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
Taxonomies:
/science/physics/space and astronomy (0.486497)
/education/school (0.326156)
/technology and computing/consumer electronics/camera and photo equipment/telescopes (0.289516)
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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