Sharing Just because I Want to Keep this for Future Reference, and because it’s Amazingly Cool
Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger
If you’re looking for a way to spend some time on the long weekend, I’ve put up a reprise of one of my old articles on Medium today. This is all about how we know where we are in space: the distance to the Sun, to other stars, and so on. It’s a tale of what real science is like: everything from Greeks running around Egypt putting sticks in the ground, to French explorers fighting off mobs of panicked Siberian villagers who believe that their telescopes cause floods, to a Scottish housekeeper who ended up founding one of the major astronomical research groups of history.
And at the end of it, you’ll be able to look up at the stars and understand just why we know how far they are.
https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/climbing-the-cosmic-ladder-15a9a7a7de02#.82uvzr5h5
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