Syzygy

Some times things just line up, Goldilocks conditions. Cosmic coincidence frames the circumstances of our lives and a little bit of heavenly significance gets woven into our terrestrial stories:

April 2014 Steph (my wife) visited Australia leaving me with the kids in London,  but the idea that we could both look into the sky on the night of the 15th and see our shadow cast on the same moon made her feel closer than "the other side of the earth". Two weeks later, as my sunshine was preparing to return to the UK an annular solar eclipse set on Australia.

August 21 2017 as the last bag of my chemo dripped into my arm and I watched the build up to another major syzygy online I started to blog some of my wonder at the paradoxes of significance. 

             

     

However, writing soon ground to a halt as I got drawn in to reading about the lives of three wise men who changed the world with their star gazing:

For the founders of modern cosmology—Nicholas Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton—studying the stars was a quintessentially religious activity. As Kepler wrote in 1595, "for a long time I wanted to become a theologian . . . now, however, behold how through my efforts God is being celebrated in astronomy". 

and for Newton- “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” 
The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy

Kepler especially fascinated me as I lay there. He took on the Ptolemaic system which had been unchallenged for 1000 years - all because of an error of only 8 minutes of arc; that's a maximum discrepancy in a planetary orbit of an angle of 1/2700th of a circle (about a quarter the width of the moon in the sky ). 

"And from this such small difference of eight minutes [of arc] it is clear why Ptolemy, since he was working with bisection [of the linear eccentricity], accepted a fixed equant point… . For Ptolemy set out that he actually did not get below ten minutes [of arc], that is a sixth of a degree, in making observations. To us, on whom Divine benevolence has bestowed the most diligent of observers, Tycho Brahe, from whose observations this eight-minute error of Ptolemy’s in regard to Mars is deduced, it is fitting that we accept with grateful minds this gift from God, and both acknowledge and build upon it. So let us work upon it so as to at last track down the real form of celestial motions (these arguments giving support to our belief that the assumptions are incorrect). This is the path I shall, in my own way, strike out in what follows. For if I thought the eight minutes in [ecliptic] longitude were unimportant, I could make a sufficient correction (by bisecting the [linear] eccentricity) to the hypothesis found in Chapter 16. Now, because they could not be disregarded, these eight minutes alone will lead us along a path to the reform of the whole of Astronomy, and they are the matter for a great part of this work. "— Johannes Kepler

Even more fascinating than his achievement were the beliefs that drove him: 

Undeterred by poverty, failure, domestic tragedy, and persecution, but sustained by his mystical belief in an attainable mathematical harmony and perfection of nature, Kepler persisted for fifteen years before finding the simple regularity [of planetary orbits] he sought… . What stimulated Kepler to keep slaving all those fifteen years? An utter absurdity. In addition to his faith in the mathematical perfectibility of astronomy, Kepler also believed wholeheartedly in astrology. This was nothing against him. For a scientist of Kepler’s generation astrology was as respectable scientifically and mathematically as the quantum theory or relativity is to theoretical physicists today. Nonsense now, astrology was not nonsense in the sixteenth century. — Eric Temple BellIn The Handmaiden of the Sciences (1937), 30. 

At the end of his life he viewed his Platonic solids framework for the planetary orbits and the music of the spheres as his most significant achievement. With hindsight it was his work on elliptical orbits that was revolutionary and his other work in Harmonices Mundi is little known about.

It looks like the scientific breakthroughs he achieved were in a large part dependent on what appears to be luck - the chance ratios of planetary orbital parameters. Kepler himself seemed to wonder at this - "The roads by which men arrive at their insights into celestial matters seem to me almost as worthy of wonder as those matters themselves". One wonders what his reaction would have been to the discovery that the 6th planet has a hexagon stamped on it's top:

https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/2983/cassini-top-10-images-2016/

The most dramatic of the cosmic coincidences has to be the alignment of sun and moon. In the human search for meaning in the patterns of the heavens the significance of the eclipse can not be underestimated. There is absolutely no scientific reason that the sun and moon need to be exactly the same angular size in the sky and yet it has been one of the main drivers of scientific progress through the ages. A syzygy that still raises questions of significance and fuels the human appetite for the question “Why?”. 

It's turtles all the way down...  https://apilgriminnarnia.com/2014/03/26/turtles/

As I came to the end of my treatment it was this feeling, the feeling of wonder, that has transformed the experiences of this year into a blessing. The in-built tension with our place in this universe, the a tug of war between meaninglessness and significance, purpose and chance, mystery and absurdity. I now believe the tension is intended to fire our appetite for learning, whatever you do please don’t resolve the riddle with a premature reductionist explanation. This very tension has made wise men (& women) seek truth in every millennium. Human beings are too small to have discovered all the answers. Revel in the awesome mystery of the universe and enjoy the ebb and flow of alignment and chaos, the dance of lives played out to an audience of dancing heavenly witnesses.