Nope. It’s true. You cannot see a rainbow and the reflection of that rainbow.

If you and I look at a car, we both see the same object. But a rainbow is a specific set of reflections and refractions within water droplets that essentially appear on the surface of an invisible cone whose radius is 42 degrees, whose orientation is the antisolar point, and whose apex is your eye, and your eye alone.

An apparent rainbow reflection in a mirror or on a lake, is that of a different rainbow. It may not even look like yours, since if it intercepts larger droplets it will be brighter but also deficient in blue. It is a different rainbow. Moreover, if the rainbow you’re seeing is nearby (as from a lawn sprinkler) then a mirror just ten feet to either side of you will show no reflection of it at all — no matter how the mirror is angled. It’ll show the same water droplets but with no rainbow within it.

Try it sometime. Or at least, think about it, and you’ll understand why you can never see a rainbow and also the reflection of that same rainbow.

Some readers have noted that they’ve seen or captured rainbows using cameras or reflector telescopes. But I never said that photons from rainbows somehow cannot bounce off glass: In these cases you’re seeing the rainbow, but not simultaneously seeing its reflection. The central point is that you cannot see a rainbow AND this same rainbow’s reflection. That’s because any reflection of an object is that object viewed from a different angle — and a rainbow, not being a real 3D object, cannot be viewed from any other angle except exactly where your eye (or camera) is located, completing the required geometry.

Try this link to an image and good explanation.

At this pivotal point in science, medical doctor Robert Lanza and I believe a more accurate understanding of the “real world” will require combining astrophysics and biology instead of keeping them separate, and putting observers firmly into the equation. This view is called biocentrism.

One critical key to many of physical science’s puzzles has been shunted out of the way simply because we didn’t know what to do with it. This – consciousness - is not a small item. It is not like anything else. Consciousness, meaning awareness or perception, in an utter mystery for biology and physics alike, has somehow arisen from molecules and goo. How did inert, random bits of carbon ever morph into that Japanese guy who always wins the hot dog eating contest?

The intractable problem of origins aside, human awareness is not just some pesky byproduct or irrelevant item, the way a buzzing mosquito might interfere with a biologist’s concentration. Rather, consciousness is the matrix upon which the cosmos is apprehended, and stands at the critical forefront of the role played by the observer. As we more fully understand this, several long-held puzzles immediately yield answers.

Undeniably it is the biological creature that makes the observations and creates the theories. For example, we observe the universe solely through the medium of light. But on its own, light doesn’t HAVE any color, nor any brightness, nor any visual characteristics at all. It’s merely an invisible electrical and magnetic phenomenon. So while you may think that the moon as you remember it is “there” when no one’s looking at it, nothing remotely resembling what you can imagine could be present when a consciousness is not interacting.

Now You See It. . .

Physicists say that the particles that make up our universe only take form when their individual “wave-function” collapses. Starting in the 1920s, and accelerating with John Bell’s work in the 1960s, it has became increasingly clear that any possible way the experimenter could take a look at an object would collapse the wave function. This reality simply cannot be made clear in this short space, but in our book Biocentrism, we devote two full chapters to the actual, repeatable experiments showing that this is indeed the case.

Before these experiments of the past few decades, it was still considered possible that Einstein was right in thinking that “local realism” – an objective independent universe – could be the truth. And that physical states exist before they are measured. Before Bell’s work of the 1960s, it was still widely believed that particles have definite attributes and values independent of the act of measuring. And, it used to be assumed, if observers are sufficiently far apart, they can remain utterly unaffected by the goings-on elsewhere. All this is now gone for keeps.

No Time to Lose

Quantum revelations and the universe’s curious physical parameters (the fact that 200 physical parameters and forces are just perfect for life’s existence) strongly suggests a biocentric basis for the cosmos. Oddly enough, so do space and time. According to biocentrism, time simply does not exist independent of life that notices it.

The reality of time has long been questioned by an odd alliance of philosophers and physicists. The former argue that the past exists only as ideas in the mind, which themselves are solely neuroelectrical events occurring strictly in the present moment. Physicists, for their part, find that when people speak of time, they’re usually referring to change. But change is not the same thing as time.

Time is the animal sense that animates events. Everything you perceive – even this page — is actively and repeatedly being reconstructed inside your head in an organized whirl of information. Time can be defined as the summation of spatial states; the same thing measured with our scientific instruments is called momentum.

The weaving together of these individual information frames occurs in the mind. So what’s real? We confront a here-and-now. If the next “image” is different from the last, then it is different, period. We can award that change with the word “time” but that doesn’t mean there’s an actual entity, as real as cheddar cheese, that forms a matrix or grid in which changes occur. That’s just our own way of making sense of things, our tool of perception. We watch our loved ones age and die, and assume an external entity called time is responsible for the crime.

The demotion of time from an actual reality to a mere subjective experience, a social convention, is evidence against the “external universe” mindset, because the latter requires a space and time gridwork. In biocentrism, space and time are forms of animal understanding. We carry them around with us like turtles with shells. There simply is no self-existing matrix out there in which physical events occur independent of life.

There is a peculiar intangibility about space, as well. We cannot pick it up and bring it to the laboratory. This is because, like time, space is neither physical nor fundamentally real. Like time, it is a mode of interpretation and understanding. It is part of an animal’s mental software that molds sensations into multidimensional objects. In modern everyday life, however, we’ve come to regard space as sort of a vast container that has no walls. But our notion of space is false. Shall we count the ways? 1. Empty space is in fact not empty. 2. Distances between objects can and do mutate depending on conditions like gravity and speed, so that no absolute distance exists between anything and anything else. 3. Quantum theory casts serious doubt about whether even distant individual items are truly separated at all, since entangled particles act in unison even if separated by the width of a galaxy, and 4) We often define separations and boundaries between objects in terms of language, convention, and utility. In truth, there is no self-existing space/time matrix in which physical events occur independently of life.

Now, space and time illusions are certainly harmless. A problem only arises because, by treating space as something physical, existing in itself, science imparts a completely wrong starting point for investigations into the nature of reality. Allowing the observer into the equation as the late Nobel laureate John Wheeler insists is necessary, would open the possibilities for new ways of cognition that might make everything work better. Without such symbiosis between physics and biology, attempts to truly understand the universe as a whole will remain a train to nowhere.

Adapted from Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe by Robert Lanza with Bob Berman.

rural sky at night

The famous two-hole experiment goes straight to the core of quantum physics. It’s been performed so many times, with so many variations, it’s conclusively proven that if one “watches” a subatomic particle or a bit of light pass through slits on a barrier, it behaves like a particle, and creates solid-looking bam-bam-bam hits behind the individual slits, on a final barrier that measures the impacts. Like a tiny bullet, it logically passes through one or the other hole. But if the scientists do not observe the particle, then it exhibits the behavior of waves that retain the right to exhibit all possibilities, including somehow passing through both holes at the same time — and then creating the kind of rippling interference pattern that only waves produce.

Dubbed “quantum weirdness,” this ‘wave/particle’ duality has befuddled scientists for nearly a century. Some of the greatest physicists have described it as impossible to intuit, impossible to formulate into words, impossible to visualize, and as invalidating common sense and ordinary perception.

But the key question may be: waves of what? Back in 1926, German physicist Max Born demonstrated that quantum waves are waves of probability, not waves of material, as his colleague Schrödinger had theorized. They are statistical predictions. Thus a wave of probability is nothing but a likely outcome. In fact, outside of that idea, the wave is not there! It’s intangible. As Nobel physicist John Wheeler once said, “No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.”

Until the mind sets the scaffolding of an object in place, until it actually lays down the threads (somewhere in the haze of probabilities that represent the object’s range of possible values) it cannot be thought of as being either here or there. Thus, quantum “waves” merely define the potential location a particle can occupy. When a scientist observes a particle it will be found within the statistical probability for that event to occur. That’s what the wave defines. A wave of probability isn’t an event or a phenomenon, it is a description of the likelihood of an event or phenomenon occurring. Nothing happens until the event is actually observed.

In our double-slit experiment, it is easy to insist that each photon or electron, since both these objects are indivisible, must go through one slit or the other. Thus it seems reasonable to ask which way a particular photon really went. Many brilliant physicists have devised experiments which proposed to measure the “which-way” information of a particle’s path on its route to contributing to an interference pattern. They all arrived at the astonishing conclusion, however, that it is not possible to observe “which-way” information and the interference pattern of a wave. One can set up a measurement to watch which slit a photon or electron goes through, and find that it goes through one slit and not the other. However, once this kind of measurement is set up, the photons instead immediately strike the screen in one spot, and totally lose the ripple-interference design.

Apparently, watching it go through the barrier makes the wave function collapse then and there, and the particle loses its freedom to probabilistically take both choices available to it instead of having to choose one or the other.

The Copenhagen interpretation, born in the 1920s in the feverish minds of Heisenberg and Bohr, bravely set out to explain the bizarre results of the QT experiments, sort of. It was the first to claim what John Bell and others substantiated some 40 years later: that before a measurement is made, a subatomic particle doesn’t really exist in a definite place or have an actual motion. Instead it dwells in a strange nether realm without actually being anywhere in particular. This blurry indeterminate existence ends only when its wave function collapses – meaning the moment of its materialization into an actual entity. It took only a few years before Copenhagen adherents were realizing that NOTHING is real unless it’s perceived.

If we want some sort of alternative to the idea of an object’s wave-function collapsing just because someone looked at it, and avoid that kind of spooky action at a distance, we might jump aboard Copenhagen’s competitor, the “Many Worlds Interpretation” (MWI) which says that everything that CAN happen, does happen. The universe continually branches out like budding yeast into an infinitude of universes that contain every possibility no matter how remote. You now occupy one of the universes. But there are innumerable other universes in which another “you” who once studied photography instead of accounting did indeed move to Paris and marry that girl you once met while hitchhiking. According to this view, embraced by such modern theorists as Stephen Hawking, our universe has no contradictions and no spooky action: seemingly contradictory quantum phenomena, along with all the personal choices you think you didn’t make, exist today in countless parallel universes.

Which is true? Experiments of the past decade point increasingly toward confirming Copenhagen. And this strongly supports the idea that there is no independent universe outside the act of observation. Or, put another way, the universe and consciousness are correlative.

The above has been adapted from my book Biocentrism, written with Robert Lanza, MD, and published by Ben Bella in May. It is also excerpted in the current Discover magazine.

Obviously, nothing can be cognized that is not already interacting with your consciousness. Since perceived images are experientially real and not imaginary, they must be physically happening in some location. Human physiology texts answer this without ambiguity. Although the retina absorbs photons that deliver their payloads of bits of electromagnetic energy, the actual perception of images physically occur in the back of the brain, augmented by other nearby locations, in special sections that are as vast and labyrinthine as the hallways of the Milky Way, and contain as many neurons as there are stars in the galaxy. This is where the actual colors, shapes, and movement “happen.” This is where they are perceived or cognized.
If you try to consciously access that visual part of the brain, it’s easy. It’s not subjectively dark and mushy. You’re already effortlessly perceiving it with every glance you take. Custom has told us that what we see is “out there,” outside ourselves, and such a viewpoint is fine and necessary in terms of language and utility, as in “please pass the butter that’s over there.” But make no mistake: The butter itself exists only within the mind. It is the only place visual (and tactile and olfactory) images are perceived and hence located.
Some may imagine that there are two worlds, one “out there” and a separate one being cognized inside the skull. But the “two worlds” model is a myth. Only one visual reality is extant; it is the one that requires consciousness in order to manifest. Now, this “one universe” model may seem like a bit of dorm-level philosophy. But it explains otherwise bewildering experimental results.
Quantum mechanics describes the tiny world of the atom with stunning if probabilistic accuracy. Since quantum theory tells us that everything in nature has a particle nature and a wave nature, and that the object’s behavior exists only as probabilities, no small object actually assumes a particular place or motion until a particular moment when it suddenly manifests as an actual entity in a real place. Physicists call this moment of materialization “the collapse of the wave function.” What accomplishes this? Messing with the electron or photon. Hitting it with a bit of light in order to “take its picture” would instantly do the job. But starting in the 1920s, and accelerating with John Bell’s work in the 1960s, it has became increasingly clear that any possible way the experimenter could “take a look” at the object would collapse the wave function. In a sense, the experiment has been contaminated. But as more sophisticated approaches were devised, it became obvious that mere knowledge in the experimenter’s mind is sufficient to cause the wave function to collapse.
That was freaky, but it got worse. When entangled particles are created, the pair share a wave function. When one member’s wave function collapses, so will the other’s – even if they are separated by the width of the universe. This means that if one particle is observed to have an “up spin” the act of observation causes the other to instantly go from being a mere probability wave to an actual particle with the opposite spin. They are intimately linked, and in a way that acts as if there’s no space between them, nor any time delay in conveying the “news.”
Experiments from 1997 to 2007 have shown that this is indeed the case, and prove that Einstein’s insistence on “locality” – meaning that nothing can influence anything else at superluminal speeds – is wrong. Rather, the entities we observe are floating in a field — a field of mind, we believe — that is not limited by the external spacetime constraints Einstein theorized a century ago. Bell’s Theorem of 1964, shown experimentally to be true over and over in the intervening years, does more than merely demolish all vestiges of Einstein’s hopes that locality can be maintained. Before Bell, it was still considered possible (though increasingly problematical) that local realism – an objective independent universe – could be the truth. Before Bell, many still clung to the millennia-old assumption that physical states exist before they are measured. Before Bell, it was still widely believed that particles have definite attributes and values independent of the act of measuring. And, finally, thanks to Einstein’s demonstrations that no “information” can travel faster than light, it was assumed that if observers are sufficiently far apart, a measurement by one has no effect on the measurement by the other.
All of the above are now finished for keeps. In addition, three major, separate areas of quantum theory make sense if the universe is understood as a “field” but are bewildering otherwise. In all these ways, the behavior of the “external world” is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer.

The above is adapted from my new book, co-authored with Robert Lanza, MD, Biocentrism, which will be available in bookstores in early May. Excerpts also appear in the current Discover Magazine.

Life is full of gray areas, so it’s refreshing to have some absolutes, things we can count on. One excellent take-it-to-the-bank certainty in this uncertain universe is absolute zero.
Heat is simply the motion of atoms: Something feels hot because you sense the frenzied movement of those little critters. At 98.6 degrees all your body’s atoms are jiggling at about 1,000 miles per hour. They’ll jiggle even faster when you run a fever during your next flu. At the coldest place on Earth (the Antarctic, where a frosty -129 registered in 1983) there’s still plenty of atomic motion. Atoms stop moving only at 459.67 degrees F below zero. Since nothing can go any slower than “stopped,” this is indeed the coldest possible temperature — Absolute Zero.
Until the mid-60s, most astronomers thought that far from any stars, thermometers would register absolute zero throughout the cosmos. Now we know that the heat of the Big Bang, cooled by expansion, produces a five-degree warmth, or 2.73 degrees on the Kelvin scale. (And the universe keeps getting colder all the time: Its background temperature was twice as warm eight billion years ago.)
The universe’s coldest place, its ultimate Minnesota, is right here on Earth, in research laboratories where temperatures less than a BILLIONTH of a degree above A.Z. were created during the past few years. This technological dive to ever-chillier temperatures takes us into an Alice-in-Wonderland realm of bizarre conditions.
As things get cold they can lose all resistance to electrical flow, creating superconductivity. Strange magnetic properties also arise (the Meissner effect) which makes magnets levitate like Hindu swamis. Then there’s superfluidity, where liquid helium defies gravity and flows up the sides of its container, escaping like some resourceful weasel by simply scampering up and out. But with all that, the very weirdest thing that happens as materials approach A.Z. requires a quick rewind to 1924.
Back then, Albert Einstein’s collaboration with Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose led to their prediction that if temperatures ever reached A.Z, a new, totally unknown state of matter should appear. This odd consequence of quantum theory was quickly dubbed the Bose-Einstein condensate.
Just a few years earlier, Werner Heisenberg had created his uncertainty principle, which set strange limits on what we can ever know about small particles. We cannot, for example, precisely figure out an electron’s motion AND its position. Pin down one and the other instantly becomes fuzzy.
But what if you chilled those particles to absolute zero where all motion stops? Wouldn’t that do the trick? You’d then know it’s motion (zero) and you’d also see it right in front of you: Voila, position and momentum both revealed. So a good enough freezer should be able to fool quantum laws. Bose and Einstein said: No way. They believed nature would still manage to disguise itself by creating something we’ve never seen before — a new state of existence.
Just ten years ago, researchers succeeded in cooling atoms to within 20 billionths of a degree of A.Z. Sure enough, like magic, the atoms merged into a single blurry blob, a sort of super-atom never before encountered. We still couldn’t know the atoms’ separate qualities because their individualities had vanished into a single quantum state, a new kind of reality. The material wasn’t solid, liquid, gas, or plasma. It had become something else. The Bose Einstein Condensate.
Amazing technological applications usually follow the discovery of a novel configuration of matter or energy. If we could glimpse future household devices utilizing the condensate, they might seem like magic to us now. Their development is held back for the moment only because reaching those ultra-cold temperatures is still so demanding.
Yes, most of the universe, like the Catskills in December, is freezing cold. But stay tuned: Pockets of even greater cold are about to change our lives for the better.

Jets burn kerosene. If you’ve ever used a kerosene heater, you’ve smelled exhaust products rising from the unit. These include water vapor, bits of carbon soot, some carbon compounds like methane, and trace amounts of impurities like metals. Well, when jets climb above 30,000 feet, the air is so cold at -40° that the exhaust’s water vapor instantly freezes into ice crystals. This is a contrail, a short white line behind the jet’s engines. It often dissipates in seconds as each crystal sublimates back to invisible vapor.
Jets even higher up zoom through such cold air, it takes a long time for the contrail ice to re-vaporize. Higher humidity can preserve it, too. The contrail lingers as a long white line across the entire sky. Winds often distort these into various curves. If the air mass is very humid, the exhaust’s soot particles enter the picture to act as condensation nuclei — like cloud seeding — to produce a thicker contrail as surrounding atmospheric vapor freezes as well.

In seconds the dense ice crystal formation spreads out and widens. It can expand into a long cloud that casts an odd shadow. Or, very rarely, in very high humidity, the contrail can act as the “starter yogurt” for a cloud covering the entire sky. People into meteorology have observed all these various contrail varieties since the 1930s. Contrail science is even taught in college courses, to show how an individual can assess the temperature and humidity at high altitudes.

These man-made pencil clouds reflect sunlight into space. Just a few years ago scientists were concerned that all the jet traffic would have a cooling effect on the planet. But global warming has made that issue go away. If anything, jet contrails are now seen as helpful.

Some folks regard contrails suspiciously. Apparently, many don’t know what they are. Several websites call the lines chemtrails, and think that the US military is deliberately spraying a substance upon the population.

This is silly for a number of reasons. First, if you’ve ever watched crop dusting you know that chemicals must be released very close to the ground. Released on high, they’d dissipate with the wind and take forever to get down; the concentration on the folks below would be zero. Second, my commercial pilot friends (along with the controllers at the FAA) would all have to go along with the plot, since they’d see the process happening. I’m a pilot and airplane owner myself: It’s NOT happening. Third, what would be the purpose? Some say mind control. But are people acting differently lately? Others say it’s to sow disease. But why would anyone want to do this? Who would go along with it? Finally, some say “chemtrails” are a government project to combat global warming. Nice, but then why should such a laudible effort be kept secret? Other web-based “explanations” involve even wackier stuff like electromagnetic rays.

Logic never placates the truly paranoid, and discussions are rarely satisfying. Those who “believe” WANT to believe, and claim soil tests show that dangerous substances have been found beneath the planes. But again, nothing released from 40,000 feet would ever reach the ground except diluted to zero. And, more to the point, the videos of these supposed “chemtrails” shown on the scare web sites are actually a common type of contrail. The believers claim they’ve only started around 1998 – but I’ve observed those “spreading out” contrails for over 40 years. They’re not new. They’re contrails. No mystery, and nothing sinister here at all.

Who hasn’t heard the old question, “If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody is there, does it make a sound?” If we conduct a quick survey of friends and family, we shall find that the vast majority answer in the affirmative. By taking this stance, people are actually averring a belief in an independent universe that exists just as well without us as with us. This fits in tidily with the Western view held at least since Biblical times, that “little me” is of small consequence in the cosmos.

But look closer. Sound is a disturbance in some medium, usually air, and a tumbling tree produces air-pressure variations. Tiny, rapid, puffs of wind. There is no sound attached to them. If a person is nearby, the puffs physically cause her ear’s tympanic membrane to vibrate, which then stimulates nerves only if the air is pulsing between 20 and 20,000 times a second - with an upper limit more like 10,000 for people over 40, and even less for those of us whose misspent youth included earsplitting rock concerts.

Nerves stimulated by the moving eardrum send electrical signals to a section of the brain, resulting in the cognition of a noise. This experience, then, is symbiotic. The pulses of air by themselves do not constitute any sort of sound. The ear’s neural architecture and a brain conjure the noise experience, and are every bit as necessary for sound as are the air pulses. In other words, the external world and human consciousness are correlative.

When someone dismissively answers, “Of course a tree makes a sound if no one’s nearby” they are merely demonstrating their inability to ponder an event nobody attended. They’re finding it too difficult to take themselves out of the equation. They somehow continue to imagine themselves present when they are absent.

Now consider a lit candle. The flame is a hot gas that emits photons — tiny packets of electromagnetic energy waves. Each consists of electrical and magnetic pulses. Neither electricity nor magnetism have visual properties. So there is nothing inherently visual, nothing bright or colored about a candle flame. But if these same invisible electromagnetic waves strike a human retina, and if the waves happen to each measure between 400 and 700 nanometers from crest to crest, then their energy is just right to deliver a stimulus to the eight million cone-shaped cells in the retina. Each in turn sends an electrical pulse to a neighbor neuron at 250 mph until it reaches the warm, wet, occipital lobe of the brain, in the back of the head. There, a cascading complex of neurons fire from the incoming stimuli, and we subjectively perceive this experience as a yellow brightness occurring in a place we have been conditioned to call “the external world.”

So there isn’t a “bright yellow” light “out there” at all. At most, there are invisible electrical and magnetic pulses. WE are totally necessary for the experience of a yellow flame. Again it’s correlative.

Consider rainbows. This one’s easy, since it’s obvious that we are absolutely necessary for a rainbow’s existence. When nobody’s there, there simply is no rainbow. (Rainbows have such a low intrinsic reality, they don’t even cast reflections). Three components are necessary for a rainbow. There must be sun, there must be raindrops, and there must be a conscious eye (or its surrogate film) at the correct geometric location.

A person next to you will complete their own 42° geometry from the sun’s anti-solar point, and will be at the apex of a cone for an entirely different set of rain drops, and will therefore see a separate rainbow which needn’t even look like yours. If the sunlit droplets are nearby, as from a lawn sprinkler, your companion may not see a rainbow at all. Your rainbow is yours alone. But now we get to our point: what if no one’s there? Answer: No rainbow. An eye-brain system must be present to complete the geometry. A rainbow requires your presence just as much as it requires sun and rain.

Few would dispute the subjective nature of rainbows, which figure so prominently in fairytales that they seem only marginally to belong to our world in the first place. It is when we fully grasp that the sight of a skyscraper is just as dependent on the observer, that we have made the first required leap to understanding the nature of things.

The above is taken from a chapter in my new book, co-authored with Robert Lanza, MD, Biocentrism, published next month.

Coincidences are bothersome to scientists. Take the Andromeda galaxy, straight overhead at midnight. That this nearest of all spiral galaxies is also the biggest and brightest within 35 million lightyears is strange. But there Andromeda sits, and that’s how it is.

Or consider that our sky has just two disks, sun and moon, that both appear the same size. This alone brings about those amazing total eclipses. And we have a north star that just happens to be the brightest and most precisely aligned of the past 26,000 years.

Far more typical than such true coincidences are the logical match-ups. People are often amazed that the moon spins in the same period in which it revolves around Earth, keeping the same hemisphere forever pointed our way. But tidal stresses always slow a satellite’s rotation until it’s locked in place. Every moon of every planet has this same synchronous spin. What about the fact that the strong nuclear force, gravity, and 20 other parameters are just perfect for the formation of life? Another coincidence?

Here the Anthropic Principle is invoked: Only in our kind of universe would stars, planets and sentient beings have had time to form. If things weren’t this way, we wouldn’t be around to wonder about it, but since we do and here we are, then the universe had to be this way. Yogi Berra would be proud of this reasoning, but it’s now generally accepted.

It’s sometimes hard to separate coincidence from correspondence. Take the 11-year sunspot cycle. Powerful solar storms must do something to us. But only some two dozen sun-cycles have been observed, against which we can hunt for thousands of potential rhythms from political events to climate changes to earthquakes. Which are related and which are merely the mischief wrought by the law of averages?

Checking back we find that the solar cycle swings in harmony with the fashionable length of women’s skirts, the rabbit population of Australia, the party that controls Congress, the position of the Gulf Stream, and the thickness of Earth’s atmosphere. Only those last two are probably related to the sun.

But you see the problem. Or do you?

Anaxagoras (450 BC) correctly believed that moon reflects light from the sun, and therefore understood why the moon darkens during an eclipse.

Heracleides (350 BC) was the first to propose that, since Mercury and Venus stay so close to the sun, they might orbit it and that the Earth might rotate on an axis.

Eudoxus (in 375 BC) originated a geometric method of calculating the distance from the Earth to the Sun and Moon.

Aristotle (340 BC) is famous, but he set back science for 2000 years with his geocentric model of the universe, which went unquestioned until the time of Galileo. But some of his other writings were correct, like when he said that the Earth was not flat, but spherical.

Aristarchus (265 BC) was among the greatest of the great, the first to correctly determine the relative sizes of the Earth, Sun, and Moon. And once he realized that the sun is far larger than the Earth, he proposed that the Sun, and not Earth, was the center of the solar system. Aristarchus wins the cigar for the heliocentric model.

Eratosthenes (200 BC) was another genius - the first person to correctly measure the size of the Earth. He used the angle of the sun’s shadow at noon in two different towns, and the distance between the towns to set up a proportion with the 360 degrees in a circle and the unknown size of our planet.

Ptolemy (170 AD) is famous, despite being wrong about nearly everything. Ptolemy supported a geocentric universe, which unfortunately became a religious principle for 1,700 years.

Hipparchus (130 BC) discovered the 26-century wobble of Earth’s axis (now called precession) and created the first accurate star catalog, using a system of dividing stars into 6 magnitudes of brightness, which is still used today. He also determined the length of a year to within 6 minutes.

In other words, astronomy may be Greek to you. But it wasn’t to those guys.