"Mirage" is from the Book of History and Heavenly Officials, "Mirage (Mirage) Meteorological Tower; Guangye Qicheng Palace Queran." The clouds are like the people of their mountains and rivers.
Originally, it refers to the appearance of illusory buildings or scenery in the air or on the ground due to the reflection and refraction of light on the seashore or in the desert. Now it generally refers to something that is illusory.
Let's take a look at the provenance of this sentence first. The "Records of History" contains the "Eight Books" that record various cultural contents such as liturgy, legality, and astrology, and the "Book of Heavenly Officials" is the oldest astronomical monograph at present. Because in the Book of Han. The more than 400 volumes of ancient astronomical books recorded in the Yiwen Zhi were basically lost by the Sui and Tang dynasties.
Chinese good at observing the stars and corresponding the changes in the stars in the sky to the mortal secular world, creating a rich cultural connotation. Some special astronomical phenomena in ancient times have also been able to calculate and confirm scientific theories through the records of the ancient Chinese. As you can imagine, how unfortunate it is to lose a large number of astronomical books. Fortunately, there is also the "Chronicle of History. Book of Heavenly Officials"
"Heavenly official" refers to the stars in the sky, because the ancients believed that the stars in the sky corresponded to the kings and subjects of the world, and there was a hierarchy.
The star system is called "Jing", the sky is divided into five major stars according to the direction, and we can often hear these mysterious names, such as Zhonggong Ziwei, Donggong Canglong, Nangong Zhu bird, Xigong Xianchi (non-white tiger), and Beigong Xuanwu. There are also stars around each house, forming a layout of twenty-eight stars. The planetary system is called "latitude", which can also correspond to our current solar system, Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, and Saturn are called Taibai, Nianxing, Chenxing, Yinglu and Filler, respectively.
Sima Qian recorded the stars, not simply love science, at that time the changes in the stars are often regarded as changes in the human world, especially special celestial phenomena such as meteors, eclipses, etc., often make people feel nervous, and then explained that there is a disaster in the human world or the monarch's loss of morality, the stars have become an important symbol of divination, even to fight a war to see the night sky, observe the auspiciousness of the celestial signs.
Mirages we ancients have known for a long time, and the legends of Penglai Wonderland are mostly related to this. The distant sea looks like a fairy island looming, but it is impossible to find it, so it is not a fairyland.
Mirage is a kind of sea monster in our ancient myths and legends, and you may not imagine its shape, because this thing is like a large oyster, and in the past people thought that the illusion of the sea was a mirage exhaling.
Modern people can easily explain the causes of mirages, thanks to the rapid popularization of modern science. Because the density of hot and cold air is different, light has different refractive indexes in different densities of air, so the light reflected by objects on the earth may be refracted by the atmosphere after refracting the virtual image, which is the mirage phenomenon.
In the past, it was seen mostly on the surface of the sea, and later it was often seen in the desert. Today, we can also see in the city's asphalt roads, lakes, snow fields and other places, as long as the surface and the air form a thermal gradient, resulting in uneven heating of the air, there may be this spectacle born.
In ancient times, Qin Shi Huang and Emperor Wu of Han liked to send people to Penglai to search for fairyland, wanting to live forever, it can be seen that the illusory scene has a great impact on our human brain, we have always thought that seeing is believing, but in many cases it deceives us fiercely. When everyone believes in an illusory imagination and forms a tight system, the power of cohesion is sometimes shocking enough.