Looking at the stars from a well

摘要

Aristotle's report that "men in pits or wells sometimes see the stars", made in On the Generation of Animals (book V, chapter 1), is a legend that was long believed, persisting until the 20th century without being experimentally tested. Similar stories were reported by Giambattista della Porta in 1560, Christof Schneider in 1626, John Herschel in 1836 and Charles Dickens in 1837, among others. But sunlight scattered from air molecules is generally much brighter than the brightest starlight, so it is impossible to see stars with the naked eye during daylight hours, no matter where one is looking from. Physicists today, however, have found methods for looking into stars from the bowels of a mountain. In addition to the observations of solar and supernova neutrinos, nuclear reactions of astrophysical interest are now being studied underground.