Traveling Among the Spheres Where the Music Has Stopped: Sol

“While I do appreciate the sun-ripened fruits that line my breakfast bowl, my worshipful awe stems more from Sol’s drop-mike nonchalance. As Galileo said, while Sol keeps his eight planets in line over an unmatched reach of 9.3 trillion miles, he casually ripens a bunch of grapes in Bordeaux, warps the Eiffel Tower six inches out of plumb, and melts traffic cones in Phoenix. God only knows what magic he works in the Oort Cloud.”—Skip Eisiminger

Skip the B.S.

By Dr. Skip Eisiminger (aka The Wordspinner)

I. “All sunshine is a desert.”—Arab proverb

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Hubris)—March 2025—As a recently confirmed, olive-complected boychild of about 13, I had a brief, solipsistic notion that not only was my shadow tailing me, but so was the Sun. If Jesus was the son of God, I wondered, why couldn’t I be the son of Sol? No matter how I turned, the sun shone its spotlight on me like some Hollywood star basking in the klieg lights. I first noticed this solar attention at my Uncle Ted’s swimming pool, and when I mentioned it to my sisters, they thought I was barmy. “Look,” snarky Karen said, rising from her towel, “it’s following me, too!”

Her point was well taken, but I was slow to accept it, for my belief made me “bulletproof.”

I’ve long had a special relationship with Sol by which I mean Sol Invictus, the Romans’ unconquered sun, not Sól, the Germans’ sun goddess. Easter in our household is a celebration of the resurrected son and the resurrected Sol. Twice now, I have climbed onto our roof to greet Sol’s green flash, but each time I have missed it. Apparently, one needs a mountain. In the 2017 solar eclipse, I climbed up on the roof to greet the black wall I knew was racing toward me at the speed of dark, but the darkness I experienced arrived on a dimmer switch. In 2021, after Clemson University completed construction of its first solar parking lot, I rode my bike in the shade of the panels that were turning sunbeams into watts. And for years, my bucket list has included a “safari hat” with solar-powered fans inside to keep me cool when mowing the lawn. I’m still working on that one.

I wouldn’t say I’ve ever worshipped Sol, but the brilliantly original comedian George Carlin became a convert to Solism after he realized that everything he ate and drank was a solar byproduct. Carlin was impressed that Sol extorts no money, no one must dress up to be seen with Him, and, for most of any given day, Sol is visible overhead. Even on rainy days, there’s usually enough light filtering through the clouds to read by.

While I do appreciate the sun-ripened fruits that line my breakfast bowl, my worshipful awe stems more from Sol’s drop-mike nonchalance. As Galileo said, while Sol keeps his eight planets in line over an unmatched reach of 9.3 trillion miles, he casually ripens a bunch of grapes in Bordeaux, warps the Eiffel Tower six inches out of plumb, and melts traffic cones in Phoenix. God only knows what magic he works in the Oort Cloud.

But impressive as all that is, what really captures my imagination is Sol, himself:

• He’s about 4.6 billion years old and has another five billion to go.
• The fusion forge at his core burns at 27 million degrees F.
• He contains 99.87 percent of all the mass in his system, which leaves our “mighty” Earth looking like a pebble in the Blue Ridge. (Nevertheless, our blue-green marble is still, hands down, the best-looking planet.)
• 1.3 million of our pebbly Earths would fit inside a hollow Sol.
• In the five billion years of its existence, regal Sol and his retinue have made 20 leisurely orbits of Sagittarius A, the black hole at the center of our galaxy.
• If all our nuclear weapons were detonated, the energy released would be less than one second’s worth of what Sol sends us 24/7.
• And so extravagantly prodigal is Sol that he expends 10,000 times more energy on us than we use.

If the seven bullets above haven’t pierced your thick skull, yet, consider UY Scuti: while Sol’s light takes just eight minutes zipping along at 186,000 miles per second to reach us, UY Scuti’s light takes 9,500 years. If UY Scuti were hollow, five billion Sols would fit inside of it. Now that’s impressive, but I still prefer Sol’s proximity. UY Scuti has never done a measurable thing for me or Mother Earth while Sol lays 4.3 pounds of sunlight on our doorstep every second.

II. “Solar and wind power were once considered ‘hippie power.’”—Anonymous

Let me turn my focus away from Sol and focus on the light and warmth he and the two hundred billion trillion more like him so generously dispense. To be sure, these gifts often arrive on a double-edged sword:

• Starlight lightens hair and darkens skin.
• It enables all vision even as it sears the eye.
• It produces vitamin D in our bodies as well as melanoma.
• It makes stars invisible during the day and visible at night.
• It travels through the vacuum of space where sound cannot.
• It has no mass or electrical charge but bends a comet’s tail and one day will fill a starship’s sail.
• It travels like a wave, but on striking something, it behaves like a particle.
• Whether emanating from a moving object or reflected off a still one, its speed is constant.
• It can be frozen and released without losing any of its energy.
• Even while traveling at 186,000 miles per second, it cannot escape a black hole.
• It is the tungsten of reason and the off switch of despair.
• It is inside Quakers and outside the Pope.
• It is the prima facie evidence of God.

To starlight, the gods themselves must kneel.

III. “Sunlight is as necessary to life as bread, water, and sleep.”—Anonymous

Four and a half billion years ago, a cloud of interstellar gas and dust collapsed under its own weight to form what I fondly call Sol because, like Solomon, he needed a bit of humanizing. At his core is a fusion forge where 4.5 tons of hydrogen per second are crushed to form helium, releasing heat and light in the process. The byproducts thus released take at least 30,000 years to go from the sun’s core to the sun’s surface, and then to the Earth in just eight more minutes, where they initiated life and now sustain it.

What follows is a spotty and somewhat irreverent history of our ur-ancestor, Godparent, and parent:

The first priest may have been a Paleolithic medicine man who promised to roll the rock away from the tomb that Sol had stumbled into. When the good doctor succeeded, his followers wanted to make him king, but he was content with a lifetime supply of nuts, berries, mammoth steaks, and the love of his people.

The solar eclipses that elevated one lucky Neanderthal were rare astronomical events, but humans were quick to notice how dependent they were on Sol, so they invented various roles to honor him. Ra and his priests presided over Egypt; Huitzilopochtli and his priests presided over Central America, and there were dozens in between. So integral was Sol’s diurnal course to our ancestors’ thinking that the root of “east” honored the direction in which Sol rises, and “west” honored the direction where he sinks below the horizon. “Asia” took its name from the sunrise; “Europe” took its name from the sunset. And for over 2000 years, the most revered day of the week in many western Christian countries has been “Sunday,” not “Sonday.”

Though it may have been some nameless Chinese astronomer who first realized that Sol, not Earth, was central to the heavenly order, today, Aristarchus of Samos gets most of the credit for introducing the heliocentric theory (in 270 BC) because his name happened to be recorded. Few, however, believed him until Copernicus (in AD 1543) published solid evidence which was soon confirmed by Galileo. “At rest in the middle of everything is the Sun,” as Copernicus wrote. “For this most beautiful temple [the solar system], who would have put the lamp in any other place than where it can illuminate everything simultaneously?” Though the church fathers remained unconvinced, Leonardo da Vinci announced, “The Sun does not move.” Today, we know the sun has a wobble; it rotates on its axis, and it’s orbiting the galaxy’s core at 450,000 mph, but for all practical purposes, Leonardo was right.

Despite the beauty of Copernicus’s imagery, the result of Earth’s demotion from epicenter to “third rock from the sun” was untold mental illness before anyone knew that psychiatry was a medical specialty. Around 1800, Thomas Jefferson, confident in his new rational faith, wrote that the sun was his “mighty physician,” unaware that as many as one third of all cancers are solar related. Today, we know that diabetes, asthma, high blood pressure, and multiple sclerosis all correlate with high-latitude Zip Codes. Indeed, rates of multiple sclerosis rose eight-fold after the Iranian Revolution in 1979 forced women back into their long black robes.

As recently as 1920, fearful American and European women, ignorant of the sun’s production of vitamin D, kept parasol manufacturers in business. But in the summer of 1920, Coco Chanel inadvertently acquired a suntan on the French Riviera, and the tan as fashion accessory was born. In the century since, we’ve learned that tanning beds are as “deadly as arsenic and mustard gas,” according to the World Health Organization.

It’s taken nearly a century of research, but solar farms are now cheaper to build than coal-fired plants. In 2017, the Kentucky Coal Mining Museum converted to solar power, and in 2019, the Israelis aligned 50,000 mirrors in the Negev Desert to boil water to power electric generators. The days when it cost more to light a hotel room than to rent it are long past.

IV. “Look at the Earth in this picture. It’s a pale blue dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. And on that dot, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human who ever was, lived out their lives . . . on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”—Carl Sagan

In AD 321, Constantine, the first Christian emperor, designated “Sunday” as the “venerable day of the sun,” and that name has been some combination of “sun” and “day” in the Germanic languages ever since. In Turkey, however, Sunday is Market Day; in Russia, it’s Lord’s Day; in Greece, it’s Christ’s Day; in Israel, it’s Rest Day; in Estonia, it’s Holy Day; in Poland, it’s No-Work Day; in Malta, it’s First Day; and in Lithuania, it’s Seventh Day. But in Germany, where the Eisenmengers/Eisimingers originated, it’s Sonntag, “Sun Day,” and the association with the sun is so strong there that Saturday is Sonnabend, “Sunday Eve.”

In Morris, Minnesota, I expect you’ll find most people in church on Sunday worshipping in a sanctuary where the HVAC system is powered by renewables, for in this farm community, the righteousness of solar and wind power will not be denied. In and around the town’s 5206 inhabitants, two wind turbines, some geothermal equipment, and numerous solar panels power a county-wide compost operation, electric school buses, a carbon-neutral fertilizer plant, etc. As a result, utility rates are about one-third the national average. Asked about the town’s bold environmentalism, Blaine Hill, the retired city manager, said, “We never made it about climate. We just did it because it makes sense.” So successful has the “Morris Model” been that it’s been adopted in 13 other Minnesotan communities.

In 1979, Jimmy Carter had solar panels installed on the White House; in 1986, Ronald Reagan had them removed, but things have changed, and I’m left wondering if Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz had this ace in the hole as he approached the 2024 election.

You may be wondering why I haven’t mentioned our solar panels. The reason is simple: we don’t have any, and I feel like a hypocrite admitting this, but the reasons we don’t are formidable:

• We don’t have a south-facing roof,
• though solar costs are edging toward “too cheap to meter” [NYT, 9/2024], the conversion would still be expensive,
• my wife and I are octogenarians and therefore unlikely to recoup the costs of any solar installation,
• the roof we have has just been reshingled at considerable cost,
• our friends, who recently had solar panels installed, now have a leaky roof,
• and the plywood in our roof is 45 years old, unsuited for the weight of solar panels or so we’ve been told by our roofer.

One of my favorite photographs from my intramural-softball playing days was taken by my wife on a cloudless summer afternoon. It shows me in my Rec Specs smiling in the batter’s box preparing to hit, and nine of my teammates standing in the slender shade of a single light pole. It was hot, as I recall, but I was happy to have my coat and tie off and to be playing in the sun.

Humans cannot do much better than play in the sun.

Editor’s Note: In closing, and having read Eisiminger’s meditation on Sol, I thought the old boy might like to have the final word. NASA has been eavesdropping, and here is one recording of the great star speaking in a language all his own.

To order copies of Skip Eisiminger’s Letters to the Grandchildren (Clemson University Digital Press), click on the book cover below or contact: Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, Strode Tower, Box 340522, Clemson SC 29634-0522. For Wordspinner: Mind-Boggling Games for Word Lovers, click on the book cover.