BAN #437: Solstice tonight, What is a woman?, Art of Science

20 June 2022 Issue #437

June 20, 2022

Astro Tidbit

A brief synopsis of some interesting astronomy/science news

Happy solstice!

Tonight — well, overnight for the US, meaning Tuesday morning at 09:13 UTC — the Sun will reach its northernmost point in the sky for the year, marking the moment of the June solstice. We used to call this the summer solstice, but a lot of folks live in the southern hemisphere where for them it’s the winter solstice, so to avoid confusion I always use the month.

If you watch the Sun rising and setting every day, you’ll see the point along the horizon (called the azimuth) changes every day. On the spring and autumnal equinoctes (the pedantic plural of equinox, and I use it because I love how it sounds) it rises due east and sets due west, but, for folks in the north, it moves north of those points after the spring equinox and south of them after the autumnal one. So tonight if you mark the position where the Sun sets it will be as far to the northwest is it will be all year.

[The first sunflower of the year pops open while Tahsa (left) and Tiny Elvis (right) munch away at what grass they can find. These sunflowers grow wild all over the place here, and soon our yard will have hundreds of them. Credit: Phil Plait]

“Solstice” literally means “the Sun stands still”, because as it moves north of west in azimuth in the spring the rate at which it moves north slows and then stops at the solstice. It then reverses course and sets farther south, moving more every day, passing west at the equinox, then finally setting as far south of west as it will all year at the December solstice. It’s moving the fastest at the equinox, then slows again until December, stops, reverses course, and then here we go again.

It’s also the longest day and shortest night of the year, but weirdly not the earliest sunrise and latest sunset. I explain that in a blog post about the December solstice. For me in Colorado the earliest sunrise was about a week ago, and the latest sunset will be on the 27th. Being on a spinning planet whirling around the Sun on an elliptical orbit is weird, and can be hard to understand.

If you like day time, then enjoy, and if you like long nights, they’ll be back in a few months. The clockwork of the heavens is complicated, but predictable. Count on it.

Blog Jam

[Drawing depicting a black hole passing between us and the center of the galaxy, its gravity bending the light from the stars via gravitational lensing. From Monday’s article. Photo: FECYT, IAC]

Piece of mind

I have opinions. I try to base them on evidence.

My friend Rebecca Watson is an outspoken feminist and critical thinker. She puts out videos on her Skepchick website taking on bad thinking, especially when it impacts others in some way. Which it always does.

She recently tweeted about far-right chucklehead Matt Walsh, who, besides promoting the racist, white nationalist “Replacement Theory”, is also maybe a little bit of a misogynist and transphobe. His video, “What Is a Woman”, appears to be a shallow screed intended to diminish trans women. Rebecca takes him down as well she should. I encourage you to watch her video.

I tweeted about this myself in part to signal boost her video as well as to make a point that I make over and again: Humans like to define undefinable things. There is no strict definition of “woman”, because there cannot be; it’s a social construct as much as it is a natural outcome of biology. As Rebecca points out, some women can’t have babies, some don’t have a uterus, some don’t have XX chromosomes, and and and. You can give an overall description of what a woman (and man) is in general, but when you get down to specifics the lines fuzz out and disappear.

We see this all the time in science. All the time. That’s why I use color as an example; it’s a good and familiar one for talking about this. I’ve written about this a few times as well, sometimes when it comes to the definition of planet, and other times because a lot of bigotry comes down to trying to define some nebulous other as not us, when in reality that definition doesn’t exist.

I wrote about this specifically in BAN Issue 338. That’s for paid subscribers, but I’ll leave you with the important bit:

In life I see people trying to put things into discrete bins all the time, saying that something is either this or that, without allowing for the possibility that there might be things in between.

Over and again nature tells us that many of our distinctions are an illusion, that there is no border between red and orange, for example, except for one we arbitrarily define. Another example: Some stars are more massive than others and behave differently; we say ones more than 8 times the Sun’s mass can explode as supernovae while those below that limit can’t, but really that’s not precisely true. A rapidly rotating star can get more massive before it explodes, and its chemical composition makes a difference, too. There’s no hard and fast limit to mass before a star goes kablooie, just a small but fuzzy range that depends on other things as well.

I can come up with dozens more examples; sex, gender, political affiliation, species, planets/brown dwarfs/stars, asteroids and comets… all of these exist on a spectrum, with one characteristic blending into another. When you look at examples at opposite ends of that spectrum the differences are obvious, but when you compare any two samples that are next to each other on that spectrum the differences are far harder to tease out. So where do you draw the line?

Humans like putting things in bins, but in general nature isn’t so picky. We need to realize that. It’ll make life a lot easier, and make our own differences easier to understand and live with.

Et alia

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