"spy satellites, for example, move very rapidly as they swoop close to earth's surface not because they are propelled with powerful on-board rockets but because their highly eccentric orbits are governed by Kepler's laws."

i hate that.
i hate how it creates the subtle, underlying sense that we are in charge. it's like saying that apples fall because of newton's law of gravity. the truth is exactly the opposite, and it is nothing but our pervasive egocentrism that leads us to phrase things as though we have any control over the basic functioning of the universe. and, it implies a permanace that simply doesn't exist in the scientific world.

a few thousand years ago, the stars moved in the sky because of aristotle's theory of the celestial sphere.

i suppose it's just another way we try to rationalize it all. constellations are the same thing, the conceit of stellar subdivisions, trying to find some way to conceptualize infinity.

us humans are so silly.