An imaginary telescope for reading.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

I quite like making an analogy of looking at stars through a telescope and comparing it to reading.

Light has always had a close relationship to knowledge to me, it could be because that without it in a dark room you could not see anything or know its contents and therefore light gives you the ability to figure it out or to discover what there is. In the same way as you look at a star or a planet through a telescope what you tend to see is a light that has taken a certain amount of time to reach you and you can distinguish it in more detail.

You can think of applying an imaginary telescope to a book where you can always focus on some points and look at them in terms of the time that they were written. My first appreciation of this was whilst reading Homer’s Troy, there are some scenes where Homer describes the warriors drinking wine. What makes this interesting to me is the ability to appreciate the existence of wine during the Trojan war, i.e. it was already invented. An observation of which I personally find fascinating as its still a practice carried out today.

In this example I was able to to pay attention to an act of drinking wine in the the period it was being carried out. In the same way, if I were to point my telescope to Jupiter I would see the detail of its moons a few minutes in the past. Although not much is likely to change with the Jovian moons they are something that you can hardly notice without a telescope.