Tag: 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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November 15, 2024
Thanks to HMU Tutor, Peter Ponzio, for today’s post.
Milton, in describing Satan’s fall in Book II of Paradise Lost, compares the fallen angel to a comet. The five-line description of Satan reads as follows:
“Satan stood/ Unterrifi’d and like a Comet burn’d, / That fires the length of Ophiucus huge/ In the Artick Sky, and from his horrid hair/ Shakes Pestilence and Warr…”
» Read more about: And Like a Comet Burn’d, /That fires the length of Ophiucus huge »
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 Eddington, is the subject of today’s blog.
In this selection, Eddington made three observations,
» Read more about: Comments on The Expanding Universe by Eddington »
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 and ammonia must be silent?” – Richard Feynman
In 1609, Johannes Kepler published a few surprising details.
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 ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplation of the Cosmos stir us – there is a tingling in the spine,
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 cluster (M 5). Today’s image depends upon equipment newly made available to amateur astronomers.
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 man first turns from himself and his immediate earthly surroundings to the larger universe of which he is a part,