Backward, turn backward, O Time in thy flight

I don't know whether you have noticed (yeah, right) but I am a curious person. I don't mean that other people find my ways curious (I can hear some of you saying, "Oh, yes, we do") but that I was born with enough natural inquisitiveness that I like to know answers to questions that other people aren't even asking. "Curiosity killed the cat" is an old saying, but as Mrs. RWP often says, finding out brought it back.

When I wrote the line in the previous post about the earth proceeding in its orbit around the sun at just the right pace, it made me wonder how many miles forward in its orbit around the sun does the earth move in one day? I suppose I could look it up somewhere, but I wanted to try to figure it out by myself using facts we were taught in school.

Here are the facts one must know to determine the answer to my question:

1. Earth's orbit around the sun is not circular, it is elliptical. However, we will treat it as a circle so as not to confuse ourselves further.

2. We need to determine the circumcerence of the circle, that is, the length of Earth's orbit in miles.

3. You may have heard the term πr² (pronounced "pie are square". My dad always insisted that pie are not square, pie are wedge-shaped, but I digress.) Since πr² is the formula for determining the area of a circle and we want to determine the circumference of a circle, πr²
is of no use to us. We need a different formula. The formula we need to use is 2πr where r is the radius of the circle.

4. It just so happens that the distance from Earth to the sun, 93 million miles, is also the radius of the circle whose circumference we are trying to determne. This distance is also what astronomers have dubbed an Astronomical Unit (1 AU), but this bit of trivia is irrelevant for our purposes today.

5. Pi, as we all should know, is 3.14159

We are now ready to do the math/maths, which is/are:

2 × 3.14159 × 93,000,000

and we find that the distance the Earth travels in its year-long orbit around the sun (that is, the circumference of a circle with a 93,000,000-mile radius) is 584,335,740 miles.

It is then a siimple matter of dividing this number by the number of days in a year (use either 365 or 365.25, whatever floats your boat, it doesn't matter to me one iota) to find that our planet is hurtling forward through space about 1.6 million miles every single day.

That is an interesting fact, but here's one that is even more interesting: our movement along the path of orbit around the sun is in a counter-clockwise (British, anti-clockwise) direction.

I don't know why, but learning this astounded me in the same way earlier peoples must have been astounded to learn that the sun does not rise in the east and set in the west, but that our planet is spinning from west to east.

Heretofore I have assumed that clockwise is the natural direction of things. Clocks move forward for a reason, to keep track of the passage of time. And though we can move mechanical timepieces backward, time itself cannot move backward. It keeps moving forward regardless of our actions. We cannot reclaim past moments but nowadays we can record them as they occur using fairly modern inventions the ancients never dreamed of and preserve them for future generations to peruse and, hopefully, enjoy. Maybe that's the lesson of Earth's orbit. Even though its motion runs counter to our feeble understanding, time itself keeps moving forward.

That's all I can drum up for today, folks. I hope each one of you has a merry Christmas and, in case I don't post anything in the next few days, a very happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year.

Has anything astounded you lately?