A couple of days back, I was riding my scooter. The path was scenic. It was an evening where on one side we had an airport and on another end we had rice fields. A perfect hue of orange on the horizon which going up went to deep blue, the one that makes you feel that the world is perfect. It was so perfect that I did not take a picture, rather I decided to just look at the sky. On the other side, glowing in all its glory was an almost full moon. The white soft candy looking thing poets have compared their loved ones to? Yup, that one.
Now, my YouTube feed is full of science videos. The likes of Brian Cox and Neil Degrasee Tyson come up at least once a day. So this thought just zoomed through in an instant, like 2-3 seconds. Here is the afterthought of the entire processing that I did on that 2 second thought.
Moon’s observability
If you look up to the sky, the only thing you can observe with naked eye is the moon. If you say anything, you are not understanding the word “observability”.
The Sun is definitely the most important and the most noticeable object in our sky. I am not gonna waste time by saying a line more about that. But, it’s not “observable”, not by naked eye at least. The only two times in the day when it is observable, is mornings and evenings when it is in its pale-orange-reddish hue on the horizon. All you can visibly see is a ball made of fire (well, not technically, but figuratively that’s what it is).
The stars are too tiny to be “observable”. We know they are there and we can see them as little dots in the sky. In the night sky, the planets also look like stars. That leaves us with the moon. You can look at it all night without hurting your eyes. You can see it has spots, you can track its position by drawing lines and comparing its position in the sky throughout the year.
Great. So this dude is visible and easily observable with the naked human eye.
The lock!
Our moon, like a few others in the solar system is “tidally locked”. Meaning - the moon’s rotation around its axis (which by the way is pretty minimal - around 6 degrees) is the same as its revolution around earth.
What that means is that a person on earth would always see the same side of the moon. It is so perfect that for thousands of years our Mr. Moon has not shown us even a little bit of the other side.
Slowdown of progress
Imagine this: if we had a moon which was not tidally locked, whose rotation was a little bit faster or slower than the perfect tidal lock. What would have happened in the millennia that went by? Our species that did not have electricity and spent evenings around bonfires looking at the white beauty would have noticed that the moon is actually a spinning ball.
It must have raised the question about “is earth also a ball”? We would have been more curious about space, and more “sure” that there might be more such bodies. Maybe they would have thought about Sun’s rotation, stars rotation. The endless debates about whether we are the center of the universe or if the earth is flat would have been much different, most probably shorter. People since the dawn of civilization, collectively, would have been much more curious about our place in the universe and how things really worked.
And all it would have taken is a little bit of difference in that speed of rotation of Mr. White.
But it wasn’t. Moon is perfectly tidally locked with earth.
I think Moon is just a scoundrel playing a game with us, laughing while doing this mischief. No wonder they call the mad a “Lunatic” 😁