Week 1: Starting Assumptions

For my Starting Assumptions, I would like to write about the woodcut, because Kerry has made such good use of that over the years. I love the large version of it that I bookmarked last fall when Kerry shared it as his blog - here is the big image; more about that in Kerry's blog post:

The details are just beautiful, and I will confess that my favorite details are the faces of the sun and of the moon in the "familiar" world: the sun is gazing upon the world which is full of greenery, water, homes where we live, while the moon is resting peacefully, slumbering just as we do in the night... all very unlike the strange and alien world which the person in red has glimpsed by going outside the bubble. There is a yellow and orange orb that might be the sun, but it has no face, and there is a blue orb that might be the moon, but again it has no face; there is no man in the moon in that view of the heavens.

The reason I am excited to take this course is that I spend my time in a world of stories and imagination, mythology and folklore, where the sun really can be a character in a story (like in this beautiful Cherokee legend about the origin of strawberries, which my own students are reading this week), and my own knowledge of science is not great. Well, linguistics - I know a fair amount of linguistic science. But ask me to tell you the evidence for the earth moving around the sun? Honestly, I could not tell you.

So, it's not like I see a face in the sun, and I know the sun is not a sentient being in the world. But... even though I "know" that, I could easily make up a story about a sentient sun (in fact, there's a great Doctor Who episode on that theme), while learning about the mathematics and the science of astronomy will be a challenge for me in this class. I really like the challenge of learning something about the science in a context that I find so congenial: the context of stories, just as Kerry has emphasized in the opening videos. So, I look forward to more to come and am very glad to be getting started.