I've been reading about the history or mathematics, physics, and astronomy, and Wow! is it fascinating! History was almost always the subject I hated most in school. The only time I ever liked it was 6th grade, where I had an eccentric teacher who taught us all kinds of history, from the Australopithecines to the Middle Ages to the present, and taught us about all kinds of different religions. I felt I got a much better understanding about people and the world and why it is the way it is through learning from her than from any other public school history class, where we had only ever studied the histories of politicians and their wars. But now I am thankfully no longer in school and I have the time to invest in a real education (too bad "I go to the library all the time" still doesn't look as impressive on a résumé as "I got a B.S.") and I have been learning on my own all those many things we never seemed to get to in school. So, while reading about Galileo and Kepler and Tycho I came across Kepler's Model of the Solar System, using Leonardo-like open-faced Platonic polyhedra that I had made before as origami models. Here is the model I made yesterday and today: It is difficult to see, but there is a red octahedron at the very center, inside an orange icosahedron, inside a yellow dodecahedron, inside a green tetrahedron, inside a blue hexahedron. The polyhedra represent the distances between the orbits of the six known planets at the time – Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The Sun would be at the center. Kelper mathematically proved that there could only ever be five platonic solids (Euclid did, too, but Kepler gets credit for expanding knowledge of polyhedra) – the five polyhedra of the model. He wanted to believe that planetary motion could be understood as being related to these perfect geometric shapes inscribed in one another (the order of the polyhedra was just the one that best matched contemporary astronomical calculations) but he later abandoned the theory when it defied observations. The model is still quite aestetically pleasing and is attractive from a historical point of view, and I had wanted to make some kind of origami mobile; therefore, I recreated Kepler’s model. ********** That favorite teacher of mine was naturally fired a couple years later. Apparently, she disagreed with the curriculum she was supposed to teach (never mind that us kids in her classes were passing the standardized tests with flying colors). It lends credibility to all those conspiracy theories that say that public school is intended for populace control, for dumbing down the masses. What is the point of being taught, year after year after year, about all those wars, anyway?
What?! I try to make this into a controversial topic so this thread doesn't die a quiet lonely death in the Workshop, but it does anyway? Oh well. When I hung the model up in my office, the cube completely fell apart and I had to make it smaller and more stable (which meant using glue - it's no longer pure origami ). But it still looks good. Here is what I was trying to recreate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Kepler-solar-system-1.png Of course, it's not to scale, but I took artistic license.
