John Keats Recalls a Game of Orbiting Children

The young John Keats remembered an organised game at his school in Enfield, in which all the boys whirled round the playground in a huge choreographed dance, trying to imitate the entire solar system, including all the known moons (to which Herschel had by then added considerably). Unlike Newton’s perfect brassy clockwork mechanism, this schoolboy universe-complete with straying comets — was a gloriously chaotic ‘human orrery’. Keats did not recall the exact details, but one may imagine seven senior boy-planets running round the central sun, while themselves being circled by smaller sprinting moons (perhaps girls), and the whole frequently disrupted by rebel comets and meteors flying across their orbits.

Notes:

Where the children run around mimicking the orbits of the planets and comets, making the solar system seem more chaotic than the classical perspectives.

Folksonomies: games astronomy order chaos

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Concepts:
Solar System (0.956000): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Mercury (0.835085): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc | yago
Planet (0.796153): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Sun (0.749330): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Uranus (0.737943): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc | yago
Saturn (0.655572): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc | yago
Neptune (0.642692): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc | yago
Moon (0.640402): dbpedia | freebase

 The Age of Wonder
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book:  Holmes , Richard (2010-03-02), The Age of Wonder, Vintage, Retrieved on 2012-01-02
  • Source Material [books.google.com]
  • Folksonomies: history enlightenment science


    Schemas

    05 JUN 2011

     Raising Enlightened Children

    Memes about raising children as a spiritual naturalist, with a sense of awe for the Universe and reverence for the laws of nature.
     24