Leaving Circadia

Ptolemy had a problem to deal with. Here I am not talking about Ptolemy the son of Cleopatra, but instead the famous mathematician/astronomer. In his ancient society, and in many others of his time, the consensus said that the Earth was the center of the universe, literally. Everything rotated about the Earth.

To a casual observer, that might make sense. The sun took one day to go around the Earth. You could see it move. The stars also seemed to go around the Earth, and it took them close to a day to do so. If you didn’t know the Earth was spinning, this idea that everything else is orbiting the Earth isn’t so bad.

There were some commonplace things that it didn’t explain without some fixes: Why do we have more hours of sunlight in the summer and fewer hours in the winter? The sun isn’t going in a circle that is perfectly east/west, but wobbles north and south too. Why are there phases of the moon? Same as the answer even after the heliocentric model, it is because of the shadow of the Earth. But what about the wanderers?

The wanderers are the planets. The word planet comes from the Greek word for wanderer. They’re called that because they messed up the system. If they were just circling the Earth, they would always be going the same way, like the Sun is always going west. But there were these five bodies, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn that sometimes turned around and went the other way. How could that be? (There are more planets than that, but until the telescope was invented, nobody knew that. You can’t see them with the naked eye.)

So Ptolemy had to explain this crazy phenomenon. Today, with the heliocentric model we can explain this. The Earth moves around the sun with a different period than the other planets. Imagine we are "lapping" Mars in our relative orbits. Then from our point of view, Mars is heading backwards. It’s like when you pass a truck on the highway, if you are just looking at the truck and not the trees behind it, it looks like you are still and the truck is moving backwards. But Ptolemy didn’t imagine a solar system with the sun at the middle.

So his solution was more complicated, but it explained what was going on. Each of those five planets was moving in a smaller circle that had at its center some point that was orbiting the Earth. There was nothing at that center point, nothing solid. It was just a point in space. (Remember, this is way before Newton and an understanding of gravity.)

I know readers are wondering what Ptolemy has to do with anything. But if you’ve read enough of my blog posts, you probably aren’t too worried about that. You already know: Frequently I have no point! Why should I start now?

Okay, it’s not a random non-sequitur. I want to ask this: Any flat-earthers out there, how do you explain time zones? Why would we need them if the Earth were flat? Wouldn’t the entire Earth be lit at once (probably all the time)? Or even if the sun did “set” by going under the disc, wouldn’t the entire Earth go dark at the same time? But that’s clearly not what happens. And I know because I’m living through the effects of time zones right now.

You see, I just had twenty-four hours in which I did everything I could to mess up my own body’s circadian rhythm. I’ve slept (but not enough) at wrong times, eaten (I had enough) at wrong times, and taken care of other biological imperatives (let’s not quantify their enoughness) at, you guessed it, wrong times.

To explain, I started those twenty-four hours in Virginia, USA, and ended those twenty-four hours in Vienna, Austria. Now those out there who have some idea of how planes work might think, "how did you make a plane go that slow?" Those of you who have traveled already know the answer: It wasn’t a direct flight!

Dulles Selfie! Not a great picture, huh?

We flew from Dulles Airport in Dulles, Virginia to Keflavik Airport in Iceland. That was the long flight, six hours. But it took us from 6:50 PM to 4:55 AM, which is way more than six hours, right? That’s time zones, baby! I did manage to get some sleep on the flight, but only near the end, when it seemed late enough to my body to sleep. (And at great peril to the muscles in my neck and shoulders.)

Keflavik Selfie! I don't really look much happier, do I?

Then we flew from Keflavik Airport to London Stansted in the UK from 6:40 AM to 10:40 AM, though that was only a three-hour flight. (Much like the three-hour tour of the Minnow, but we didn’t end up stranded on an unchartered desert isle. Also, I’ve watched Gilligan’s Island, and it seemed to have fabulously lush flora for a "desert" isle. Why wasn’t it an unchartered jungle isle?)

Stansted Selfie! At least I have something like a smile here.

So based on the time we landed, we got "lunch". But my body thought that 11:30 AM was 6:30 AM, so this was breakfast. In fact, it was a much earlier breakfast than I normally eat. (If I normally ate breakfast, which I don’t. Normally.) And we were stuck in London Stansted for about eight hours. So we ended up having "dinner" which was "lunch" as far as I could tell.

The last flight was short, only two hours long, but our takeoff was delayed for over an hour while we were sitting on the plane. So the 6:20 PM to 9:30 PM two hours became a 6:20 PM to 10:50 PM more than three hours. Honestly, that’s fine. Given the state of air travel today, I’m thrilled to have only experienced one delay of just over an hour.

Vienna Selfie! Wow, I really suck at taking selfies.

But in the interest of trying to get into the pattern of Vienna (which is where we landed and we will stay for a week), this was way too late for dinner. Besides, by the time we caught the train and the subway train and go to our place and got our key and got inside, it was after midnight. But to our bodies, this was just after 6 PM, and though our sleep had been fitful the previous day, we couldn’t get ourselves to sleep.

As you can imagine, my body is a bit miffed right now. This morning and beyond, I slept until 12:45 PM. (Though I don’t think I fell asleep until after 2:00 AM.) Now it isn’t even 8:00 PM and I am already yawning. I ate my lunch, if we’re calling it that, at close to 3:00 PM. My brain says, "Mission accomplished, we have transitioned our time zone understanding," my body is more like, "We? Don’t say ‘we’ brain. Cause most of ‘we’ isn’t with you."

I’m very excited about that previous sentence because my wife is a stickler for using single quote marks only for quotes within quotes (the American way) and I got to do so, appropriately. (At least I think it was appropriately, but we’ll see what she says when I show it to her. I will keep the single quotes, so this paragraph still means something. But you will have to ask her if I am sleeping on the metaphoric punctuation couch tonight.)

Anyway, the point is we made it safely into the next phase of our adventure. And while my brain is excited, my body is letting the excitement build in more of a slow burn. I wish everything in me worked together as seamlessly as Ptolemy’s circles orbiting points on circles orbiting Earth. If only Ptolemy were still alive, I could ask him to come up with a model to deal with the anti-circadian perils of modern-day travel for the weary wanderer. But hey, that makes me a wanderer, a planet. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Erich! (All right, and Alrica.)