Part Two: Physics

Chapter Six: The Very, Very Large

6.1 As The Pancake Turns...

As we begin to explore the halls of science, I turn first, as our ancestors did, to the heavens.  Astronomy and cosmology are older than recorded history.

BIG WORDS.  From here on in we will be using some terms and jargon that may not be familiar to many of you.  We are going to be looking into our cumulative knowledge of the harder sciences.  For the faint of mind I offer a quick word of encouragement.  Science is not tough.  Look at it this way: if we can remember the names and personalities of our favorite sit-com characters, we can remember a few new terms and the properties of the actors in the cosmic drama called The Material World.

It is easy to empathize with the environmentally concerned factions when you see the earth from a position in space for the first time. The atmosphere is frighteningly thin. It seems so frail. Fortunately for it (and us) the vacuum of space does not shear off, by friction, any of its protective envelope. Gravity holds the light air molecules tightly against the earth’s breast. We represent the only immediate danger to its life sustaining systems.

Gravity, a concept imparted to our schoolchildren at an early age, was not a concept which was understood until Isaac Newton (1642-1727) some three hundred years ago. Not very long ago even in historical time. There was a great deal of knowledge, discoveries made mainly by the Greeks, that had been retained by the Arab world who did not suffer through the Middle Age period that gripped a stagnating Europe for almost a thousand years. In fact, the Arabs made many significant discoveries of their own before the texts they held began being converted into Latin and made available to Europe during the renaissance. It’s a humorous tale of daring do when Christopher Columbus set sail to discover the New World 1492, because only the educated class understood the spherical nature of our globe. We chuckle at the ignorant notion of Columbus’s ships sailing off the edge of a flat pancake shaped world. The renaissance, which officially began in 1350AD, had been underway less than two hundred years when Chris began his voyage and the average person was yet to be privy to such arcane knowledge as that the world was actually a ball - with everything held in place on all sides by the mysterious force later to be known as gravity.  This knowledge would only come to light another one hundred years later around the end of the 1500's.

It’s hard to appreciate the struggle of human advancement towards our current Technological Age. One needs to call to mind so many setbacks without ever really knowing the fullness of knowledge that may have been lost. The burning of the Great Library at Alexandria. All the knowledge lost (at least for a time) in the middle ages. The early Greeks and Egyptians knew the world was round, although they

It was not until the Renaissance that things really began to rock and roll. Although the concept of printing has been around for thousands of years in the middle and far east (an ancient process of stamping a soft material like wax or clay), the automation of printing with the invention of the printing press assured once and for all that knowledge would never again be lost to future generations. In the same way that language allowed a collective knowledge to be passed down and improved upon, the written word accelerated the pace and allowed a greater number of people to be “in the know”. Because books were more accurate than reciting from rote memory many of the early books were sought to be banned by the renaissance Church.

It was once ‘common knowledge’ among the uneducated masses that the earth was flat. Christopher Columbus was famous not only for discovering the New World, but also for proving wrong what was held by a great many of the time to be truth. The flat earth theory stands as an icon for how easily ‘common knowledge’ can wrong. The flat earth belief not only reminds us how knowledge can be false, but it also shows that knowledge can be refined as time goes by - providing someone has the courage to prove us all wrong. It was known that the earth was round by any educated Greek thousands of years before Christopher Columbus. 

Nicolaus Copernicus¹ (1473-1543) is widely considered to be the father of astronomy.  He was the first to correctly deduce that the earth and planets revolved around the sun.  Like many men of science to follow, Nicolaus's discoveries were originally banned by the church and only published near the end of his life.

The Problem of Easter