Isaac Asimov's Guide to Earth and Space

by Isaac Asimov

But if you live in some parts of Kansas or Uruguay or the Ukraine, you don’t see much in the way of hills or valleys; you see plains, which look pretty flat.

Uruguay nomá 😂

Suppose you have a huge quantity of matter of any shape, and every part of it is pulled by every other part so that all the material is packed as close as possible. When all the parts are compressed as much as possible and can get no closer, they have taken up the shape of a sphere. No other solid shape has all its parts as close together, on the average, as a sphere does, which is why the Earth, attracting everything to its center, is a sphere.

It wasn’t until 1851, though, that someone actually demonstrated the rotation so people could actually see that it happened. A French physicist, Jean B. L. Foucault (1819–1868), let a long, heavy pendulum swing from the ceiling of a church.

The path taken by the sun, however, is at an angle to the equator. The noonday sun shines directly on the equator on March 20th every year, and on that date, night and day are each twelve hours long all over the Earth. This day is known as the vernal equinox, since vernal comes from the Latin word for spring, and equinox from the Latin word for equal night.

The resistance of an object to changes in motion is called its inertia, and the quantity of inertia that an object has is called its mass

Nothing in science is ever beyond improvement or modification, not even the law of conservation of energy, which is one of the traits that makes the game of science so overwhelmingly interesting.

BELT? There are thousands upon thousands of asteroids,

STARS? The Aristotelian belief that the objects in the sky

high bursts of X rays and even gamma rays.

MOVING? Since it was settled four hundred years