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Saturday, January 19th at 6:00pm
Education Event- Mark Borton: Solving the Riddle of the Tides
Join us for the first Education Evening of the Year. Novelist Mark Borton will make a presentation on the Riddle of the Tides. Borton’s talk will introduce the most interestingly imperfect characters and their ideas--from Socrates to Newton.
"What causes tides was a mystery that occupied the minds of many of the greatest thinkers in human history. It was a riddle that was unraveled only slowly. When our race was younger, we knew the tides by living with them. As the seasons and tides changed—we adapted to them. But while we were familiar with the tides, we did not understand them. Myths and mysticism were the way we made sense of the cycles we saw in the sea. The first real advance came when the ancient Greeks and Egyptians mastered mathematics and reasoned out the answers to such big questions as the size of the world and where we stood in the universe. But triangulate as best they could, they still couldn’t explain what caused the tides. The answer didn’t arrive for another two thousand years.
In the interim, organized religion came to dominate society, and all questions had to be framed and answered in context of the orthodox doctrines. But as exploration and discovery yielded facts that did not support pre-conceived doctrines, a philosophical crisis ensued. Is a stationary Earth the center of the universe, or does the Earth revolve around the Sun? Such heretical questions were dangerous to ask. As it turned out, the tides were integral to the answer. With the help of his newly-invented tools of telescope and calculus that took us into the infinite and infinitesimal, we made the intellectual leap: it was the universal force of gravity that attracts everything to everything else, and that explains both the planets’ dizzying orbits and the oceans’ rocking rhythms."
The cost to attend this event is $5 for members and $10 for non-members. Click HERE to register, click HERE to see who else is attending.
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