The Sun, and how it has fuelled humanity's curiosity, knowledge

In Jules Verne's classic Around the World in Eighty Days, the Sun can be said to be one of the central figures. Phileas Fogg and his fellow travellers see the Sun rise and set 80 times during their round trip from west to east, and therefore presume that 80 days and nights must have elapsed. It takes Fogg a little bit of arithmetic to correct one of literature's most famous miscalculations and collect his bet in the nick of time the following day. Travelling in that direction and seeing 80 sunrises and 80 sunsets, as he works out, could only have meant that 79 days had elapsed.

- Kabir Firaque

The Sun, the source of all energy that sustains life on Earth, has inspired knowledge for as long as humanity has existed. Isro's Aditya-Ll mission, launching on Saturday, seeks to add to our knowledge about the physics and chemistry at play around the Sun, concepts that are far more complex than the arithmetic in Verne's novel. Fogg's correction can be explained either with longitudes (as Verne did) or simply with the relative motion between two objects charting the same circular path in opposite directions.

Even that, however, would be far more advanced than the knowledge of the ancients who believed the Earth was flat.

Growth of knowledge

Much of our early knowledge, particularly of geometry, trigonometry and astronomy, is a result of a curiosity to understand the motion and the influence of the heavenly bodies. While their mathematical observations were remarkable given the constraints of their times, many early scholars also dwelt on the supposed astrological influence of the heavenly bodies, which has no connection with what modern science has taught us.

The accumulation of knowledge would have started with the obvious observation that the Sun gives us days and nights. Deification was inevitable; countless civilisations have had countless sun gods, and indeed Sun-worshippers exist even today.