The Earth! Home to 7.9 billion people. Care to imagine how many that is? Consider Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, whose net worth also happens to be 7.9 billion dollars. A person called Humphrey Yang experimented to visualize that much wealth by regarding a grain of rice to be equal to 100,000 dollars and what he ended up with was 19 kgs of rice to equate to 7.9 billion dollars. Now imagine you are 1/100000 particle of that rice grain and there are not just 99999 like you on that rice grain but 19kgs more of rice and rice particles who live with you, on this planet called Earth.
While we are on that plateau of imagination, place the 1/100000 particle of the rice grain on a basketball and yourself on it too. What do you think your perspective would be? Would you see the ball as curved or flat? It sure looks flat for as far as your eyes can go, doesn’t it? Maybe some of us can't imagine it, because it is really hard to think at that minute level. But the fact is that we are that minuscule when compared to the size of the Earth and we are only covering a fraction of its area and for that reason, we see and feel the Earth as flat. Therefore, it is no wonder the people in the ancient civilizations believed the world to be flat too. And yet, it took one smart rice particle aka Ferdinand Magellan, to undertake a daring journey across the Earth to discover that the reason he never really fell off an edge but circumvented back to Spain, where he started his journey from, was because the Earth is round.
As a kid we had an art activity of puncturing a tennis ball with pins, what resulted was a spiky ball. I imagine the Earth, with all of us standing on it, looks something similar. The pins are standing on the ball because of the pressure of the surface they punctured but we are standing on the Earth because of a force of nature called gravity, which makes us stand like the pin on the ball, perpendicular to the surface at all times. It is the reason why we don’t fall off the surface of the Earth, and also the fact that the surface of the Earth is not all slippery and smooth like the ball you are still imagining being on. Yet it was Newton who wondered as to why the apple fell down and didn’t fly up? This thought led to the discovery of gravity, which centers us, and makes us consider, that there are forces bigger than us at work at all times.
Let’s take a flight, not just of thought and imagination but a real airplane flight. You are sitting there enjoying a movie with a drink on your table, you might as well be in a theatre. Everything is stationary – you, your cup, your bag, even though you are all zipping through the clouds. In the second that you read this line, Earth just spun 30 km on its axis, and you along with it. But we felt no motion, it’s just like sitting in an airplane that is moving at a constant speed. We would only come to feel the motion of the Earth if the Earth were to change its speed by braking hard or accelerating up suddenly. Can you imagine Foucault discovering Earth’s rotation while being stationary? A simple pendulum experiment showed the world how the Earth turned and he calculated the speed of it too, a whopping 1670 km/hour.
Assume not knowing any of the above, being in the 5th century BC, running around, oblivious of our being, but there sits Pythagoras deep in thought from his observations of the moon and the last lunar eclipse and it strikes him that the shadow on the moon is round, which he uses to deduce and declare to the world- the earth is round. If anything is to be learned from the above understanding of the Earth in simple analogies, it is two things – one, that a keen observation goes a long way into discovering and expanding our current understanding, so stop and wonder at the most mundane of things and you will see magic. Second, that memory and transcripts have made humankind evolve, if not for it you and I would still be the kids from the 5th century running around in oblivion and not tech-savvy Googlers who can find information at the tip of our fingers!
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