The Kramer-Peterman Duality: Fragments on Eccentricity

Fragments on Eccentricity The concept of fomo has always alluded me. Part of the reason is a persistent need for eccentricity, for growing against the grain. That is not to say that I am persistently rebellious, but that there is a natural aversion to doing things “the way everyone else does it”. The word eccentricity has for me always evoked a relation to its meaning within astrodynamics1 — the amount by which a given orbit deviates from a “perfect” circle to an ellipse. For a spacecraft raising or lowering one’s orbit requires entering into an elliptical orbit before one can circularise, meaning that an eccentric orbit often means that an object is either shooting away from a body or crashing down toward it, only to gently miss. By comparison a circular orbit is merely the stable, unchanging floating above another world. The eccentric is instead constantly changing speed and direction, moving towards and away by large amounts while maintaining some sort of liminal existence. ⁂…