axis tilt of the Earth were altered slightly, surface temperatures would be too extreme.22 •​If the moon’s gravitational pull on the Earth were much greater, tidal effects on the oceans, atmosphere, and the Earth’s rotational period would be too severe for life. If it were less, orbital changes would cause climatic instabilities which would prohibit life.23

The belief in the universal validity of the principle of the excluded third in mathematics is considered by the intuitionists as a phenomenon of the history of civilization of the same kind as the former belief in the rationality of pi, or in the rotation of the firmament about the earth. The intuitionist tries to explain the long duration of the reign of this dogma by two facts: firstly that within an arbitrarily given domain of mathematical entities the non-contradictority of the principle for a single assertion is easily recognized; secondly that in studying an extensive group of simple every-day phenomena of the exterior world, careful application of the whole of classical logic was never found to lead to error. [This means de facto that common objects and mechanisms subjected to familiar manipulations behave as if the system of states they can assume formed part of a finite discrete set, whose elements are connected by a finite number of relations.]

For anyone who says we’re culturally and technologically advanced beings not held in thrall by our environment consider how we start each year afresh simply because the rotation of the Earth around the sun takes precisely 365 days and we run our lives by the hour because the planet takes 24 hours to complete a rotation around its central axis.

In one quarter to one half a day, the geographic poles move to the Torrid Zone, and all hell lets loose. The atmosphere and the Earth's oceans and lakes don't shift with the shell - they just keep on rotating west to east - and at the equator that speed is about 1,037 miles per hour. It has to be, normally, to make one revolution per day. So, while the shell shifts with the poles going to the equator, the winds and oceans continue eastward, blowing and flooding across the earth at supersonic speeds, inundating continents with water miles deep, destroying everything with which man ever dealt, including himself. That's a summary of the process.

Cope laughed. “I wouldn’t worry yourself, my friend. Eobasileus has been extinct for thirty-seven million years.” At this, the preacher could no longer contain himself. “Nonsense! Utter nonsense!” “Nonsense?” asked Cope. “The archbishop James Ussher, using the Holy Bible itself, worked back generation by generation, mathematically, and calculated that the Earth was created on Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC at precisely eight a.m.” “Did he, now? Eight a.m., precisely?” “Precisely,” the preacher insisted. Copy and Sternberg exchanged amused looks. “Well,” Cope replied, “since the rotation of the Earth assures us that it’s always eight a.m. somewhere in the world, I suppose I should applaud him for guessing the correct time, at least.” The cowboy couldn’t help but interject. “Pardon me, Preacher, but if I recall correctly, didn’t the Bible say something about the Lord resting on the seventh day?” The preacher looked confused. “What?” “I’m certain of it.” The cowboy quickly snatched the Bible from the preacher’s hands and opened it to the first page of Genesis. “Sure. Here it is. He got started on a Monday, making light and darkness. By the time he got around to creating the Earth it was well into the third day. I make that to be Wednesday, not Sunday.” Nonplussed and blushing, the preacher snatched his Bible back. The cowboy shrugged. “Looks to me like your archbishop pulled a fast one, Preacher. Or maybe he just wasn’t all that good at calculating.

She was impatient, disappointed with herself, with the limitations imposed by her physical presence, by her height and weight, age and maturity, mortality and fragility. The earth spun on its axis, and gravity grounded her. She sensed that the girl could fly if she chose to, that she could disappear and reappear, and pass through objects... all while Mary Beth grew old, day after day, and some cruel god counted the rotations, the laps around the sun... A tree grew until it fell.

As 15 degrees project a full revolution of one hour (15*24=360) onto Earth's Geodesy, so do the 11.5 (more precise, 11.459) degrees in projecting one tenth of that figure onto Giza Plateau's clock; the accumulated amount thereof in ten days, is what ancient Egyptians called: a week. The former representing a full rotation of Earth in 24 hours, and the latter mimicking a full rotation of the Giza Plateau about the heavens in ten days (10*PI*11.459); which is another proof for PI representing a measure of one single day.

And so from then onwards, Daniel understood that the point of this grueling sundial project was not merely to plot the curve but to understand why each curve was shaped as it was. To put it another way, Isaac wanted to be able to walk up to a blank wall on a cloudy day, stab a gnomom into it, and draw all of the curves simply by knowing where shadow would pass. This was the same thing as knowing where the sun would be in the sky and that was the same as knowing where the Earth was in its circuit around the sun, and in its daily rotation. Though as months went on, Daniel understood that Isaac wanted to be able to do the same thing even if the blank wall happened to be situated on, say, the moon that Christiaan Huygens had lately discovered revolving around Saturn. Exactly how this might be accomplished was a question with ramifications that extended into such fields as would Isaac, and Daniel for that matter, be thrown out of Trinity College? Were the Earth and all the works of man nearing the end of a long, relentless decay that had begun with the expulsion from Eden, and that would very soon culminate in the apocalypse? Or might things actually be getting better, with the promise of continuing to do so? Did people have souls? Did they have free will?

No cataclysmic change since 1984--Energy-exchange system now about 4.5 billion years old--Plant life itself is about four billion years old--24 hour days from one rotation of earth about axis--365-day year--one rotation of earth about sun--varying sunrise and sunset from tilt of earth's axis

The earth’s weight has been estimated at six sextillion tons (that’s a six with twenty-one zeros). Yet it is perfectly balanced and turns easily on its axis. It rotates daily at the rate of more than a thousand miles per hour, or 25,000 miles each day. This adds up to nine million miles a year. Considering the tremendous weight of six sextillion tons rolling at this fantastic speed around an invisible axis, held in place by unseen bands of gravitation, the words of Job 26:7 take on unparalleled significance: “He poised the earth on nothingness.

As one of the central defining aspects of the “other world,” time will be discussed at some length in the chapter that follows; here I will note only that time, commonly taken to be an objective fact of the natural universe (chiefly due to the incontrovertible effects of deterioration and decay), is in fact a construct like any other, bound to language and culture and by no means absolute. We are fooled by time into granting it greater ontological status than it deserves because it may be divided and expressed uniformly through the symbolic system of mathematics. We speak of how long “a day” is on other planets and make adjustments for the rate of rotation and circumference of those planets, and yet in the end we are still playing with the clumsy tool of our arbitrary divisions of time, with hours and minutes, which can be made to divide one year on earth into 365 (almost perfectly) even days.

God completed the creation in 7 days, which constituted a complete week. One “day” can refer to: 1) the light portion of a 24-hour period (1:5, 14); an extended period of time (2:4); or 2) the whole 24-hour period while the earth completes a full rotation on its axis. Each “day” in Genesis refers to a 24-hour period. The cycle of light and dark means that the earth was rotating on its axis, receiving light from a source on one side of the earth, even though the sun was not yet created (v. 16)

Thank haven, literally, for the moon," says the economist Susan George. "If it weren't there, supplying the gravity to slow down the earth's rotation, our days would last only about four hours, with constant gale-force winds. Nature doesn't work on the principle that faster is better". Industrial society, unfortunately, does work on that principle. As a consequence, it weighs heavily upon nature.

If anyone asks me now, how long he stayed with us, how many years, months or days, I won't be able to answer. In my fifty-eight years of life I have truly lived for six or seven years—the rest have been only repetitions. If among those, Mircea's stay with us was one year, then that was not just an addition of three hundred and sixtyfive days. They were not rotating on the axis of the earth, they remained steadfast at one point. Those moments with all their beauty remain fixed into my consciousness.

The gravitational pull of the moon affects the flow of water all over the planet with the tidal force. The tides are the rise and fall of water levels caused by the combined effects of the gravitational force of the moon and the rotation of the earth. The highest tides in the world travel through the Bay of Fundy, between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia on Canada’s east coast. Every day, more than two billion tons of water flow in and out of the bay, creating a difference of 16 meters, or more than 50 feet.

RHODA 2022 - She liked to come out here when the first craggy fingers of dawn were breaking across the horizon. When she could hear nothing but the lap of the water against her ears as she floated on her back, turned away from the shore and gazing out as the morning sun broke cover. When the world rotated and another day tempted her with promises of good times and better things to come, and when she hoped that by the time the earth had turned on its axis, those promises would be fulfilled

Despite hanging in the middle of the galaxy, rotating and revolving all day and night, Earth is home to millions of creatures.

as a futurist in my college days, the pretense of consistent literalism was challenged by Revelation’s wild imagery. In any given verse, we might pivot from literal to figurative interpretations and back again. Using the Church in Revelation again as our example, it was easy to discern that the collective billions who constitute the Bride of Christ are not one literal female colossus in a humongous wedding dress waiting to consummate union with Jesus in actual lovemaking. We knew this was symbolic. Yet in the very same verse, we stumbled over our literalism into the New Jerusalem. Some of the popular futurist commentaries of the day quibbled over the Holy City’s dimensions—whether it will be a pyramid or a cube and what the rooms, streets, and transportation will be like.4 I tried to picture a city that was fifteen hundred miles tall and wondered what that would do to the earth’s rotation. I also wondered what kind of oysters could produce pearls large enough to become the city’s twelve gates (Rev 21:21).

Night after night he exposed plates on the big reflector. Day after day he studied the plates. The telescope drive turned the telescope on its polar axis to compensate for the rotation of the earth, but to make a successful plate, the observer had to track a guide star within the field of the exposure, using electrical hand controls to make tiny movements in the position of the telescope that would compensate for atmospheric effects, the flexure of the telescope tube and mount, and the slight quirks of the telescope-guiding mechanism. As the telescope slewed to different portions of the sky, Hubble had to contort his body on a precarious perch to keep the guide star in the crosshairs of the eyepiece. The winter nights were cold enough to freeze his tears to the eyepiece. The exposures were long enough to test his bladder control. By morning his body would be a bundle of cricks. Lack of sleep and hours staring at the glass plates gave him headaches.

A magnitude 9 earthquake already measurably alters the rotation of the Earth; the two magnitude 9+ earthquakes this century both altered the length of the day by a tiny fraction of a second.

When I pause and reflect on our expanding universe, with its galaxies hurtling away from one another, embedded within the ever-stretching, fourdimensional fabric of space and time, sometimes I forget that uncounted people walk this Earth without food or shelter, and that children are disproportionately represented among them. When I pore over the data that establish the mysterious presence of dark matter and dark energy throughout the universe, sometimes I forget that every day—every twenty-four-hour rotation of Earth—people kill and get killed in the name of someone else’s conception of God, and that some people who do not kill in the name of God, kill in the name of needs or wants of political dogma. When I track the orbits of asteroids, comets, and planets, each one a pirouetting dancer in a cosmic ballet, choreographed by the forces of gravity, sometimes I forget that too many people act in wanton disregard for the delicate interplay of Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and land, with consequences that our children and our children’s children will witness and pay for with their health and well-being. And sometimes I forget that powerful people rarely do all they can to help those who cannot help themselves. I occasionally forget those things because, however big the world is—in our hearts, our minds, and our outsized digital maps—the universe is even bigger. A depressing thought to some, but a liberating thought to me.

Sometimes, question is raised that what is the purpose of the universe and other species. Why there was a wait for billions of years before humans began to exist in the universe. What is the purpose of millions of other life-forms in animals and plants? Why there is no life on other planets? First of all, time is a relative concept. Thus, human’s conception of time on planet earth is just how we experience movement of earth around sun and about its own axis. Venus and Mercury take longer time to fully rotate about their axis than to complete their orbits around sun. This means Venus and Mercury have days that last longer than their years, i.e. orbiting around sun is faster which determines years and rotation around their axis is slower which determines days.

As I mentioned earlier, the sun governs the tonal. It was assigned the number 13 because a single rotation of the solar equator takes approximately 26 Earth days. So the sun, Tonatiuh, shows one of his two faces to the Earth every 13 days, and this became known as a solar wave or trecena (a period of 13 days). Thirteen was such an important number in ancient cultures that one of God’s names in the Kabbalah is the number 13 in Hebrew. According to tradition, the nahual is governed by the Pleiades, together with the moon and Venus. The Pleiades reach the same position in the sky on a particular day in November every 52 years and on that day the ceremony of the new fire is celebrated in Mexico City, at El Cerro de la Estrella. 5 Fire is the governing element of sleep, hence new fire equals new dream. That’s why the nahual was assigned the number 52.

Marcus studied those NASA pictures for hours, the gorgeous Hasselblad pictures of men on the moon and the pictures of Jupiter’s turbulence. Since Newton’s laws apply everywhere, Marcus programmed a computer with a system of fluid equations. To capture Jovian weather meant writing rules for a mass of dense hydrogen and helium, resembling an unlit star. The planet spins fast, each day flashing by in ten earth hours. The spin produces a strong Coriolis force, the sidelong force that shoves against a person walking across a merry-go–round, and the Coriolis force drives the spot. Where Lorenz used his tiny model of the earth’s weather to print crude lines on rolled paper, Marcus used far greater computer power to assemble striking color images. First he made contour plots. He could barely see what was going on. Then he made slides, and then he assembled the images into an animated movie. It was a revelation. In brilliant blues, reds, and yellows, a checkerboard pattern of rotating vortices coalesces into an oval with an uncanny resemblance to the Great Red Spot in NASA’s animated film of the real thing. “You see this large-scale spot, happy as a clam amid the small-scale chaotic flow, and the chaotic flow is soaking up energy like a sponge,” he said. “You see these little tiny filamentary structures in a background sea of chaos.” The spot is a self-organizing system, created and regulated by the same nonlinear twists that create the unpredictable turmoil around it. It is stable chaos.

Happiness is something we create ourselves. To our eyes, the sun appears to rise in the east every day to create a brilliant morning for the earth. The sun, however, does not create the morning alone: the earth also creates it actively as it rotates every day. We shouldn't just wait for happiness, either. Happiness doesn't come when we wait for it: we make it ourselves.

As the morning light breaks, the day reluctantly begins revealing itself. One can almost hear the earth rotating on rusted hinges, the trembling of an ancient world pouring out its darkness.