Inspiration Fails Me

You'd think with all the sporadic posting these last six weeks, I'd have an impressive backlog of things to post about. No such luck. However, this keeps amusing me, so why not.

So the word revolution. In socio-political terms, it means to overthrow a government, usually to replace it with something very different. But in astronomy, revolution refers to one celestial body orbiting another, larger body, ultimately winding up back where it started. Well, not precisely where it started, since the orbit is slightly elliptical to begin with, and gets altered a little bit by all the other celestial bodies exerting various levels of gravitational forces upon it, their strength from one revolution to the next depending on how close they are at that time, which is somewhat determined by their own orbital period.

Anyway, I thought that was amusing in the idea of someone staging a revolution, only to wind up right back where they started. It's reminiscent of something I heard in a European History class, where we were discussing totalitarian governments of the 1930s, and how, once you get to the extremes of the left and the right (say Stalinism and National Socialism), there really isn't much difference, so the political spectrum is more like a circle than a line.