I received an email from a reader the other day after all the NASA blather that happened last week. He is an evolutionary biologist, so of course he feels my pain. He sent me a link to a page about Science Literacy Month for kids, which talks about ways to celebrate science. I just have to pass it on here.
Last week, there was Darwin Day. In that vein, he suggests that February 17th be called Heliocentrism Day. That’s because Copernicus was born on February 19th, and Galileo on February 15th. The 17th is the average between them.
He suggests baking a cake, and frosting it with concentric circles to represent the model of the solar system. And, of course, a single candle in the middle represents the Sun.
I think this is a fine idea. It’ll help kids remember how things really work in Nature. And cake never hurts, either.
February 12th, 2006 at 11:34 am
I’ll never oppose an excuse to eat cake.
February 12th, 2006 at 11:46 am
Or you could do what I did for my gran’s 88th birthday cake:
Bake 2 cakes and with suitably large cookie cutters, cut them into concentric circles…
Remove each alternate circle and you have a concentric circle cake! In fact, if you do it well enough, you could have more than one heliocentric cake!
(for the cake I made, I used the circles to make the two 8′s, but the same method could be used for a heliocentric cake.)
Put a candle in the middle to represent the sun and voila!
February 12th, 2006 at 11:46 am
Oh, and frost each circle a different colour to represent the different planets…
February 12th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
All that work would be a lot of intelligent design for the cake, which is an odd irony for what you want it to represent
February 12th, 2006 at 1:03 pm
We should remind all those kids that Heliocentrism is just a theory. There is plenty of evidence that Intelligent Design advocates stand still and the rest of the universe revolves around them.
Well there’s my bad joke of the day.
February 12th, 2006 at 1:19 pm
No, it shouldn’t be Heliocentrism Day, Between Copernicus’ & Darwin’s birthdays. It should be some sort of average of the b’days of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo & Newton, and called “Barycenter Day”.
February 12th, 2006 at 1:30 pm
What a magnificent idea. If we of the skeptical community could invest a little time into creating holidays celebrating the great moments in the history of investigation of the universe around us, we could almost effortlessly provide children with a fun way to leap into the world of science. We need more people with such wonderfully active ideas as Heliocentrism Day. It is our own ivory-tower passivity towards the world outside that provides the breeding ground for horrors like the I.D. movement. It is a delight to see someone taking an active role like this.
February 12th, 2006 at 2:04 pm
We could bake buns with raisins in them and show the children how the raisins all move away from each other when the dough is set to raise, like the universe expanding.
We’ll make to batches of dough, one with raisins for the demonstration in and one without for eating (only evil old ladies put raisins in buns for eating).
February 12th, 2006 at 2:39 pm
Fine, but I think the day should be on February’s fifth Friday.
February 12th, 2006 at 8:17 pm
Mmmm… cake…
February 12th, 2006 at 10:32 pm
As long as we’re coming up with excuses to have cake, should there also be a Most of the Way to the Edge of the Galaxy Day? And how about The Universe Has No Center Day?
February 12th, 2006 at 11:57 pm
A “More Planets Known Outside the Solar System than In” Day?
February 13th, 2006 at 1:32 am
What about, ” You can’t have your cake and eat it too ” Day ?
February 13th, 2006 at 6:38 am
I work at a library, and am always looking for an excuse to host a science program for children. We use the book “Chase’s Calendar of Events: the day-by-day directory to special days, weeks and months†to help us pick out our programs. It has daily listings of national and international events, holidays, historical anniversaries, astronomical phenomena, and birthdays of famous people (like scientists!).
The latest versions include a searchable CD-ROM so you can easily find the anniversaries of all the science history milestones, and discover that:
Bunsen Burner Day is March 31
Astronomy Day is April 16
National Chemistry Week is October 16-22
“Hot Enough For Ya’ Day is July 23.
Thanks, BA, for sharing the Swarthmore page. I think I feel a science program coming on…
February 13th, 2006 at 9:23 am
Hmm, my students have been asking for cookies lately. Maybe I’ll just bake cookies instead. They’re circular, too.
February 13th, 2006 at 9:58 am
[...] Science Literacy Month [via Bad Astronomy Blog] [...]
February 13th, 2006 at 12:29 pm
February – Science Literacy Month (for kids)
Thanks for Phil Plait for his post on Heliocentrism Day: February 17th – a comprimise between Copernicus’ birthday (February 19th) and Galileo’s birthday (February 15th). Swarthmore College has more on Science Literacy Month including Darwin Day, Ori…
February 13th, 2006 at 1:05 pm
Of course, those of us who insist on being Keplerian about it will insist that the cake needs to be elliptical, not circular.
February 13th, 2006 at 4:44 pm
But could you bake a cake in the shape of an ellipse with a small enough eccentricity to represent the orbit of, say, Earth or Mars …? After all, Earth’s orbit is nearly circular, give or take a few percent.
February 13th, 2006 at 6:20 pm
I’m looking for the best photograph of aforementioned cake, for inclusion on the Heliocentrism Day web site. Any baker/astronomers out there?
February 13th, 2006 at 8:02 pm
Nigel,
Mars’ orbit is more elliptical than Earth’s (and Venus, Saturn, and Jupiter) which is what prompted Kepler to abandon the “perfect circle” and settle on ellipses. Mars’ eccentricity is 0.093 vs 0.017 for Earth. But still pretty circular.
Colin,
Does it have to be the cake part or can you fudge it with icing?
February 14th, 2006 at 5:20 am
I would be delighted with even a square cake…as long as the planets were all represented, by thin frosting lines, with their proper circular or elliptical orbits. The universe is the same proportion as a 9 x 15″ cake pan, right??
February 14th, 2006 at 2:40 pm
My god, that’s it!!!
There was no Big Bang! It was a Big Pan!!!!!
February 14th, 2006 at 2:41 pm
That works better if you happen to know that the French onomatopoeia for “bang!” is “pan!”….
February 14th, 2006 at 3:05 pm
Irony at work. 17 Feb is the day recognized that Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake by the inquisition. His crime, among others, was that the lights in the sky were actually suns, around which other worlds revolved, and that Copernicus was right.
February 16th, 2006 at 11:23 am
Yes! Let’s bake a cake of our solar system.
Just remember that if you want to properly represent the planets and their orbits, do the following:
To represent the sun at the center of the cake use a walnut. Pluto then will be 1/5 the diameter of the period at the end of this sentence – use whatever you can find.
Based on these Walnut/Dust Spec dimensions, to include Pluto’s orbit, bake a cake about 22 acres in size (average diameter about 240 meters). Place Pluto at the edge of the cake, roughly 120 meters from the walnut.
Place Earth about 3 meters out from the walnut. Use something the size of the period at the end of this sentence.
The other planets range in size from Mercury the dust spec, to Jupiter the single bb pellet of buckshot like that which VP Cheney generously donated to the interior of his hunting buddy.
When the tenth planet becomes official, the diameter of your cake will have to be tripled, and if you want to include the farthest reaches of our actual solar system your cake will need to be larger than the state of California.
Have fun with that.
February 16th, 2006 at 3:42 pm
Mmmm… California-sized cake… y’know, we could just get around the whole scale and eccentricity issue if someone good with a frosting pen can write “sizes and shapes are not to scale” real small in one corner. Then as long as Pluto’s perihelion is inside Uranus’ mean orbital distance, we’re good enough for government or engineering work.
February 16th, 2006 at 6:51 pm
why not make that a warld record cake?
February 16th, 2006 at 6:52 pm
I mean world