Sunday Column: Hexagons On Saturn: Now THAT'S Big News

This has been bothering me for the past three months. In March, they confirmed the existence of a big hexagon on the planet Saturn.

I am not kidding. Here is the photograph. There is a giant hexagon ringing the north pole of Saturn.

A hexagon! Six regular sides, each thousands of miles long. Nothing like it has ever been seen in our solar system... [rest of column]

Comments

[Lorraine Margeson]

Howard, that was very very cool! Thanks for giving me my scientific fix for the day!!

[Charles Huska]

Howard, I am not too concerned with the large Hexagon founded on Saturn however if we discovered a planet covered by interlocking pentagons and squares that would be a time to dig in deep.

[Joe Blow]

I really can't believe some scientists are obsessing over this. It simply has to do with gas density and fluid dynamics. Have you ever tried to heat up Campbell's Tomato soup in a saucepan over a stove? It's a round pan. Leave it alone and sure enough a similar Hexagonal shape will appear in the center. It's even more noticeable if you add milk instead of water. Cheers!

[David Mathews]

Saturn is one of the most beautiful objects in the Universe. I have spent many nights looking at Saturn through a telescope and have never regretted the time spent enjoying the view. The telescopes and space probes have only enhanced this enjoyment by revealing that Saturn is a complicated, fascinating place.

But the vast majority of humans fail to even look up at the night sky, much less appreciate the abundant and inexhaustible beauty of this Universe.

Hence the statement:

Intelligence was wasted on the Homo sapiens.

We're living on the Earth but we don't love the Earth. We're abusing this planet so terribly that we must consider the Earth a disposable planet.

The full scale of the tragedy on the Earth is so large that it escapes the attention of the casual observer. Most people are so wrapped up in their own self that they cannot even see what is right in front of their own two eyes.

For example: There was a time when Florida was a beautiful, living place which hosted an abundant diversity of life. Now Florida has become a polluted, asphalt-covered cesspool which hosts a diversity of automobiles and overfed Americans but not much else.

If you destroy those things that you love ....

Americans need to wake up. We are facing a catastrophe of our own creation:

"The Dehydrated States of America"
( http://tinyurl.com/2ffybu )

Here's a news article from Canada which the St. Petersburg Times ought to publish on its front page. Infinite growth on a finite planet is a recipe for the apocalypse.

[John Gibson]

Is this a global warming thing?

[IssyWise]

I despair in the cow-towing sanitarization of scientific and mathematical terminology. Airplane engineers have the courage to say "helicopter." Building architects call landing areas atop high-rises "heliports."
"Hell, Michigan" is an American town--admirably named for a long-ago locally famous hooch still. Instead of following that robust historical example we hang lies on our communities when we name them things like "Zephyrhills," "Treasure Island" and "Sunset Pointe." And what is with that last "e?"
You can find Hell on a map of Michigan and even go there and get married: My sister did and the marriage didn't exactly work out. It was, in fact, a marriage made in.....
"Helis" is a descriptor of an entire epoch in human history. People say "hello" when they answer the phone. For God's sake, even the Bible speaks of Hell.
But scientist and mathematicians bow to nanny sensibilities by insisting on calling every polygon with six sides and six vertices a "hexigon" rather than the far more appropriate "heligon."
As a result, the pentagram--a mere pentangle, has been seized on by the superstitious through the ages and credited with all kinds of special powers. It is a Euclidean sin.
Did you know, in order to sharpen his mind in his late forties, the lawyer and politician Abraham Lincoln took to studying Euclid's Geometry? Can you image Dubya doing such a thing? If the "hexigon" had been given its true unvarnished name--"heligon," who knows that a clear-thinking Lincoln might not have fired his incompetent generals in the first years of the Civil War and immediately sought the ruthless mathematician Grant to suppress Lee forthwith? Pandering with language has historical costs!
Next time, we can discuss the current, trendy and growing use of the term "frigging" as an adjective or adverb in substitution for a beloved, rewarding and ancient Anglo-Saxon usage. Imagine what would happen to the American military if every noncommissioned officer took to using that watered down substitution? Heck, we might fail at militarily occupying Iraq!
William Safire used to have an occasional column about language usages, which would have been OK if he hadn't been a blithering blabber of bodacious booberocity--or did Pat Buchanan coin that pontificatory pinheded pronouncamata? Am I making up words? Sorry.
The point here isn't what's on Saturn--who cares! Saturn is about a billion miles away! What is important is what WE CALL the thing on Saturn. In the beginning there was the word, so the Bible says...or used to.

[Normal Person]

Re: John Gibson's post.

Um... what? I hope you're at least getting a high off of whatever you're smoking, bloke.

[William Green]

The hexagon is nature's way of distributing energy across the smallest surface area.

Like the hexagons formed in thick volcanic basalt flows, during cooling and shrinking.

.

[Howard Troxler]

Re: hexagon: and here I thought it was called a hexagon because "hex" comes to us from the classical languages for "six."