MountainMornings

Yesterday, Bob and I picked up the Grands from their morning day camp and offered them a choice for an afternoon activity. Rain was in the forecast so outdoor fun was limited. How about a visit to the Frist Art Museum? The children’s section is closed so, no thanks. Would they like to go to “Top Golf” and hit some golf balls from a climate controlled and covered bay? https://topgolf.com/us/nashville/

In this transition Covid time, the thought was we could keep socially distant in our very own individual box/bay. You can order food and drinks to be delivered, and we had been there before so I knew they’d love it. Much to our surprise, the L’il Pumpkin declined this too, in favor of our other choice – the Adventure Science Center! https://www.adventuresci.org/

Since both children are too young to be vaccinated, we pre-empted our visit with a few rules. We must wear our masks at all times even though the Pumpkin has another loose tooth, we must try and stay 6 ft apart from others, and if it gets too crowded, we leave. Well the stars must have been aligned, because the scheduled show in the Sudekum Planetarium was about the origins of FLIGHT… right up Pilot Bob’s alley.

This delightful science museum was built for children to effortlessly interact with exhibits and explore their world. We learned about gravity and wind tunnels, and fulcrums, and germs. We stood in front of a mirror and our refections turned into skeletons! Unfortunately, the virtual reality exhibit was closed, but that didn’t matter. Just being able to see our Grands run free, inside, in a “safe space,” was reward enough for me.

And finally sitting back in a dark planetarium, in our masks with lots of empty seats around us, we looked up at the stars as the film began. Have you ever dreamed you were flying? Starting with Aladdin’s magic carpet, and then watching Leonardo DaVinci sketch his idea of a flying machine, the Grands were mesmerized. As the narrator spoke, while we “flew” over France, about the development of hot air balloons starting in 1783 Paris, even the adults in the theatre were transfixed.

Did you know the first balloon passengers were farm animals – a sheep, a duck and a rooster! And that even though Kitty Hawk, NC saw the Wright Brothers first successful flight, it was the French who began to mass produce airplanes.

The Love Bug turned to me and said, “Nana, I’ve never been on a hot air balloon!” I told her she has lots of time ahead to plan for a special trip and I remembered a friend from NJ whose Grandmother took her on a hot air balloon tour across France. This particular nana, who looked exactly like the Old Lady in Babar’s books, is my grandmotherly mentor.

Today we can all travel across the world in record time, and we are busy exploring space. But today is also the anniversary of Galileo having to recant his conviction that the SUN, and not the Earth, is the actual Center of the Universe. In 1633 the Roman Church was large and in charge of everything scientific and otherwise.

“Galileo lived at a time when the centuries-old Almagest of the Egyptian scholar Claudius Ptolemy, written in 139AD, was still being used by the Church as “evidence” and “confirmation” for the Aristotelian idea that the Earth was at the centre of the Universe. Galileo was part of the Renaissance, the centuries-long ferment accelerated and intensified by the invention of printing in the middle of the 15th century. He was not alone. More or less contemporary with him were physicists and mathematicians Willebrord Snell (the Dutchman who conceived the law of light refraction), the Belgian Simon Stevin and the four Frenchmen Marin Mersenne, Pierre de Fermat, Rene Descartes and Blaise Pascale. Yet it is Galileo’s name that survives as the “founder” of physics.”

https://www.newscientist.com/people/galileo-galilei/#ixzz6yWqhznCN

Of course, it’s impossible to know where the Center of the Universe is, whether it’s finite or infinite. And we would be pretty selfish still to think that other galaxies beyond our ability to see them don’t exist. All we know is that the universe is expanding and though we don’t know its exact size, “…we only have a lower limit that it must now be at least 46.1 billion light-years in radius in all directions from our perspective.”

From my perspective, my universe is a bit smaller.