Category: Astronomy
We’re excited that you’ve joined the conversation! At HMU, we want to continue the great authors’ conversations in a contemporary context, and this blog will help us do that. We look back to Aristotle and the early philosophers who used reason and discourse to gain wisdom and now we endeavor to do the same every day.
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May 29, 2020 Thanks to Peter Ponzio, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. The introductory course at Harrison Middleton University is called “The Great Conversation: The Cornerstone Course.” It includes short readings on a wide range of subjects and serves as an introduction to our methods. One of these readings, The Expanding Universe, by Sir Arthur …
October 11, 2019 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. In The Accidental Universe; The World You Thought You Knew, Alan Lightman separates out seven different types of universe. He dedicates each chapter to way of interpreting the universe including things like: accidental, temporary, spiritual and symmetrical. Lightman straddles both the sciences and …
June 14, 2019 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Ancient history can be a difficult subject for students because it is inherently foreign to them. Not only is there a language difference, but it is genuinely difficult to envision life removed from today’s technologies. When speaking of ancient cities, most people think …
November 10, 2017 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s blog. In an attempt to better understand how we orient ourselves in life, I turn to Dante. In The Divine Comedy, Dante begins nearly every canto by determining his location. This works twofold as it locates the reader as well as the narrator. The …
October 13, 2017 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. “The vastness of heavens stretches my imagination… Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane …
July 21, 2017 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Last week we introduced a couple of less than mainstream calendars . This week, we want to move back into a look at the contemporary calendar, as based upon the Roman calendar. Julius Caesar, of course, attended to the discrepancies in the calendar. …
June 23, 2017 “The strongest affection and utmost zeal should, I think, promote the studies concerned with the most beautiful objects. This is the discipline that deals with the universe’s divine revolutions, the stars’ motions, sizes, distances, risings and settings…for what is more beautiful than heaven?” – Copernicus “The cosmos is all that is or …
June 16, 2017 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. This is the second of three posts about astronomy. (Last week’s post can be found here.) In today’s post, we will trace a little bit of the ideas and theories behind contemporary astronomy and also introduce a Charles Messier as well as globular …
June 9, 2017 Thanks to Alissa Simon for today’s post. In the Syntopicon (Astronomy and Cosmology chapter), Mortimer Adler notes that “Man has used astronomy to measure not only the passage of time or the course of a voyage, but also his position in the world, his power of knowing, his relation to God. When …
