When Day and Night are Equal Length

On this auspicious occasion I’d like to wish you a happy March Equinox.  It’s an astronomically derived “holiday” of sorts, and what it means is that the Sun’s apparent path in the sky throughout the year crosses from the southern celestial hemisphere into the northern one.

People often think of this as the first day of spring (for northern hemisphere dwellers) or the first day of autumn (for folks south of the equator), although as Phil Plait points out, that’s not quite correct. (Read here for why he says that.)

People also often — and wrongly — say that this is the only time that you can do something you wouldn’t normally do: balance an egg on its end.  I ran into this bit of conventional weirdness (the opposite of conventional wisdom) back when I worked at a newspaper.  I came in to work one day in early March (well before the equinox) and all the copy desk editors were engrossed in a conversation about how you could balance an egg on its end only on the equinox.  I asked them that could be and they didn’t know, but thought it make a cool “weird science” story. I told them it was weird, but it wasn’t science, and that set off another discussion that ended with me buying a dozen eggs and bringing them back up to the office and showing them that you could balance them on any day, not just the equinox or the first day of autumn or any other conveniently interesting date.

Imagine if you will the messy desks of a newsroom, each one with an egg balanced on it. And NOT on the equinox. and a bunch of smart-aleck copy desk editors scratching their heads because what they thought they knew was wrong. Another beautiful theory bit the dust as reality proved it wrong.

Phil Plait (his BadAstronomy-ness himself) made a great movie showing how the egg thing works throughout the year. Check it out here.

Living With a Star

Equinoxes and solstices are some of the things we live with because we live near a star. So are the seasons. And so is space weather. Speaking of which, in all the excitement yesterday, I forgot to post an entry here directing you to 365 Days of Astronomy (which you should be listening to every day anyway, right?).  I had an entry about space weather, so go check it out.

Are They Really That Ignorant?

Speaking of the change of seasons and calendrical things, there’s a fascinating bit of data out there about how only 53% of adults in the U.S. in a survey conducted by the California Academy of Sciences know how long it takes for the Earth to go once around the Sun. That’s pretty bad.  What’s even worse is that nearly 40% of those same people thought that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time.  That IS also something that the earliest humans knew as they trod the plains of Africa only 160,000 or so years ago.  The earliest primate ancestors of humans didn’t even exist when dinosaurs did. That’s because dinosaurs were thriving some 65 MILLION years ago (before a combination of factors, including a killer asteroid of some kind, started them down the road to extinction).  At that time, only the most primitive mammal ancestors of humans existed. (There’s a nice explanation of when primates did show up at this site.) Nary a human nor primate of any kind was to be found. The first hominid (a form of primate that was the immediate predecessor to us) didn’t show up until about 4.4 million years ago.  That’s a LONG time after the dinosaurs bit the dust. And, there’s fossil evidence aplenty to prove it. Hard, cold data.

But, that doesn’t stop some folks from making up faux science out of whole cloth (and some kind of curious shame over evolution) to make money on dinosaur-human theories.  And, apparently it doesn’t stop others from believing what these charlatans say instead of checking it out for themselves.  The whole thing kind of begs the question about the quality of science education these people got. If they got any.

Anyway, see how you stack up against the rest of the folks who took the test — surf on over to CalAcademy (link above) and take their mini quiz on science — it comprises six questions on their front page.  I did, and I only got one wrong (and it wasn’t the one about the year or the dinosaurs).  See if you can beat my score!