Okay so it’s a pretty philosophical one. Possibly a bit lame, we’ll see.
I looked it up this morning and found that today - the 15th of May - is the day that in 1618 Johannes Kepler discovered his “harmonic law.”
And I had a quick read about it. It’s an equation that predicts the motion of a planet as it orbits the sun. And at the time there was a popular concept that the planets moved with frequencies and patterns relative to one another in a way that was like music, called “the music of the spheres.” I’d have called it a dance, but anyway it’s why Kepler’s discovery is known as the harmonic law.
So, Kepler was building on the work of Galileo, and Copernicus before that, and these astronomers were the first people to promote heliocentrism, which means that the planets orbit the Sun. Before heliocentrism, for 100s of years, people had believed in geocentrism, which says that the Earth is at the centre of the whole universe.
It made me think. I think quite often I forget that the universe doesn’t revolve around me. But feeling like everything is aimed at you can be stressful and possibly lonely. I just thought it was a nice thing, instead, to realise that although we might be really spaced apart, we’re actually all dancing together, around the stuff we have in common.
Like the impact of Coronavirus.