Pssst! You! Yeah, you... are a passenger on a planet... on a blue-green planet that's orbiting a golden star. And right now we are approaching the point in our yearly journey-around-the-sun that we call February 19th. February 19th is the birthday of a Polish man named Nicolau Copernick. If you don't know him by that name, it's probably because he was an educated man who lived during the 16th century, and back then educated people learned Latin and Latinized their names; Copernick became Copernicus.

Copernicus was the man who proved that the universe does not revolve around us! Despite what our egos may think, Earth is not the center of the cosmos; we are just not that important! But this isn't what Copernicus set out to prove. He was just trying to solve a problem that had been bugging people for centuries. He was trying to figure out why planets appear to move backward from time to time. For example, planet Mars, whose orbit is the next one beyond ours, appears to go backward each time we pass by it on the inside. This is like what happens when our car passes another car, and that other car appears to be going backwards (or retrograde) from our perspective. This apparent backwards, or retrograde, motion of the planets is due to our own orbiting. But... back in the time of Copernicus, we still believed that we lived on an Earth that didn't move, at the center of all things.

Fortunately, Copernicus was not only a brilliant man; he also had a wonderful imagination! He knew that the best way to tackle a problem is to view it from a different angle. So he imagined himself standing on the Sun, and then viewed the planets from there. From this imaginary place on the Sun, he reviewed and reconsidered centuries' worth of carefully documented observations of the motions of planets across our night sky. From the Sun he could see how our solar system really works; the Sun is at the center! "The Earth," wrote Copernicus, "conceives from the Sun." Now THAT changed everything!

Now we know that one Earth orbit is actually a 600-million-mile journey around the Sun. Now we know that one day is actually one spin of our planet in space. And we have known this for centuries. So... I'm grappling with a problem. Why are our schools are still teaching us that a year is a unit of TIME when a year is actually a 600-million-mile journey through the SPACE around our Sun? Shouldn't we be learning that a year is a unit of space-time? And that a day is a unit of space-time?

Thanks to Copernicus, we now know that our planet Earth is a ship moving through the heavens of space. As the passengers on this heavenly ship, we are heavenly beings. As we orbit through February 19th, let's remember Copernicus, the man who showed us this.

Remembering that I'm a heavenly being is a holy experience. So for me February 19th is a holy day - a holiday, a day that reminds me to see more of the WHOLE of things. I hope it's holy for you too. And I hope that one day this day will be celebrated as holiday by the whole world!

This is Harriet Witt, your guide for this little ride on our passenger planet.


If you have any questions, drop Harriet an email: harriet@passengerplanet.com


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