Gazing into the Eclipse

Amid the regular cycle of sun and moon stalks a darkness -- a darkness that ancient humans perceived as cosmic abandonment, portent and demonic disruption. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the celestial mechanics, mythology and terrestrial ramifications of solar and lunar eclipses.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
Joe is filling in for Julie this week. You probably
know Joe from Forward Thinking, our sister podcast and show brand.
Uh and we're talking about the eclipse. The eclipse, Yes,

(00:27):
the power of eclipse. That nicotine gum the name of this,
No way that I think it might just be a
regular gum. Okay, maybe available on nicotings later. I don't no.
Eclipses our thing that they are both sort of mundane
in physical terms, but also quite stunning and terrifying and

(00:51):
significant throughout the history of humanity, significant to the observer. Yeah,
because I just want to try to imagine. I know
you can't really put yourself in this headspace, but just
try to imagine what it would be like to sort
of live in a pre scientific time. Maybe you're you're
part of a you know, a hunter gatherer tribe somewhere
in the world, and for the first time in your life,

(01:12):
something very strange happens. One day, the sky starts to
go dark and you see a black disc pass in
front of the sun until there's just a ring of
white fire and the the it's dark in the middle
of the daytime. You don't know what's going on or
what's causing this. I have to imagine that it would
be absolutely terrifying and and completely bizarre. Yeah, I mean

(01:36):
the cycle of night and day, you know, the one
of the guiding uh, factors of your life. Even with
the gay, the guiding factors for any organism, and some
of the earliest organisms were still based on recognizing when
it was dark and when it was daylight. And suddenly
that seems to be thrown out the window by there's
a random chaotic event. Yeah. Well, i'd say upsetting the

(01:58):
clear division between night and day is like one of
the most perverse things you could do to a biological organism.
I mean, the sun, it's it's the mother of all
on Earth. When you think about it, all energy on
Earth is solar energy. Pretty much all all the energy
we consume, you know, all the food we eat is
a few steps down the chain, but it's solar energy. Uh.

(02:21):
And so it's just kind of amazing to imagine not
knowing what's going on, but seeing that that mother of
all life suddenly blotted out. And of course maybe not
equally astounding, but also very strange and and perhaps perverse
and upsetting is the lunar eclipse. Uh, seeing something happen

(02:41):
to the moon which to you might have been some
kind of god or have some other kind of magical significance,
seeing it change colors, or seeing a shadow pass in
front of it. Um. So, yeah, I think eclipses are
going to be a really interesting thing to talk about.
So you might have heard a couple of years ago
that the Mayan calendar predicted the end of the world.
You remember this, I remember hearing a little about it. Yeah,

(03:03):
way too much. Oh, I got so sick of hearing
about that. But maybe it's just now been long enough
that we can bring it up again without making people
grown too much. But it was supposed to end in
December twelve. Well, not only did the world not end,
but the Mayan calendar, actually, this is funny, didn't predict
the end of the world. Did you know this at
the time? Um, I don't think I was that informed

(03:24):
about it. But and it also it was just bombarded
with that idea of you know, Mayan apocalypse. Yeah, so
around that time was basically the end of their long
calendar cycle, which would reset afterwards, so it wasn't really
a judgment day. It was more like their December thirty first.
If they had a really, really really long year, it
would be like somebody looking back at our calendar system

(03:46):
and thinking of the end of the year, is the
the end of the of an era, at the end
of an age and apocalypse? Right, And so they didn't
predict the end of the world there, but the Mayan
astronomical calendar actually did make some interesting astronomical predictions. For example,
there's a book called Astronomy and the Maya Codessees by
Harvey and Victoria Bricker. So they discussed the ancient Maya

(04:11):
Mayan astronomical calendars and and they discuss some dating back
to the eleventh or twelfth centuries CE. And they say
that these ancient calendars that the Maya had predict the
date of a solar eclipse that would have been visible
in July of ninete within about a day of accuracy.
And it kind of makes you wonder why predicting an

(04:33):
eclipse would be that important to them. I mean, it's
not like it had any real like physical effects of
much significance on Earth. You know, it didn't like it
wasn't that an eclipse would like destroy all their crops
or something. So what did it mean? Well, it, I
mean a lot of it really comes down to, of course,
there's cosmology, your understanding of what you are as a

(04:54):
people and what the what the world is, and then
what the cosmos means. Uh, as well as just basic
record keeping basic uh observation of the movement of the
spheres and using this as a as a as a
way to divide out time. UH. The ancient Maya believed
in in recurring cycles of creation and destruction, and they
believe that life was composed of eras lasting around in

(05:17):
modern years, it would be around a fifty two hundred
year periods. They believe in a flat, four cornered earth
that was has been described as being like that of
the back of a crocodile that's resting in the water,
you know where it's just the back is emerging. And
you know. There was additional stuff about the four corners
and the corresponding gods and UH. And of course there

(05:38):
are also a lot of rituals in life that are
dictated by this two hundred and sixty day sacred round calendar.
So within my culture, you have these priests, these are
these are the guys that are that are tasked with
with taking care of upkeep of the calendar as well
as astronomy. So they're calculating time. Uh, They're they're figuring
out when festivals should occur, when ceremonies are occurring, uh,

(06:01):
certain fateful days and seasons. They're divining the future. Uh,
they're they're trying to figure out the cures for diseases.
They're writing about it all, and they're keeping track of
the various genealogies. So in a sense, they are they're
the keepers of time. They're concerned with Mayan time and
uh and the Mayan people's place in the universe. Yeah,

(06:21):
and obviously to the to the Maya, astronomical events had
real significance, like that they might believe that an astronomical
portent could give them real information about what would happen
to them, you know, like it could it could bring
something bad that would be dangerous, or it could bring
a good omen So you actually really wanted to be

(06:41):
able to predict and understand astronomical events. And of course
the Maya weren't weren't the only ones who had believes
like this. This is very common all around the world,
Like the ancient Chinese were very concerned with being able
to predict eclipses, even the you know, the Anti Kithera mechanism. Yes,
this is sometimes heard to as the world's first computer

(07:02):
or like the oldest astronomical calculator in existence. It's a
mechanical computer that's you know, I think more than two
thousand years old, that was discovered in a shipwreck in
the Mediterranean off the coast I believe of the island Antikithera.
And so they bring this thing up and people have
been studying it and putting together reconstructions of it. And

(07:25):
what the people who have studied this mechanism, uh decided
is that, oh, yeah, so this was an ancient astronomical
calculator that if you wound the gears, it would tell
you the placement of different celestial objects and it would
predict eclipses. So the ancient Greeks or whoever invented this
amazingly advanced mechanism for the time. We're also very concerned

(07:49):
with being able to know when was an eclipse going
to happen, So we're gonna come back and discuss the
human significance of eclipse more in a few minutes, But
first we really need to break down the basic science
of the eclipse, the basic celestial mechanics, uh, that are
in play here. Okay, Robert, tell me a word that's
hard to pronounce. Oh, well, you know I can. I

(08:12):
can probably stumble over any number of difficult words pronounced,
but the one in question here is ziziggi, which is ziziggi,
zizigi which is s y z y g y um,
which is uh. It's like they were playing a joke
on you. Yeah, I mean, and it only just makes
me think of Ziggy the cartoon character. But but you know,

(08:34):
it comes from Ziggy Stardust or Ziggy start us. That's
why am I going to Ziggi the cartoon character instead
of Bowie. I don't know, um, but it's a It
comes from from the Greek um ziogos, which means yoke together.
Because ultimately we are talking about about convergence here, right,
So every eclipse is a ziziggi, but not every ziziggi

(08:58):
is an eclipse. When when a ziggi he occurs with
celestial bodies, we're talking about a nearly straight line configuration
of three celestial bodies. In this case, we're talking about
uh configurations that involved the Sun, Moon, and the Earth
lining up within a gravitation gravitational system. It also refers
to when the Sun and the Moon are in conjunction,

(09:19):
such as a new moon or in opposition, a full moon.
So those are examples. Those those A full moon is
a ziziggi. But obviously a full moon is not necessarily
an eclipse. Okay, you need a full moon for a
linear eclipse, but more on that later, right, Yeah, okay,
so I get that. So ziziggi ziziggi, Yes, from the Greek.
Where does the word eclipse come from? Well, with eclips

(09:40):
we have to go back to the Greek as well,
back to eclipses from eclip in, which means to omit fail, suffer, etcetera.
Uh man see but this kind of dire I mean,
it kind of drives home the fact that throughout human
history like this is how we view eclipse. It is
a thing of of dire omen totally. Well, okay, let's

(10:03):
look at how lunar eclipses work first, and then we
can turn the solar eclipses Okay, so pop quiz, which
is which we you know that one you know that
one is the Earth blocking light from reflecting off the Moon,
and the other is the Moon blocking the direct light
from the Sun that we receive on Earth. But which

(10:23):
is which? Oh? I mean? So you're basically for a
solar eclipse, a solar eclipse to occur, the Moon has
to be in the way, right, So for a solar eclipse,
the easy way to remember is that you're naming the
object that's being obscured. So for a solar eclipse that's
blocking the light from the Sun, the lunar eclipse is
blocking the reflected light from the Moon. So the lunar

(10:44):
eclipse happens. It's actually, in the most basic terms, really simple.
It's when the Moon passes into the shadow of Earth. Uh.
And when we describe these it will probably really help
if you will try to do our best. But if
you look at a picture, this is inherently kind of
a geometrical or ual phenomenon. You can only say so
much with words. Um, But if you picture the Earth

(11:05):
orbiting the Sun and then the Moon orbiting the Earth,
every now and then the orbits line up so that
the Moon is directly behind the Earth with respect to
the Sun. And of course the light we see from
the moon doesn't come from the Moon, it's reflected from
the Sun. So if you block the light, you know

(11:26):
with the Earth's shadow, you're gonna not see much light
reflected from the moon, or you're gonna see maybe some
strange colors. So it's like standing in front of a
movie projection camera facing the screen and you're suddenly asking yourself,
where did the movie go? Well, the movie is on
your back now because you're standing in front of the rejector.
That's a good analogy. Yeah, okay, so the Earth, there

(11:47):
there are two cone shaped shadows that come off of
the Earth, and one is sort of the the outward
spreading one, and one is sort of the inward focusing one.
The outward spreading one is known as the pin numbra.
That it's the more diffuse shadow. So that's kind of
a faint shadow, and you've probably seen, you know yourself,
in various scenarios that you're actually casting sort of more

(12:08):
than one shadow, kind of a faint, bigger shadow, and
then a smaller, more concentrated shadow, and then of course
the the middle focused inner shadow is the umbra, and
that's going to be the very dark area that the
Earth is blocking out a big majority of the Sun's light.
The pannumbra in cases the umbra, so the pannumbra is wide,

(12:28):
the umbra is small. In the middle of that is
futtle bull's eye there in the umbre. Because a lunar
eclipse can only happen when the Moon is behind the Earth,
that means that a lunar eclipse also only happens during
a full moon. A full moon is when the you know,
the Moon is behind the Earth, reflecting its full face
to the Earth. It's it's not getting a partially out

(12:50):
of view, but the Moon orbits the Earth all the time,
like it makes a full circle roughly every month, right,
So why don't we see a lunar eclipse every full moon?
Why don't we see a lunar eclipse every time the
Moon is on the opposite side of the Earth. So
you can imagine the Earth and the Sun together on

(13:11):
what's called an ecliptic plane. They're sort of like sitting
on a flat surface together. You imagine that's a flat surface,
and the Moon actually does not orbit the Earth on
exactly that same plane. It's not flat with the Sun
and the Earth. It's at a five degree angle from
that orbit. So if you can imagine this, and it

(13:33):
probably again will help if you look at a picture, Uh,
the Earth's orbiting the Sun on a flat plane, and
then the Moon is orbiting the Earth slightly diagonally. So
every now and then it is just lined up on
the sort of up and down y axis with where
the Sun and the Earth are, and other times it's
above or below. Okay, So the rotation of the Earth
is like a brimmed hat that's just on perfectly, whereas

(13:56):
the Moon's rotation is a cocked hat. Yeah, that's exactly right.
So those places where the Moon crosses the ecliptic plane
of the of the Sun and the Earth, those are
called nodes, and that's where it's lined up correctly to
be caught right in the middle of of the possible
eclipse shadow that's being cast by the Earth. When those
orbits line up perfectly like that is when you're going

(14:19):
to see a lunar eclipse. It's when the Moon is
it just the right hy coordinate on this graph. So
remember those two different shadows I talked about. You have
the the the umbra and the pin umbra and the
pin numbre the big shadow. When the moon passes into
that shadow, sometimes you will get like a pinnumber a
lunar eclipse, and that can be difficult to see right

(14:42):
because that shadow isn't so so dense, it's not going
to block out as much light. And then you can
also get a partial lunar eclipse where you know, only
part of the moon is blocked out by the shadow.
That the really impressive one you want to see is
the total lunar eclipse where it's just right to pass
into the umbro, you know, that deep center shadow, and

(15:04):
that's where the magic happens. And so a lunar eclipses
are pretty rare. On average, they can happen about three
times a year, though you can have a year where
you don't have any eclipses, any lunar eclipses at all
um And then about a third of these are the
pin number ones that are harder to see cool, and

(15:24):
that brings us to solar eclipses. And again it comes
down to three bodies, you know, again sort of the
projector something in the way of the projector in the screen.
But in this case, a solar eclipse is occurring when
the Moon passes into direct line between the Earth and
the Sun. So we're the screen as opposed to the
individual standing in front of the screen in my projector

(15:46):
analogy here, and solar eclipses are only possible during the
new moon phase. Uh. This is when the Moon essentially
plays monkey in the middle Sun and Earth when you
normally wouldn't see it. Right. So what happens here is
the Moon's shadow travels over the Earth's surface and blocks
out the Sun's light as seen from Earth. Again, it
all comes down to the observer. Because the Moon's the

(16:10):
moon orbits the Earth at an angle as we already discussed,
approximately five degrees tilted. The Moon crosses the Earth's over
doll plane only twice a year, and these team times
are called eclipse seasons because they are the only times
when eclipses can occur. So for an eclipse to take place,
the Moon must be in just the correct phase during
an eclipse season. Uh, and then that's when the solar

(16:31):
eclipse occurs. The condition makes this extremely rare. Now, the
Moon's shadow, as we already mentioned, you have the central
umbra and then the outer pannumbra. Depending on which part
of the shadow passes over you, you'll see one of
three different types of solar eclipses. Because as you've as
you've probably noted if you've done any kind of reading,
you know, online, where you're like, when's the next eclipse occurring?

(16:51):
How am I going to see a solar eclipse? Solar
eclipse depends on where you are. Yeah, it depends greatly
on where you are. I mean, I'm already looking ahead
to the next one, and I think, all right, how
far do I have to drive? I think I have
to drive to Kentucky to really get a good view
of it. And I'm and I'm already thinking about my
eclipse tourism, because yeah, you could get a total uh
solar eclipse, and clearly this is the one you want

(17:12):
to drive for the entire central portion of the Sun
is blocked out. This is your big iconic Oh my god,
the world is ending eclipse, right, But then there's the
partial eclipse where only part of the Sun's surfaces blocked out. Uh.
And then there's an annuler and this is when only
a small ring like sliver of light is seen from
the Sun's disc. Yeah, you can you can actually observe

(17:33):
the Sun's corona sort of like a plasma halo of
the Sun around the outside of the black disc, which
is also pretty Oh my god, the world is gonna end.
Um And that's a solar eclipse. That's how that works. Yeah,
we did our best with words. Again, look at a picture. Yeah.
And also I'm gonna make sure to link out to
our how stuff works articles on the landing page for
this episode. We have an article about solar eclipses and

(17:55):
we have an article about lunar eclipses. Both of those
have illustrations that will really help you at a better
grash than what's happening here, as well as more in
depth explanations. Right. Uh. And we're eventually going to get
back to what eclipses mean to us in a kind
of like a dark and magical way. But eclipses also
do have scientific significance, and I think we should examine

(18:17):
those claims, both the real scientific significance and the ones
that have been maybe proposed but not quite validated. Yeah. Indeed,
and something you might not even think about, like I
had not really thought about the effect of a solar
eclipse on terrestrial wind wind, Yeah, which of course makes
perfect sense, right, because the Sun and its effect on
the Earth is doing a lot of the work in

(18:40):
UH in stirring our our atmosphere into the weather patterns
that we perceive. Yeah, I mean a lot of what
wind is is exchanging gas from one place to another
because of heat differentials. And when you block out the Sun,
obviously you're you're creating as kind of disturbance in the
normal solar radiation levels you're getting in a certain area. Indeed,

(19:00):
and UH. In two thousand twelve, a study from the
University of Reading looked into this UH and found that
solar eclipses due in fact UH slow the wind down
and make it change directions. This is a team of
scientists led by Dr Suzanne Gray, and they compared hourly
measurements of wind speed and direction from a hundred and
twenty one weather stations across southern England during the August

(19:23):
total solar eclipse. Then they compared these to a high
resolution weather forecast model UH that did not account for
a solar eclipse. So every what they found is that
everything lined up on these two different accounts. The model
that the computer model that does not have an eclipse,
and then reality which has an eclipse, everything lines up

(19:43):
right until you get to the eclipse point. Uh. So
they got to see what the weather would have been
like without the eclipse occurring at that diversion point, and
these were the results. They found that average wind speed
across a cloud free region over southern England dropped by
point seven meters per second, and that the winds direction
turned counterclockwise by an average of seventeen degrees. So effectively,

(20:07):
the eclipse was causing the winds to become more easternly,
and temperatures also fell by about one degree celsius. Oh
so did they know that the reason why it was
changing the mother Was it what I was saying earlier
about changing the temperature and solar radiation or did it
have more to do with gravity from the sun and
the moon. Well, I mean, temperatures fall and there's no
sunlight obviously, as we see in our regular play of

(20:28):
night and day. So so that was expected. Wind slow
went atmosphere um close to the ground cool, So that
was to be expected, But the changes in wind direction
were a bit of a surprise. I wonder what could
caused that? Well, I mean a lot of it just
comes down to just the complexity of of of weather models,
you know, and uh, and just how many different factors

(20:50):
are playing into windspeed in direction right, butterflight's the sun
in New York, you get rained instead of I mean exactly.
So that's when we get the butterfly effect. We get
the the idea of chaos area, and that stems out
of our attempts to forecast weather in this entirely complex system.
Here's one I've heard. I remember reading somewhere that apparently

(21:10):
animals go nuts during an eclipse. Now is this true
or is this a bunch of bunk? I believe this
is a bunch of buck based on the research that
I was looking at. Um basically across the board. There's
there's no there's no you know, um preternatural response by
animals to eclipse. Uh. They simply tend to react to

(21:31):
the darkness as if it were occurring during a typical cycle. Uh. So,
for instance, scientists have observed this in the vertical migration
of zooplankton in the ocean due to lunar eclipses, as
well as I mean countless higher animals when it comes
to solar eclipses. Because of course, that's the more drastic change. Uh,
that's weird. I mean, intuitively, I would think it would

(21:52):
make a big difference. Like if you know, animals have
circadian rhythms, and you know, rhythms that are based on
the cycle of night and day and that are tied
to all kinds of biological processes, not just sleep and wake,
but lots of things in your body. Um, I would
think if if the darkness comes before you're expecting it,
that would throw you all out of whack. Well basically,

(22:13):
I mean it comes down to you have daytime mode
and nighttime mode, right, and if it seems like suddenly
it's getting dark, well it's time to shift into nighttime mode.
And that's that's pretty much what a lot of uh.
The research out there has shown that that roughly speaking,
diurnal animals react as though night we're approaching, UH, as
demonstrated in you know, expedited roosting and betting behavior. And

(22:35):
in contrast, animals that are normally active at night, nocturnal
you know, animals like bats and whatnot, they may show
the reverse pattern. So they're emerging into the open as
if the as the sky darkens during an eclipse. So yeah,
there's not there's not animals going crazy in the streets.
They're not you know, wolves, They're not howling out of madness.
It's just a gentle shift into sort of early nighttime,

(22:58):
and then oaps, it's not nighttime after are all go
back to your regularly scheduled program. Here's something I don't
know if I've ever seen addressed in the werewolf literature.
What happens during a lunar eclipse. So let's say you're
a werewolf. Your transformation is triggered by the appearance of
the full moon. So full moon's out, but suddenly it
passes into the umbra, and you've not got a full

(23:21):
moon anymore, at least not got a normal full moon.
You've got an eclipsed full moon. What happens to your body?
I would think that wolf mode is canceled at that point, Yeah,
I would think you just revert back to a naked
human in the woods. Yeah, I would think so. I mean,
maybe even more naked than normal, like nobody hair. You
would be whatever whatever is on the other side of

(23:41):
human from the werewolf, like a almost like a ware human,
a wear human plus that would be my guest. You
turn into a into a one of those dog robots,
you know, with the puppy bots. But you know you've hit,
of course on an important question because we're talking about
how out eclipses affect animals and of course the human

(24:03):
animal like that's that's where we see most of the
more impressive effects. Now we don't turn into wear wolves obviously,
because of course eclipse has a huge impact on the
way we perceive the universe. Have we perceive life on
Earth and what it means? Yeah, it's it's importents we
were talking about earlier. I mean, we are the animals
that go crazy when a solar eclipse happens, are a

(24:24):
lunar eclipse sometimes indeed, we we we are the animals
that go crazy. I don't know if you've ever seen
like a video of a large crowd gathered to view
a solar eclipse. Sometimes there's just like sudden screaming and people.
It's it's bizarre. I mean, I would be very impressed
to see a lunar eclipse. I don't think I've ever
actually watched one. Maybe when I was a little kid
or something. I don't know, Um, but I wouldn't scream.

(24:48):
I don't think. You don't think, but you know how
can you be for certain? I mean, I've never seen
I don't think i've I've never seen a solar lunar
eclipse myself, not the full you know, lunar eclipse and
fort of them full solar eclipse. So you know, I
think I would behave calmly, but maybe I would just
really mark out for it. Now. We'll talk more about
the religion and myth here and a bit after the
after an upcoming break. But um, according to at least

(25:11):
one historical account to greet According to a Greek historian, Herodotus,
and only according to him, keep that in mind. Baileys
of Melita's predicted an eclipse that occurred during the six
year of war between the Medians and the Lydians, and
allegedly this eclipse resulted in a complete ceasefire. Um. So

(25:33):
that the eclipse occurs, war has been raging for years
and years and years, and then the eclipse occurs and
everyone puts down their weapons and they get serious about
talking peace. Um. Did it happen? I don't know. This
is the only Herodotus gives us this account. Uh, And
if it occurred, we're probably talking about an eclipse on
May five, eighty five as as. This is when a

(25:55):
total solar eclipse was visible in the Aegean and Asian
mind or region, but there were no There was no
mention of where wolves in his account either. But in
sometimes the the the effects and the ramifications of eclipse
go beyond life here on Earth. They go into our
our understanding of how the universe itself works. Yeah, this

(26:16):
is great. There have actually been examples of people using
eclipses as a way to devise an experiment that you
couldn't otherwise perform. So like on Earth, we don't have
a lot of options for performing experiments that involve incredible
amounts of mass or energy like now we you know,
these days we can build like had drawn colliders and
stuff to generate a huge amount of energy and a

(26:38):
controlled area. But we didn't always have stuff like that,
and we still can't generate, you know, enough mass to
simulate like the mass of a star or the mass
of a planet or something like that. We can only
harness so much. But there are very clever ways to
use quantities like, for example, the mass of the Sun
to experimentally verify predictions based on new theories. So I

(27:01):
want to take us to nineteen nineteen when we had
this wonderful new theory from my old friend Alfred Einstein
Albert Einstein I believe he was called, but his his
theory was theory of general relativity. So the idea here
is that gravity is actually the curvature of what Einstein

(27:24):
called space time, that that space and time are sort
of part of the same general four dimensional fabric of
the universe, and that gravity was actually the effect of
seeing that fabric warped or distorted or bent by a
large piece of mass. But how could you test that? Yeah,

(27:45):
because you're basically saying Einstein's basically saying a sufficiently massive
object he is going to bend light. Yeah, like you
could observe it. You could observe the bend in space
time by seeing how the trajectory of a eam of
light changes as it goes around a really massive object.
But you can't put the Sun in a lab. Yeah.

(28:06):
It's like, if you need to get you need to say, okay, Einstein,
go get a sun sized object to get a bowling
ball about that sis, get a flash flight, and let's
watch the light curve. Right. But you know one thing
you could do is try to watch what happens when
a star passes behind the Sun. You could look out
towards the Sun and see, hey, as the light passing

(28:28):
the Sun comes towards us, does it get bent an
amountain by the gravity of the Sun. That would be uh,
there would be a number corresponding to Einstein's theory of relativity,
and that would be great if you could check it out.
But there's a problem. The Sun's too bright, like you
can't see the light from the stars behind it. At
least you certainly couldn't at the time. I'm not sure

(28:49):
if we could now, but there might be a way
around that. You could look for how the Sun bends
light coming from stars behind it during a solar eclipse,
and that's the solution. So Sir Frank Watson Dyson and
Astronomer Royal of Britain conceived this experiment and then it
was carried out by a Sir Arthur Eddington. But what

(29:11):
they did was they they plotted out the course of
an upcoming solar eclipse, and then they sent teams to
a couple of locations. One of them was an island
off the west coast of Africa called Prince cheep A
I believe and then the other team I think, was
sent to Brazil and they were supposed to measure what
happened when the solar eclipse happened, to look for that

(29:31):
light coming from the star that was passing behind the
Sun to see if it bent at just the right
amount to experimentally verify Einstein's theory relativity. And it did,
which of course made einstein overnight sensation. So we see
a case of the eclipse being the perfect scenario in
which to test out a theory regarding uh nass and

(29:53):
the bending of light. Right, and and at the time
there was just like no other way we could have
tested this. Yeah, you can't build a model in which
to construct it. You have to depend on the model
that is reality. Of course, the experimenters were very lucky
that they had like clear weather and stuff when that happens. Yeah,
I mean that's why they sent out two experiments, like
one to two teams to two different locations, because what

(30:14):
if one was cloudy, right, you needed to fail safe. Yeah,
what if they've both been cloudy? I want a mess.
Imagine picking up the check for that experiment. None of
us would know who Einstein was. Alright, we're gonna take
a quick breaking When we come back, we're gonna talk
a little bit about eclipse mythology. We're not going to
do an exhaustive mention of everything, because every culture has
some sort of cool eclipse and my but we'll do

(30:35):
some highlights and then talk a little more ce. Let's
feel mechanics before we close it out. All right, we're back.
So when you're talking about eclipse and mythology and folklore,

(30:55):
you do see the re emerging trend of disorder and chaos. Right.
It's like we were talking about earlier, where the sort
of rhythm of night and day is about as basic
as it gets for a biological organism, Like Disturbing that
cycle is a I think I called it perverse, and
I'm going to stick with that. It is a perversion

(31:16):
of what seems to be biologically necessary. Yeah, I mean,
you can you can basically root most of the major
themes in mythology and folklore down to the basic rhythms
of life. There's night and day, there's life and death,
there's birth, there's disease, and the cycles of the seasons,
maybe the cycles of the seasons. Uh, And so you

(31:36):
end up personifying these movements and defining features of life.
And then of course those all those gods end up
having their own little personal dramas, their own their own offspring,
their own parental issues, and you end up just filling
up the entire pantheon and then uh and then driving
stories out of each one. So yeah, we know that
the ancient Chinese astronomers were very concerned with being able

(31:58):
to predict eclipses. Like were some ancient Chinese beliefs about
the eclipse. Well, one that certainly rises through the surface
is just the the the basic belief that the eclipse
occurred when a legendary celestial dragon devoured the sun or
the moon. Uh. And it was actually tradition in ancient
China to bang drums and pots and make loud noises

(32:18):
during the eclipse to frighten away the dragon. And this
the tradition of this actually carried out into the nineteenth
century when the Chinese navy would fire cannons during a
lunar eclipse. That's cool, Yeah, you know, it comes back
to what you're talking about, like people you know, making
a lot of noise, sort of freaking out and getting
excited during one of these uh, these these eclipse events. Uh,

(32:41):
so you can sort of see see this tradition as
an example of that where it's just it's a time
to make a lot of noise and get excited about
what's happening and into varying degrees. Apply this mythical context
and uh you know, as far as records of eclipses
go in China, uh, they date back at least to

(33:03):
uh C. We see that by looking at oracle bones
from the Shang dynasty. Wow. Another really interesting one is
the role eclipse has played in sort of the royal
mythology of ancient Assyria. So if you look to Assyria
in the first millennium b C. There was a type

(33:24):
of lunar eclipse that was actually considered a bad omen
for the reigning king at the time. So it's like, oh,
you see this particular type of lunar eclipse, and you
know the gods have it in for the king. The
king's going to die. That's bad for your political standing,
that's bad for the certainly bad for the king. So
so what do you do? I mean, well, so you

(33:45):
could come up with some kind of like just standard
magical rituals to board off the bad omens. But what
if you're afraid that's not gonna work. Well, So basically,
how do you get out of cosmic trouble here? How
do you get us keep your fate? Yeah, as dictated
by the you know, the celestial objects. They know more
than we do. I mean, so the way they figured

(34:07):
out to get around this was a ritual substitute king
or I believe it's pronounced sharp poi. And so what
you what you do is you would basically create a
scapegoat king to absorb the you know, the evil fate
of the reigning king. And so you dethrone the real king,

(34:29):
the reigning king, for like a hundred days, and you
would substitute this fake king to eventually be killed in
the king's place. And then once the the you know,
the bad omen is fulfilled, then the king, the actual
king can safely return to the throne without having to
worry about his fate. And I understand it like the

(34:49):
when I first started looking into it, I thought they
meant that it was more like a rituals like sacrifice
of the substitute king, But it sounds more and more
like the substitute king quote unquote dies. So you can
imagine some form of royal crier appearing before the people
and saying, oh, the substitute King has died in his sleep,
thus fulfilling the prophecy and any death related obligations of

(35:13):
our returning king. Let's hear it for king what's his name?
Asher banafol back in a come back? Yeah, the bad
omen is behind us because the substitute king absorbed it all. Yeah,
that substitute king was such a bad king anyway. It's
it's I wonder what it would be like to be
that substitute king. Would you? Would you feel the pressure

(35:35):
to really get stuff done? Like maybe if I really
proved myself in my hundred days in office, I can
that they'll actually keep me. Or is it just sort
of like, well, heck, they're gonna kill me in a
hundred days. I'm just gonna ride this out in the
most hedonistic did that's impossible? Did the substitute king know, like,
did he think he was having the best day ever?

(35:56):
That's true? Yeah? Is it? Or is it just the
priests and the king himself that are aware of this scenario? Yeah?
I don't know it would I would? I wonder if
there's any fiction out there that explores this trope? If so,
I would love to hear about it because it seems
just perfect for exploitas. Send us that short story. Yeah. Um.
Another example that came to our eyes was that of

(36:17):
Apopus in Egyptian religion, ancient Egyptian religion and mythology. And
this is a moon serpent, the moon serpent that emerged
from the Great Void at the dawn of time and
now lives deep within the nile Um the Nile not
only in the physical sense but also in sort of
the cosmic sense of ancient Egyptian religion and embodies all
the dark aspects of the universe. He's night and death,

(36:39):
he storms and chaos. He conspires was set the god
of evil and sometimes the ensnare souls in their journey
between this life and the next, engulfing them and not
not only just like eating them and just crushing them
into the non into non existence, reminding me a bit
of the long Boy in Stephen King's Lissies story. I
haven't read that. He's is basically a cosmic world serpent

(37:02):
that lives outside of our reality and he eats you.
It's like love crafty and levels of bad. This crushes
you into non existence. Stephen King likes those cosmic world
eating serpent. He's he's great when it comes to the
extra dimensional entities, no doubt. Um. So, of course this
cosmic world serpent from Egyptian mythology. Of course, he wants

(37:23):
to devour the great sun disk that lights our world,
which is pulled across the sky by the god Raw
in his sun boat. Rob's protected, however, by another serpent,
a good one, and almost always escapes um the ravenous
of office. Sometimes he almost succeeds, and that's when we
get into eclipse, but he's always made to vomit everything

(37:43):
back up again. So in this we see the the
traditional trope of eclipse as an example of the forces
of chaos and darkness and evil almost winning but then
being beaten away by the forces of order. You know,
I feel like we still have not actually shucked this
myth of like the monster that eats the sun, because

(38:04):
we've got it within the past few decades with the Unicron,
you know, eating planets. Yes, Unicron, And we'll come back
to Unicron in a minute, because he does line up
rather nicely with with a particular eclipse, the entity from
Hindu religion. Let's see, I'm going to see if I
can find a good YouTube clip of Unicron eating a planet,

(38:24):
but no Unicron Galactus. Those those guys are very much
in keeping with these these ancient ideas of cosmic world eaters,
cosmic moon and sun eaters. It is a truly captivating idea.
I mean, like, um, it is the sun and entity
that can be consumed. I mean, if it could, you
you could sort of see that. It's like it's like
the ultimate empowering agent. It's you know, it's the pill

(38:47):
that you take that gives you ultimate power. Yeah. But
it's also it's almost kind of this idea too that
like this like nothing can actually eat the Sun. So
if you have an evil being or creature in your cosmology,
of course it's going to try to eat the Sun,
but it can't carry it out and then it just
falls back to Earth, It falls back to Hell or
what have you. Now we're kind of jumping around in

(39:07):
time a little bit, but just to just to make
sure we hit at least one werewolf. Example, there is
a werewolf from the folklore traditions of Russia and Belarussia Uh.
And this is an individual named vessus Lav Uh. The
Belarussian werewolf. So now, are we actually going to find
out what happens to a warwolf during the eclipse? Uh? No,
haply not. But we'll see how an eclipse factors into

(39:29):
the creation of a werewolf. The idea here is that
his mother was violated by a serpent, and as a result,
Vessuslav was born during a solar eclipse, and so he
became a mighty warrior in life, kind of a warrior magician,
a warrior, sorcerer, battle wizard if you will. Uh. But
he also could turn into a wolf. He he was

(39:50):
essentially a werewolf and could and could take on this
nocturnal lupine form. Now he's based on a real guy,
based on the real live vasus Lav of Polot, also
known as Vasaslav, the source for Vassaslav the Seer really
lived from ten thirty nine to eleven oh one, and
he's the most famous ruler of the Polots and briefly

(40:11):
Grand Prince of Kiev from ten sixty eight to ten
sixty nine. UM. This more mythic uh likeanthropic version of
him stems from the twelfth century Slavic epic the Tale
of Egor's Campaign, and as far as I know, nothing
in there tells us what happens to Vasuslav during a
lunar ecliffs man, that would be really cool to be

(40:33):
immortalized and like epic poetry and turned into a were wolf. Yeah.
He we were talking about this earlier. Kind of he
kind of reminds us of the Starks, right right, He's
like Rob Stark, you know, like they're a legend. He's
actually just a sort of warrior king, but their legends
surrounding him. All. He can turn into a wolf in
the full moon, and then of course there's throat ripping. Yeah,

(40:55):
the bloody time delicious viscera. And this brings us to
one of my favorite and again, you know, we're continuingly
to see this trope of the moon or sun consuming entity.
This brings us to the Hindu god ra who or
a Frau ra who is. He's known in Thailand and
he has just a fabulous stories. But he's easily my
favorite of all these different eclipse entities because he was

(41:16):
once a proud osherra Demi, god of immense power and hunger.
But you know, he's a bit flight he's a little
too ambitious. He wants immortality because you know, within this
particular cosmology, demi gods are just another realm and the
wheel of sam Sara. So demi gods may be super powerful,
and they may live a long long time compared to
human lives, but they're ultimately going to die. So Ra

(41:39):
who drinks the divine nectar that's going to give him immortality.
But before the this gulpful of this magical liquid could
pass his throat, all powerful Vishnu jumps in and decapitates
him for the transgression. Okay, so he cuts his head off,
severing the esophagus before it trickles down the esophagus, right
before it can actually go all the way down, So

(41:59):
just cuts it off there. Oh man, that's such a bummer,
Like how low would it have to get to have
an effect? You have to fully digest it? Um. I
think it's the idea. It's kind of like an Achilles
kind of a situation. You know, Achilles is only as
powerful as how far he's dipped in the water, and
so you know he'll didn't make it end, so the
heel is vulnerable, So cut him off before the liquid

(42:20):
could pass into the body. So the body's gone, but
the head, the head has the power So the idea
here is that the power of the nectar makes the
disembodied head of ra who immortal man. And and so
this pleased and fallen god continues to seek his revenge
on the two planetary deities who ratted him out to Vishnu.

(42:40):
And that's the sun in the moon. So as such
ravenous rah who regularly ascends into the sky and attempts
to swallow the sun or the moon. But since he's disembodied,
his meal falls back out again, so he succeeds. He
eats that moon, he eats the sun, but he has
nobody's just ahead with some neck flesh, so he swallows
it and comes right back out the next step. That
is a genius like that is an awesome myth. Now

(43:03):
in Thailand, he's he's seen as more cut off at
the stomach, however, as opposed to just ahead, so he's
more of just a half god instead of astead of
just ahead of a god in those motifs. Now, where
this gets interesting. Uh, an area of this myth that
I really find fascinating is that you see this, uh,

(43:23):
this exchange between science and myth regarding Rahu and and
his status. So there's always been less conflict between science
and Hinduism due to a variety of reasons. But you
could you can hone in on distinct linguistic differences between
teleological and causative wise, so just the language of talking
about why something happens, there's the why is in like

(43:47):
what was the actual cause of this event? And then
there's the why in the sense of what is its
reason from a cosmological standp Oh, it sounds almost like
a parallel between causality and synchronicity. Yeah, yeah, in a sense,
because it's it's kind of like if I say why
did I get sick? You could say, well, the reason
you were sick is because you ate that food at
that restaurant last night that was a little off. Yeah,

(44:11):
And then then there's the why that you would ask, like,
why God am I allowed to get sick on this
most important day of my life when I have this
job interview and my marriage on the same afternoon to
humble you, yeah exactly. So the idea here is that
in in the in English especially, there's there's more room
for confusion here between your wins, whereas in Hinduism they're

(44:32):
depending on linguistic models that have a clear distinction between those. Wise,
I think that's really interesting. Yeah, um, anyway you shake it, though,
we do see this interesting interplay between raho and astronomy
of the time, because the Indian astronomy was pretty advanced
UM and its scientist Rajesh Kosher discusses in his paper

(44:53):
Rahu and Ketu in mythological and astromological context UM treatments
of the disemb adi ra who actually evolved with the
scientific knowledge of the time. Uh. Yeah, So go back
two thousand years and Indian astronomers divided the cosmos into
seven geocentric planets or graha, and then they set aside, uh,

(45:13):
you know, particularly disastrous phenomena like meteor's comments and eclipses,
and they called those outpata. So on one hand, you
had us a cyclical order, the graja the planets, and
then you had uh news, chaos and die are omen
in the forms of outpata. But of course, as we
know now, eclipses follow a pattern. We can predict them,
we can prove it out. They're actually more in line

(45:36):
with order than in chaos. But it's not necessarily easy
to see that pattern, It's right, and that you might
only notice after you've collected multiple generations worth of data. Yeah, yeah,
it took it took a while before someone realized that.
And in four the great Indian mathematician astronomer Ari Bahada
introduced a mathematical theory of eclipses that that really pretty

(45:58):
much nailed it. Uh, just our two lunar nodes, earth
shadows and moon shadows, so there's no demons required. But
of course that means that there ra who needs a
promotion along with his headless body that ends up being
known as Kettu. So instead of them being chaotic pata,
they're upgraded to order Draha. So while they're not actually

(46:22):
considered planets, they don't get like full planetary status. Was
of course they're not planets, it's just you know, the
way things are lining up. They took on the distinction
of being shadow planets, so that they graduated from becoming
sort of like intruders on the cosmic plane to uh
more like shadowy residents. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, they were really

(46:43):
seen as more. They said, hey, we can't really classify
the eclipse is just pure pure chaos, because clearly there's
a pattern. Clearly it's part of the ordered system of
our planets. And they realized that this. Even in four,
I'm sensing more parallels with the Unicron. I mean, indeed
you get when you look at Unicron, especially Unicron and Ra,
who are basically the same entity, right down to just

(47:06):
being disembodied heads, right, Because what did Unicron do in
the eighties six Transformers movie tried to eat the Earth right,
Transformers stopped him and he's just reduced to a head. Wow. Yeah,
so I've I've looked into it. I found no clear
example where someone says, yeah, we based a Unicron on
Hindu God, indu entity. But it seems there's just too

(47:29):
much coincidence there to ignore. But of course it's not
just the ancient religious cosmology that assigns true like magical
significance to eclipses. There are still religious movements today that
are looking for the religious significance of eclipses. One example
that I remember hearing about is the so called blood

(47:52):
moon prophecy that's popular in some circles of evangelical Christianity
these days. Yeah. The idea here is that it revolves
around a hatred series of lunar eclipse that's four lunar
eclipses within within a cycle. Uh. You know, three is
rare enough, but here you would have you would have
four showing up in a in a row. And it
only occurs a few times within a century. For example, Um,

(48:14):
in this century, it occurred in two thousand three, two
thousand four, two thousand fourteen, and uh a few more
times before the turn of the next century. So it's
a rare enough account that you'll end up, you know,
hitting the jackpot with four. Okay, But like, why is
this popular right now? Well? Uh, it all comes down
to a two thousand thirteen book, Four Blood Moons Something

(48:35):
is about to chain, or let me say, four Blood
Moons colon Something is about to change. That sounds like
a like a great like rock album title. Yeah, yeah,
what It did not come from rock and roll, though,
it came from the pastor of the Cornerstone Mega Church
in San Antonio, Texas, John Hagey. Uh I know John
Hagy you do, Okay, not personally, but yeah, you see
his picture. You look at my people go oh that

(48:56):
guy from I've seen him preaching on television. You don't
know him personally, no, okay. Um. So Hagey suggests that
there's a link between a new Total Lunar eclipse a tetrid,
and the biblical process of prophecy about the end times. Okay,
so it's certainly a case, yes, that we're still looking
to the movements of the sun and moon. We're still

(49:18):
looking at at the eclipse, and even with all of
our modern scientific understanding of what's actually happening, if we're
trying to understand like this wider sense of not only
why is that our things occurring in the universe in
that positive sense, but also in the grander magical sense
and the meaningful sense, you know, we can't help but

(49:40):
look to the movement of the sun and the moon
and look to these to these anomalies that occur. Yeah,
I think there's something very interesting about this historical progression
of us seeing eclipses originally as sort of like a strange,
unpredictable events that that violated our our sense of patterns,
and then finally coming to understand them as part of

(50:02):
larger and longer patterns. It's sort of a microcosm of
the whole progression of science in a way, like taking
events that seem to represent chaos and disorder and then
fitting them into the system of order that you finally
come to understand, and of course it's an analysis of
eclips and obsession of the clips continues on into a

(50:24):
present day fiction and fiction of the modern era. Uh.
For instance, Asimov's Nightfall, which exists, of course, is both
a short story and there's a full novel version that
he did with Robert Silverberg. Yeah, but it concerns the
fictional planet. Uh. It's called lag Ash in the short
story and Kyle Gash in the novel. And this a

(50:45):
fictional planet very much like Earth for the most part,
you know, like a sci fi Earth. You can think
of it just kind of almost like a star trek Earth,
where it's basically Earth at things that there are a
few factors at play that make it interesting. Right, You've
got some wrinkles on your head or something. Yeah, so
it's kind of like that. It's at the ring. Goals
here are that the the planet has six sons, which
keep the planet illuminated in varying levels of daylight all

(51:07):
the time. It sounds like too many suns. It does
sound like too many suns, but the result is that
there's no total darkness on the planet. And so on
one hand, the idea of their being total darkness just
seems like no one can buy For the most part,
no one can buy that. They're like, how would that
even work? Like the creatures depend on light. If there

(51:28):
were periods of darkness that it would just be devastating,
But it also means that no one has ever seen
the stars and so. But but then there when they
start looking back through through historical accounts and uh, and
some individuals are you know, trying to figure out how
celestial mechanics work. There's a belief that every two thousand
years or so, darkness comes to the planet of of

(51:50):
Lagash or cow Gash, and with it falls whole civilizations.
You know, I can almost see that kind of thing
in that scenario being a self fulfilling prophecy. Yeah, yeah,
uh it does. It is it's almost kind of like
the idea of the eclipse blown up or or and
and also kind of reversed that the world has always

(52:11):
uh bathed in in varying levels of light, and but
then every two thousand years there is a night into
a world that has never known night. Would it just
be madness? Would it be the would it be the
banging in the streets times a thousand? Like, how would
we deal with that and that's what what's what Asimov's
novel explores, or in a much simpler level, you can
look at Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court,

(52:34):
in which a time traveling Yankee saves his life in
the Middle Ages by remembering the occurrence of an eclipse
and claiming to have caused it. Oh well, I mean
you could tie that into events in in real history actually,
where you know, people have obviously been able to use
their knowledge of the ordered uh sequence of eclipse cycles
to impress people. Right, if you know that an eclipse

(52:57):
is coming and other people have no idea that a
elipses are on a schedule, basically you can appear to
have tremendous magical power. Yeah, it's and even today, if
you work in a you know, kind of uninformed workplace,
like nobody's really reading Scientific American or anything or the newspaper,
you might be able to pull this one off. Still,
wait for the next cellar eclipse, go to work, and

(53:19):
then claim to be a wizard. You'll surely get that
promotion you've always wanted. Yeah, I mean that's a rule,
and that's a business one on one always promoted was
that's your solid advice right there, all right. So there
you have it, the science of eclipse, you know, a
brief study of some of the mythology surrounding the eclipse

(53:39):
and just what it what it means to humanity as
a whole. You would like to explore more on this
topic again, check out that landing page for this episode
and you'll find it at stuff to blow your mind
dot com, along with all the other episodes we've ever reported,
along with videos, blog posts, links out the social media accounts.
You name it. And if you've got a story you'd

(54:00):
like to share about an eclipse you've ever seen or
fascinating eclipse mythology you've read about, please email it to
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because it has stuff works dot com