The 2024 Eclipse: Experience and Meaning

My family and I drove to the house of some relatives in in the town of Nashville, located in Brown County, Indiana, to watch this year’s solar eclipse. The town was humming with preparations for the event, and local vendors had eclipse-themed sales and promotions which they were offering to locals and visitors, along with eclipse-related humor.
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We planned to watch the eclipse from our relative’s house, and we brought our eclipse glasses along with eclipse filters for our iPhones.
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At the expected time, the disk of the sun began to be covered by the moon to a progressively greater extent. There were some clouds, but they were thankfully very high in the atmosphere and did not obstruct our view of the sun significantly.
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At one point we tried the pinhole camera trick to see an image of the sun using a colander.
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As the moon covered an increasing area of the sun, it got cooler, and there was a noticeable decrease in the amount of sunlight around us.
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We noticed a reduction in the amount of bird songs coming from the woods, but we heard a new bird singing, the mourning dove. These birds only sing towards dawn and dusk. However, it didn’t feel like dusk. Even with most of the sun covered, it still shone brightly. 
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And then it suddenly happened: totality! We were able to take off our eclipse glasses and look directly at the sun which looked like an annulus with a black center and a bright circumference.

The horizon all around us bore an orange and yellowish tinge like a sunset or a sunrise. My relatives, who were sitting out closer to the trees (I was up on the deck), reported that they saw insects that normally only come out at night. In the distance, we heard some loud explosions. Somebody had the original idea of taking advantage of the eclipse to set off fireworks!
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We saw what appeared like a bright star visible close to the tip of the tree branches to our right. One of my relatives checked with the astronomical app and confirmed it was the planet Venus, which, if it were not for the eclipse, would not have been visible.
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And then, just as abruptly as it had arrived, the darkness went away. The insects disappeared, and the birds resumed singing.
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In the next hour the moon moved across the sun in the opposite direction.
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The 2024 eclipse was a festive event where millions of people marveled at the natural phenomenon. With a few exceptions, no one thought the eclipse was an bad omen or a an warning from God. But the reaction of people towards eclipses has not always been like this.
 
The explanations that ancient cultures had for eclipses were rooted in superstition. Many such explanations involved the notion that some entities ranging from dragons or demons to actual animals were obscuring or biting the sun, while others equated the event with the antics of some mythological characters or with the actual sun exhibiting this behavior for one reason or another. Not surprisingly, eclipses often inspired fear in both the populace and their rulers with both engaging in rituals to ward off any dire consequences. In the most extreme cases, people were actually killed during or as a result of eclipses. And all this happened because of fear.
 
In my book, The Gift of Science, I quoted the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft who wrote that one of the strongest emotions of humankind is fear, and that one of the strongest fears is the fear of the unknown. This type of fear is the begetter of some of the most barbaric behaviors that humanity has exhibited through history. But today we have science, and science allows us to know. We now know that an eclipse is just the moon moving across the sun and projecting a shadow on the Earth. If someone argues that the eclipse is a sign from God telling us to change our behavior, we can reply that we can predict when and where the eclipse will happen to the nearest minute and to the nearest mile. What kind of sign is that? The eclipse will happen even if we do change our behavior. And if we all change our behavior before the eclipse, after the eclipse happens another person can argue that it was a sign of God telling us that we should change our behavior to the way it was before the eclipse!
 
Unfortunately, there are millions of people who accept the science behind eclipses but deny the science behind things such as climate change, vaccines, evolution, and even the roundness of the Earth! And while the scientific disciplines that deal with these things are different, they all use the same method (the scientific method) to discover the truth about the behavior of matter and energy in the world around us. Observations, experiments, measurements, testing of hypotheses, elaboration of theories, making predictions and testing them, refining theories, putting together an increasingly complete description of reality – this is what ALL science is about. The scientific method has allowed us to understand eclipses, climate, the immune system, the origin of species, and the curvature of the Earth. You can’t accept what one group of scientists has discovered using this method while denigrating and delegitimizing what other scientists have discovered using the same method!
 
When we planned our trip to see the eclipse and marveled at its occurrence, we benefited from hundreds of years of research carried out by thousands of scientists. Let’s not allow ourselves to be swayed by ignorance, misinformation, and conspiracies. Let’s benefit from the work that ALL scientists have performed.
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The photos belong to the author and cannot be used without permission.
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