Received my daily dose of Adam Astronomy a few minutes ago. He came to my office and announced without preamble:
If it weren't for supernovas we wouldn't be alive because the sun wouldn't be alive. Cause, cause they explode (cue visual and sound effects) and the dust starts to stick together, and it gets thicker and thicker, and it all pushes together and then a star is born. The rest of the dust comes together to make pebbles. Then the pebbles hit each other and make boulders, and when the boulders hit together they start to make round, and pretty soon you have... [dramatic pause] planets! And that's where we live.
In his extended lecture, Adam dropped other tidbits.
On some planets, methane is like water and water is a gas. And if there was life there it would drink methane. But they wouldn't be aliens, because that would be just the way they live.
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The moon orbits the earth, the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits a black hole!
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Pluto is a dwarf planet. It's bigger than asteroids. Meteors and comets are really small.
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Mercury is bigger than the Moon, but not much.
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There is a Moon of Saturn that's bigger than Mercury. [But he did not remember the name.]
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Saturn had a moon that got hit by a comet. It pushed it toward Saturn and pretty soon Saturn ripped it apart [sound effects] and made... a ring. The ring is mostly dust and ice.
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Jupiter is my favorite planet.
Move over Carl Sagan. I really wish I had a recorder.
Very cool. You should set your sites higher than Sagan, though - seems Adam might actually want his audience to understand something.
ReplyDeleteI love cute kids' stuff!
ReplyDeleteYou should hear my daughter (7) holding forth on the subject of viruses and DNA - she's soaked it up like a sponge.
Ditto with Joseph M about Carl Sagan - Stephen Cox is slightly better, he's a media-savvy physics type without the ideological baggage.
Speaking of which [soapbox] my early-adolescent flirtation with atheism was wrecked when I read Sagan's book of the Cosmos series, where it informed us with all due seriousity that Christians believed the earth was only 6000 yrs old. I remember the flash of insight, coupled with disappointment, that if he couldn't get that right, what else had he got wrong? I haven't trusted an atheist opinion since. [/soapbox] As you say, O TOF, they get their ideas about Christianity from Bill & Ted's Most Excellent Bible Shack - saves on thinking.