ABSTRACT
SHORT OF CHARTERING a spacecraft (which may one day become possible – watch this space!) it is very difficult for us to observe the ways in which the Earth,Sun and Moon move in relation to each other to give us day and night, seasons and lunar phases – the ‘big ideas’ in this topic.This is hardly surprising:most people believed that the Earth was flat and at the centre of the universe until the end of the 16th century, when global circumnavigation and Copernicus’s observations of planetary motion challenged science and church teaching.A few decades later,Galileo famously got into trouble with the Pope for suggesting that his telescope observations supported Copernicus’s ideas. It is very difficult to move away conceptually from our position on the surface of the Earth and to see it as part of a bigger system, and Piaget’s observations of young children’s ‘egocentrism’ (1929) would suggest that they may find this even harder than adults.We need as many models and kinaesthetic experiences as possible to help us envisage the three-dimensional movement of the solar system.
