What determines up?

What determines up?

In science, gravity offers one orientation. Up is the direction directly away from the terrestrial body. Science, as it is practiced by earthlings, determines up as away from the earth.

But once we leave earth things get tricky. A universe of countless heavenly bodies each determining their own up is what we're greeted with.

The way in which our solar system is presented to us visually gives the viewer some clues about how up works and of course how vision and representation collude in making knowledge. Firstly, the view of each planet and the sun grossly misrepresents both the sheer differences in scale of each planet and the sun but also their distances from each other and the sun. That aside, it's a handy representation of all that is of scientific relevance, astronomically speaking, for earthlings living in Sol, our solar system.

Let's look closer.

We see the solar system represented with the horizontal plane determined by the rotation of the planets around the sun. That makes sense from a number of perspectives, one of which is a criterion for internal validity. I agree with that as an explanation, and its tidy.

But there are two sides to this planar representation: up and down. Nothing in our representation determines what makes up up and down down. And here's where things get interesting.

Isaac Newton was spending time with a relative of the family as he looked out into the courtyard of the home where he was staying. He happened to see an apple drop from the tree onto the ground. And from that prosaic occurrence, one that perhaps he had witnessed countless other times, Newton began to think about gravity as a force that extended infinitely into space. Thus we are back to our version of up. It is in essence the direction away from the planet, or out. Up and out are interchangeable from a terrestrial standpoint, using gravity as a marker.

But we've added a wrinkle to up and much like Newton's gravity it extends out infinitely into the universe. The planar representation of our solar system sets the planets about an imaginary plane determined by their orbit around a central star, our sun. What determines up in this representation are the people creating the representation. This connects us to the work of metaphor in human understanding. As with many metaphors comparison is the function. Spatial orientations are no stranger to have added valences. Up and down are prime candidates. Which is better? In most cases, up is the preferred orientation. Who, after all, doesn't like to be on top? Sales are up! Participation is up! Up means more, means greater, means power, means wealth, means more, more, more. As for down? You get the impression.

The carbon dioxide graph that has become all but iconic of our belief or denial in the negative effects of fossil fuel usage could be one example where up and more aren't necessarily better. In this case up still is a means for conferring the salience of an issue. But I digress.

In determining where up is in this planar view of the solar system, science uses planetary north. And planetary north is a rule of thumb for up as if we were standing outside the earth and viewing it. In doing so, it requires that the rest of the universe carry on infinitely in every direction with our version of up extending out.

I'd hazard that, for the sake of internal validity, each solar system could be represented with an up counterposed with down along its orbit around a star. That doesn't necessarily destroy our view of our solar system and this imaginary up, which orders the universe around it. But, by way of metaphor and the vagaries of our subjectivity as thinkers and actors we have inherited a thought and an action, which orders the universe around a decision on what was 'up.'

At the very least having an up and a down are an indispensable means for understanding and representing some thing. Up and down as serve as a medium for exchanging ideas and coordinating meaning about the world we inhabit and that we story. Up and down fit into our visual understanding. And at its rather prosaic core, like the core of that prosaic apple is something much more human: pride, stubborn, arrogant pride.

Who, after all, doesn't like to be on top?