As the equinox approached, Confucius and Laotzu journeyed to an island near Singapore to visit friends in an Orthodox monastery. It was noon and the sunlight was coming down vertically. Nothing cast a shadow. For a moment the glare was so intense it seemed to Laotzu as if sunlight were coming through the air without attenuation, as if there were no air. He put out his hands side by side, palms up, forming a roughly square platform ten fingerwidths broad. He thought that the radiant power on that area must now be a chi.
Like many other Taoist sages, Laotzu could see in the infrared and tell the keynote frequency in a thermal glow. He could see that the keynote frequency in sunlight is 40 quadrillion per mintue and so he knew that the temperature on the surface of the sun is 40 grade. It was four times hotter than what the two sages used to achieve in their kiln using the forced draft from a bellows.
That afternoon Laotzu examined the curious Western clock in the monastery. It told time in foreigner minutes rather than the Taoist minutes to which he was accustomed. Later they and their friends watched the sun set. By the monastery clock, it took 2 and 1/8 foreign minutes for the sun to set, from the first moment that it touched the horizon till the last sliver disappeared.
Laotzu reckoned that because Taoist minutes were shorter (only 90% as long) it took 2.36 Taoist minutes for the sun to set. And he knew that it takes 254 Taoist minutes for the earth to turn one radian.
"I know our distance from the sun in solar diameters," he told Confucius. "The number of its diameters which the sun is distant is 254 divided by 2.36." Confucius, who was proud of his skill with the abacus, promptly divided the two numbers and got 107-some. "It would be neater if you expressed the distance to the sun in terms of its radius," he told Laotzu. "The distance to it is 215 solar radii."
That night Laotzu dreamed of walking in a field of bright sunlight. It was many times brighter than any patch of sunshine he had ever seen, or that could be on earth even in vertical sunlight. It was brighter by a factor of 215-squared. Laotzu decided that he must be walking on the surface of the sun.
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Copyright © 2002 Leonard Cottrell. All rights reserved.
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