by Axel » Sat Aug 28, 2004 4:05 pm
The false dawn picture is indeed magnificent. However, I was put off by the caption which said this phenomenon was "once considered" to be a false dawn whereas it is "actually" the zodiacal light. It would have been okay if the writer was discussing, say, an ancient myth about eclipses being caused by wolves eating the Sun or Moon: we know eclipses are "actually" something else. But to call an early light on the horizon a false dawn is not to make a claim about anything physical. It is a very common figure of speech to say that B is a "false A" when A and B look similar. There is a mushroom popularly called a false morel because, well, because it's not a real morel. "False dawn" was used in the same way, as a metaphor. There's no way a "false dawn" could be a hypothesized something-or-other about which we know better than to believe; it just says it isn't the real dawn, and who can argue with that? The use of "once considered" and "actually" here is just flag-waving for the 21st century, declaring how much smarter we are than those silly ancients.
The false dawn picture is indeed magnificent. However, I was put off by the caption which said this phenomenon was "once considered" to be a false dawn whereas it is "actually" the zodiacal light. It would have been okay if the writer was discussing, say, an ancient myth about eclipses being caused by wolves eating the Sun or Moon: we know eclipses are "actually" something else. But to call an early light on the horizon a false dawn is not to make a claim about anything physical. It is a very common figure of speech to say that B is a "false A" when A and B look similar. There is a mushroom popularly called a false morel because, well, because it's not a real morel. "False dawn" was used in the same way, as a metaphor. There's no way a "false dawn" could [i]be[/i] a hypothesized something-or-other about which we know better than to believe; it just says it isn't the real dawn, and who can argue with that? The use of "once considered" and "actually" here is just flag-waving for the 21st century, declaring how much smarter we are than those silly ancients.