Today's Wisdom - The Solar Eclipse, Plato and the Satellite

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This evening, for the first time since 1905, the Moon will completely swallow the Sun over mainland Spain. For roughly one minute and 48 seconds at around 20:29 local time, the sky above the city will fall into an eerie twilight, the temperature will drop, and the Sun's ghostly outer atmosphere will blaze into view. The shadow begins its journey at sunrise over Siberia, races across the Arctic and eastern Greenland, clips western Iceland, then curves down the Atlantic to make its grand finale over northern Spain as the Sun hangs low in the west. A narrow band only about 290 kilometres wide, threading through A Coruña, Oviedo, León (where we will luckily be watching it from), Bilbao, and Zaragoza, will witness totality, while the rest of Europe sees only a partial bite taken from the Sun.

For almost all of human history, a sight like this provoked terror, because people had no idea what was happening. Ancient cultures reached for monsters to explain the vanishing Sun. The Vikings blamed great sky wolves chasing and devouring it, the Chinese imagined a celestial dragon swallowing it whole, and in parts of the world people would bang drums, shout, and hurl objects at the sky to frighten the beast into spitting the Sun back out. It always worked, of course, which only deepened the conviction. Eclipses were read as omens of doom, the death of kings, or the anger of the gods, and one is even said to have halted a battle between the Lydians and the Medes around 585 BC. The sudden darkness was so unnerving both armies laid down their weapons and made peace on the spot. The Greek philosopher Thales had reportedly predicted that very eclipse, an early flicker of the science that would eventually strip these events of their fear.

The single most important thing tonight is to guard your eyes, and the rules leave no room for shortcuts. Throughout every partial phase you must look only through certified eclipse glasses, since staring at even a sliver of exposed Sun can scar the retina permanently and without any pain to warn you, as the eye has no pain sensors inside it. Ordinary sunglasses, however dark, are useless for this. Only during the brief moment of totality, when the Moon blocks the Sun entirely, is it safe to lower your glasses and look directly at the corona with the naked eye. One local quirk matters here, because the Sun will sit only about 10 degrees above the horizon during totality, so an open, unobstructed view to the west-northwest is essential, whether from the flat meseta outside the city or a clear rooftop. Today's eclipse is also the first of a rare triad, with Spain due another total eclipse in August 2027 and a "ring of fire" in January 2028.

Around 375 BCE, Plato sat down to answer a deceptively simple question that has haunted humanity ever since. Why be good? More precisely, is it better to be a just person or an unjust one, if you could get away with injustice entirely? His brother Glaucon sharpens the challenge with a famous thought experiment, the Ring of Gyges, imagining a shepherd who finds a ring that makes him invisible and promptly uses it to seduce a queen, murder a king, and seize a throne. If a good man and a bad man both possessed such a ring, Glaucon asks, would they not behave identically, since only the fear of getting caught keeps any of us honest? The rest of The Republic, written as a dramatic conversation led by Plato's teacher Socrates, is an attempt to prove that the just soul is happier and better off even if it never gets caught, even if it suffers for its goodness.

To answer the question about a single person, Socrates does something ingenious and builds an entire imaginary city, reasoning that justice will be easier to see written large in a society than small in one soul. This ideal state is split into three classes, namely the workers who produce goods, the warriors who defend it, and the philosopher-rulers who govern. Justice, he concludes, is simply each part doing its own proper job in harmony, and he argues the human soul has the very same three parts, appetite, spirit, and reason, with a just person being one whose reason rules over desire the way wise rulers govern a city. This leads to the book's most provocative claim, that societies will never be free of evil until philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers, since only those who have spent decades training their minds to grasp truth are fit to hold power. To hold his imaginary city together, Socrates proposes a "noble lie," a founding myth telling citizens they were born with gold, silver, or bronze mixed into their souls, justifying who rules and who serves.

The most enduring passage is the Allegory of the Cave, one of the most influential images in all of Western thought. Socrates asks us to picture prisoners chained since birth deep inside a cave, facing a blank wall, able to see only the flickering shadows cast by objects passing before a fire behind them. Having known nothing else, they believe these shadows are the whole of reality. One prisoner breaks free, is dragged painfully up into the sunlight, and slowly realizes the shadows were mere illusions of a far richer world. When he returns to tell the others, they think him mad and want to kill him. For Plato this was the task of the philosopher, to escape the cave of everyday appearances and glimpse the eternal truths he called the Forms, then return to enlighten a world that would rather not listen. Modern readers often recoil at the Republic, since its perfect city abolishes the family among its rulers, censors poetry and music, and frankly distrusts democracy, which Plato warned slides naturally into tyranny as a smooth-talking demagogue exploits the appetites of the mob. Yet nearly 2,400 years later we are still arguing with it, which is perhaps the surest sign of how deeply its questions cut.

The idea of a satellite was imagined long before the technology existed to build one, and remarkably, it came from science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. In 1945, Clarke, then a young Royal Air Force officer, proposed that three spacecraft placed in a high enough orbit could travel at exactly the same speed as Earth’s rotation, making them appear to hover motionless above the planet. Positioned around the globe, they could relay radio signals across vast distances. That orbit, roughly 22,000 miles above Earth, is now known as the Clarke Orbit in his honor and is home to hundreds of satellites.

Everything changed on 4 October 1957, in a single evening that reshaped the twentieth century. The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, a polished metal sphere the size of a beach ball, weighing about 84 kilograms and trailing four whip antennas. It did almost nothing by modern standards, simply circling the Earth every 96 minutes and emitting a steady electronic beep on a frequency that even amateur radio enthusiasts could pick up. That relentless ping, passing overhead night after night, sent a jolt of fear through the United States. The panic, sometimes called the "Sputnik crisis," poured money into science education and led directly to the creation of NASA the following year. A month after the first launch, the Soviets sent up Sputnik 2 carrying a stray Moscow dog named Laika, the first living creature to orbit the Earth.

America answered on 31 January 1958 with Explorer 1, and this smaller craft carried a scientific instrument rather than just a transmitter. A cosmic ray detector designed by the physicist James Van Allen revealed vast belts of charged particles trapped in the Earth's magnetic field, now known as the Van Allen belts, making Explorer the first satellite to deliver a genuine scientific discovery from space. From there the technology advanced with astonishing speed. Vanguard 1, launched weeks later, was the first to run on solar power and remains the oldest human object still in orbit. Clarke's original vision finally arrived in 1964, when Syncom 3 became the first satellite to hover in geostationary orbit and beamed the Tokyo Olympic Games live across the Pacific, the first time a major event had been broadcast between continents in real time. What began as one metal ball emitting a lonely beep has swelled into a swarm of thousands, quietly guiding our cars, forecasting our weather, and carrying nearly every phone call, television signal, and internet connection that binds the modern world together. .

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The A Little Wiser Team