Why I Stopped Watching Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader, Reason 227

I wanted to open this blog with the actual clip from Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader, episode 107 (S01E08), but I could not find a copy anywhere on the Internets. This was way back when that show was brand spanking new and I thought I’d watch a few episodes to see how it was. This was the last one I ever watched. Awful show.

Anywho, I’ll have to describe it. The second contestant of the episode, a man, eventually got asked the following question:

In the Southern Hemisphere, the vernal equinox occurs in which month?

Already, there are major, major problems with this question. The contestant bailed out rather than trying to answer. After, the host revealed that the expected answer was “September.” There are even more problems with that answer.

First, no American, public school 5th-grader would know the answer to that question, no matter what it’s meant to ask. Second, no American, public school 5th-grader would even know what the words “vernal” and “equinox” mean on their own, let alone used together. These are just not subjects on the public school 5th grade science curriculum anywhere I can find.

The difficulty of the question alone was enough to turn me off the show right there. But the major problem–the one of celestial nomenclature–really put me over the edge. I was fuming about it for weeks. I remember talking to many people about it at the time. I thought I blogged about it, but I can’t find any such post.

“Vernal equinox” is a term of art. It means a very specific thing. It is the traditional name for a point on the (geocentric) celestial sphere. It is not synonymous with the more modern term “spring equinox” or the even more modern “March equinox.” It is synonymous with the old naval and astrological term, “first point of Aries.”

Allow me to explain.

The celestial sphere is a fictional spherical surface astronomers use to locate objects in the sky. For our purposes, we can assume that the distant stars are fixed points on the inside of this sphere, and that the local objects (the Sun, Moon, and planets) move around relative to the stars.

There are two very important planes that intersect this sphere and delineate imaginary circles in space where they intersect the sphere. The first is the celestial equator. This plane is coextensive with the Earth’s equator. It is just extended from the equator out into space. The second is the ecliptic. This is the plane on which the Sun appears to travel around the Earth. Because the Earth has a tilt to its axis of about 23.5°, the celestial equator and the ecliptic intersect at about 23.5°. Wikimedia Commons has this lovely graphic:

The ecliptic is a very important plane for a number of reasons. It traces an imaginary arc across the sky. The sun will follow this arc as it moves from East to West over the course of a day. At night, the planets can be found on or very near this line. The constellations of the Zodiac lie along this line. Your “sign” –insofar as you put stock in such nonsense– is the constellation of the zodiac the sun was in on the day of your birth.

Hold up, back up, wait, what? I thought I just told you that the sun moves along the ecliptic from East to West each day! Now I’m telling you it stays in one zodiacal constellation all day long? Yes. The Sun doesn’t move around the ecliptic daily; it moves around it yearly. The stars are pretty much fixed relative to the ecliptic.* The sun appears to “trace the line of the ecliptic” during the course of the day because the Earth rotates relative to the Sun in its relatively stationary position on the ecliptic. The Sun creeps along the ecliptic over the course of a year.

As you can see from the diagram above, some parts of the ecliptic are “above” (North of) the celestial equator, and some parts are “below” (South of) it. It crosses at two places. The places where two celestial planes cross are generally called “nodes.” One of these nodes will be called the “ascending node” and the other the “descending node.” Which is which depends on the relative motion of the two bodies that define the planes. In this system, the two bodies are the Earth (defining the celestial equator) and the Sun (defining the ecliptic). That diagram doesn’t indicate any directions, so I’ll have to tell you that, viewed from celestial North down through the plane of the ecliptic, the Earth revolves counter-clockwise about the sun. Viewed relative to a stationary Earth, the Sun appears to move along the ecliptic counter-clockwise around the Earth. That’s left-to-right in the front of the diagram and right-to-left in the back of the diagram.

So you can see that, as the year goes along, the Sun will first pass through the node in the front of the diagram, labeled γ, and, six months later, through the rear node, labeled Ω. When the sun appears to pass through γ, it moves from the celestial Southern hemisphere into the celestial Northern hemisphere. This is the ascending node. When it passes through Ω it moves from North to South–the descending node.

The Sun/Earth system has nodes. So does the Earth/Moon system. The nodes in the Earth/Moon system are important for calculating eclipses. Other orbital systems also have ascending and descending nodes. But the Sun/Earth system has a special name for its nodes. These names date from quite long ago. In Western astronomy, the oldest such names make reference to the zodiacal constellations in which these nodes appeared to early astronomers to be fixed. The ascending node was at one time (approximately 2,000 years ago) right at the boundary between the constellations of Pisces and Aries, with the sun moving into Aries. So it became known as the “first point of Aries.” Likewise, the descending node was just between Virgo and Libra, with the sun moving into Libra. So it became the “first point of Libra.”

The first point of Aries remained a useful astronomical landmark for centuries. If one knows where the first point of Aries is in the sky, one can, using a clock, a calendar, and a sextant, determine one’s longitude on the Earth. This was very useful in seafaring. The nodes were known by these names (in various languages, allowing for differences in zodiacs) from antiquity.

The word “equinox” enters English very early, before 1391, when Chaucer used it. When it entered English, it bore only one meaning. It referred to the nodes of the Sun/Earth system. They were differentiated at that time as the “vernal equinox” and the “autumnal equinox”, for their association with the seasons in the Northern hemisphere. The ascending node, or first point of Aries, became the vernal equinox because the sun crossed it during Spring in the Northern hemisphere, the exclusive home of English at the time. The descending node likewise became the autumnal equinox.

The word “equinox” did not gain meaning as the moment at which the sun passed through one of the nodes until at least 1588, and the phrases “vernal equinox” and “autumnal equinox” didn’t gain such meaning until about 1664. For some time, the phrases properly held meaning as both the points in space and the moments or dates on which the sun passed through the points. I say properly, because, during those years, English-speaking astronomers were confined almost exclusively to Northern hemisphere cultures. There was no need to differentiate the seasonal words from the celestial meanings.

When English became prevalent in Southern hemisphere cultures, the terms became very confusing. Astronomers still referred to the ascending node of the Sun/Earth system as the “vernal equinox”. But in the Southern hemisphere, the sun passes through this node in Fall, not Spring. In the mid-18th Century, the phrases “Spring equinox” and “Fall equinox” appear, describing only the moments or days. Vernal and Autumnal retained the celestial meanings, but began to lose their seasonal meanings, despite being words with seasonal origins.

That brings us to today. Today we have a set of terms to refer to the celestial positions (the ascending and descending nodes) and another set of terms to refer to the dates on which, or moments at which, the sun passes through those nodes:

So you can see the phrase “vernal equinox” refers to the same point in space no matter where on Earth you happen to be. But the phrase “Spring equinox” refers to a different moment or day depending where you are. Use of “vernal” to mean “Spring” in this context is archaic and inappropriate because, as English is spoken in both hemispheres, it is ambiguous. Because “vernal” has properly retained only a celestial meaning, using it to refer to a moment or day can only mean some time on or about March 21, no matter where you said it or your listener heard it.

The vernal equinox is in the same place, and the sun passes through it on the same day, in the Northern hemisphere as in the Southern hemisphere.

The Spring equinox can be on or about March 21 or September 21, depending on where you are. But it doesn’t add any new ambiguity to the language. It piggybacks on the already ambiguous term, “Spring.” That’s a concept (and an ambiguity) that has been in the language much longer and is already well-established.

Another interesting feature to note is that, at about the same time “Spring equinox” split the date/moment meaning off of “vernal equinox”, the concept of “Summer” also underwent a significant shift in meaning. Up until about the mid 18th Century, “Summer” and related seasonal terms described local meteorological conditions with strict adherence to celestial events. “Summer” was the warm period centered on a solstice†. It changed at that time to take account of temperature lag, so that “Summer” would actually describe the warmest months of the year instead. These lag behind the celestial summer centered on the solstice by a month and a half in the temperate bands between the tropics and the arctic/antarctic circles. So today, “Summer” begins on what used to be Midsummer’s Day (the local Summer solstice).

Given all this discussion, you should now see that Are You Smarter’s question is defective in a number of ways. It should have asked “Spring equinox”. Then its answer would have been correct. But it asked “vernal,” which has lost the meaning they intended. As written, the answer to the question is March, not September. If they’re going to use “vernal equinox” to mean a moment or date, then it is going to refer to the moment or date when the sun passes through the vernal equinox, nothing else. The histories of astronomy and English point strongly to this conclusion, and continuing to use “vernal” to mean “spring” is, prescriptively, incorrect now that English is spoken in both hemispheres. Most importantly, the question is defective because there is no way a 5th-grader could be expected to know what “vernal equinox” really means. Is the point of this show to answer the questions as if the contestant were a 5th-grader, or is it to give the correct answer?

*Actually, they move very slowly. This is why the astrologers recently “corrected” everyone’s signs. The dates for the traditional Western Zodiac got set a long, long time ago, based on even older astronomy going back to when the vernal equinox really was at the “head” of Aries the Ram (hence “first point of Aries”).

†Interestingly “solstice” never had a “point in space” meaning, and it hasn’t ever acquired one.

Edit: The shift from celestial seasons to meteorological ones happened in 1780, not the 1800s. So use of “vernal equinox” to refer to one date in the Northern hemispher and another in the Southern is even more archaic than I thought. Please stop it now.

The modern, and very clear convention is to use “March equinox” and “September equinox” for the ascending node transit and descending node transit, respectively, because March is March in both hemispheres. This practice even more clearly differentiates meteorological from celestial phenomena, and reinforces the conceptual difference between the moment and the point-in-space.

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Take advantage of this cool offer! And feel free to ask me anything if you want to know more about 23andMe!

You won’t find the book on Bob Jones University Press’ Website anymore, because shortly after attention was drawn to it by the above page scan, they removed the second edition from their Website, replacing it with a redirect to the third edition, which has very different text. BJUP makes the third edition’s chapter on electricity available as a free preview on their site. Before the second edition was removed from the BJUP site, the preview chapter was the first one, on the history of the moon, which I present here:

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

Page 4

Page 5

Page 6

Page 7

Page 8

Page 9

Page 10

Page 11

Page 12

Page 13

Page 14

Page 15

Page 16

The book does not discuss the scientific method at all. The only treatment of methodology is found on p.2, in the “History of the Moon” chapter above:

Science can be defined as “information gained by using our senses.” Faith means “holding beliefs without seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, or touching the proof of them.”

When the moon came into being, were there any people there to get facts through their senses? Then do all our ideas about where the moon came from rest on science or faith? What anyone believes about the beginning of things rests on faith, not science.

That’s it. No mention, even in a grade-school way, of deduction or induction. A flat rejection of reason. In the opening paragraphs of a science textbook.

The book has no hierarchy. It is arranged haphazardly. The table of contents looks like this:

1. History of the Moon
2. Insects, Arachnids, and Myriapods
3. Electricity
4. Plants
5. Length, Area, and Volume
6. Digestion
7. The Moon’s Structure and Motions
8. Animal Defenses
9. Light
10. Machines
11. Trees
12. How Earth’s Crust Wears Down

This appears to me to be deliberately disorganized so as to prevent students from making connections between the topics discussed. But I suppose it could also be a result of a profound misunderstanding of the empirical scientific method. It’s scattershot.

That such a book was ever used by anyone to attempt to teach science to children is simply appalling.

Please be advised that, although the Large Hadron Collider will be powered up on Wednesday, no high-energy collisions are scheduled until November.

It really upsets me to see people, including the news media reporting tomorrow’s initial power-up as “the most complex scientific experiment ever undertaken” (from the first link) when in fact it is not.

The claims that the LHC will destroy the world are pure lunacy. But please, all you crazies out there, if you’re going to get all het up about the end of the world, it is very important that you get your dates straight.

Lovies,

~Qwertz

EDIT: To those who subscribe to the feed, I apologize for botching the URLs. I will try to remember the correct syntax in the future.

You will need to click on that to get it big enough to read.

The graph shows sunrise, sunset, waking hours, and business hours through the course of the year. Solar noon is at the center, sunrise is above, and sunset below. It makes some pretty wild assumptions, too. It is based on an average observer at 40°N latitude. It assumes that the average observer wakes at 6am and goes to bed at 10pm. It assumes business hours of 9am to 5pm. It assumes that the observer is longitudinally situated in the center of an ideal time zone, so that local dynamical noon (of the clock) coincides with local apparent solar noon (when the sun is at its zenith). It also assumes that the average observer desires never to wake earlier before sunrise than he does on the winter solstice. According to my calculations, the average observer wakes approx. 75 minutes before sunrise on the winter solstice. The black curve above represents this time carried throughout the year. Notice that at the end of DST, as it is currently practiced in the United States, the observer wakes earlier than 75 minutes before sunrise for about three weeks — the last three weeks of Daylight Saving Time — before standard time resumes and he again wakes less than 75 minutes before sunrise. Also notice that a similar situation does not occur at the beginning of DST. In fact, DST could start up to one week earlier than it currently does and the observer would still wake no more than 75 minutes before sunrise — no earlier than he does on the winter solstice.

Therefore, there is a morning-light saving inefficiency at the end of DST, but not at the beginning. Assuming that it would be inefficient to have the observer spend more time awake in the dark in the morning than he does on the longest night of the year.

In 1966, Daylight Saving Time started six weeks later than it does now, and ended one week earlier. There was still an inefficiency of two weeks at the end, but none at the beginning. In 1987, DST started three weeks later than it does now, and ended one week earlier. Same inefficiency. The 2006 amendments increased the inefficiency at the end of DST to three weeks, but still did not create an inefficiency at the beginning. In fact, DST could start up to one week earlier than it currently does and still not result in morning-light inefficiency.

The problem is at the end. Daylight Saving Time runs three weeks too long, resulting in a wake time of nearly 2 hours before sunrise on the second to last day of DST. (The last day of DST is a Saturday — the observer will in all likelihood sleep in.)

Of course, the other problem with DST is that it is forced on us by Congress. Aside from that, though, the most efficient practice of DST would have the clocks set ahead one hour from the first Sunday in March to the second Sunday in October. Apologies to trick-or-treaters.

Since I posted about this week’s episode of House, M.D., my hits have quadrupled. Apparently, many people want to know about the phrase written on the chalkboard behind House in the classroom where he grilled his 40 or so candidates:

Tesla was Robbed!

The phrase appears alone on the board early in the episode. But later in the episode, House writes the following above it:

SYN
RBC
TACH
PANIC

for synesthesia, red blood count, tachycardia and panic attacks.

These latter are part of House’s diagnostic procedure. He’s using the chalkboard instead of the old whiteboard in the office. But the Tesla remark, which appears, on a cursory examination, to be written in a different hand (though the style of the R is similar), is incongruous.

Nikola Tesla was born in Croatia in 1856 and emigrated to the United States and became a citizen there. He was a prolific and eccentric inventor. Among his more enduring inventions are fluorescent light bulbs and alternating current. AC is the operating standard for all major electrical distribution the world over, and Tesla’s AC generator design is used to generate very nearly all of the electricity on the commercial market. Having revolutionized the world with AC, Tesla next tried to move into wireless transmission of electricity. Tesla constructed large air-core resonant transformers for the purpose, and was extremely successful in getting them to transmit high voltages great distances without wires. Tesla invented long-distance radio communication in 1897 and was awarded US patents on the technology in 1900.

An upstart Italian, named Guglielmo Marconi, was working on achieving a similar feat. He was initially successful only in transmitting electrical signals a short distance. Nothing compared to what Tesla had been able to accomplish at his Colorado Springs laboratory. Marconi applied for patents on radio technology beginning in late 1900, after Tesla had been awarded his patents. Naturally, the US Patent Office denied Marconi’s applications.

Tesla is rumored to have once quipped,

Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents.

That Marconi used technology that was covered by patents held by Tesla is a matter of historical record. Whether Marconi actually got the ideas from Tesla, or developed them on his own, is debatable. What is also known, however, is that Marconi’s major American investor was a man named Thomas Edison. Edison was also a prolific inventor, and was a proponent of direct current electrical transmission. The electric chair was invented by Edison, using Tesla’s alternating current, as part of the two inventors’ ongoing and often bitter feud. But so long as Tesla held the patents on the technology Marconi was using in his radio experiments, Marconi could not obtain a patent.

That changed in 1904 when, for reasons unknown to history, the US Patent Office reversed its decision not to award Marconi a patent on the radio. Marconi also eventually won the Nobel Prize for his “invention.” Tesla never won one, even though he made a much more lasting contribution to electrical science than any other inventor of his time. Tesla eventually went broke and died in massive debt.

This is, I believe, what “Tesla was Robbed!” refers to. Not only the loss, during his life, of his radio patent, but the loss of the Nobel Prize to Marconi.

But Tesla wins in the end. In the same year as his death in 1943, the United States Supreme Court finally upheld Tesla’s prior patent on radio technology. To this day, as a matter of US law, Tesla, not Marconi, is the inventor of the radio. Tesla has even triumphed over Edison. Edison’s most celebrated inventions (phonograph, movie projector, light bulb) have largely been replaced by technologies that rely more heavily on Tesla’s contributions (CDs, digital video projectors, fluorescent bulbs). Today, Tesla’s inventions touch and improve every corner of modern Western Civilization.