Part Two: Physics

Chapter Six: The Very, Very Large

6.2 The Classical World

Space. The final frontier. When we talk about The Universe, just what are we talking about anyway? Just how big is big and just how empty is empty space. Information that we take so much for granted today was unavailable to our ascendants. In general the world was a much smaller place then. The Unseen world was just next door- under our feet or just above the clouds. The ground and sky at least could be seen. Everyone felt reasonably cozy and safe from a cosmological perspective. Our God(s) were comfortingly close at hand. It was not until modern times that our world was transformed into a small little speck in an inconceivably vast universe.

Medieval Europeans believed the world was flat and was at the center of all things. They subscribed to the earlier Greek notions of Ptolemy. Just us and our Gods to look after us. Nice and cozy little family. That is how it is, now go pick berries or something. Myth and religion still held the answers to the secrets of the sky. It wasn’t particularly difficult to see what was happening. The sun and moon and stars quite clearly revolved around us. We certainly had no sensation of movement ourselves, so it had to be everything else that were moving. Looping around and around for ever and ever. What threw the monkey wrench into this ‘common knowledge’ of early civilization was the disorderly movement of the planets. They confounded early astronomers back into the times of the Greeks and Romans.

The dancing or ‘wandering’ planets¹ first called our attention to a problem with the ancient idea that

Archaeoastronomy

Archaeoastronomy is an interdisciplinary field that relates archaeology, anthropology, and mythology with astronomy. It is sometimes called historical astronomy. The best-known evidence that early humankind used the sky is Stonehenge, near Salisbury, England. Built between 3100 and 1550 BC, Stonehenge consists of an impressive array of megaliths and lintels arranged as stone portals that are precisely aligned in relationship to the sun on an ancient summer solstice, which occurred on June 24. Today the summer solstice falls on June 20 or 21. Over the millennia, solstices shift slightly forward in the calendar. Astronomers have accounted for this shift by observing that the Earth precesses slowly as it rotates on its axis, like a top that wobbles as it spins. This precession makes one complete cycle every 26,000 years. This phenomenon causes the time of the solstices and equinoxes to change and also causes, over time, changes in the apparent location of a polestar, or North Star.

There are at least 900 other structures of a similar nature that exist in the British Isles alone. At Carnac on the western coast of France are more than 3,000 stone monuments for which astronomical alignments have been claimed.

Newgrange, northwest of Dublin, Ireland, is a Neolithic tomb, part of which was built as early as 3100 BC. It also indicates probable early knowledge of astronomy. The tomb has a long, narrow passage with a slitlike opening that appears to have been designed and engineered to permit the sunlight to enter the burial chamber at the far end momentarily on the morning of the winter solstice.

From architectural studies of ancient Egypt, there is considerable evidence of early, though not prehistoric, astronomical knowledge. The base of the Great Pyramid at Giza is aligned closely with the four points of the compass, and its hidden north passage is aligned with the lower culmination of the North Star at the time the pyramids were built (between 2686 and 2345 BC). The great temple of Amon, or Amen (Ra), at El Karnak was aligned with the midwinter sunrise during the epoch of Thutmose III (1479-26 BC). A nearby temple of Khonsu, the Egyptian moon god, was built to align with the distant hills of Thebes, the northernmost extreme of the setting of the new moon crescent at the time of the summer solstice.

The Dresden Codex, written by the Maya during the 1st millennium of the Christian era, contains astronomical calculations--eclipse-prediction tables, the synodic period of Venus--of exceptional accuracy. Temples and pyramids in what are now Mexico and Guatemala were often constructed and aligned with attention to astronomical phenomena.

The Plains Indians left stone patterns called medicine (magic) wheels, found along the eastern boundary of the Rocky Mountains from Colorado to Alberta and Saskatchewan. One of the best known is on top of Medicine Mountain, in the Bighorn Mountains west of Sheridan, Wyo. It is accessible only in the summer, and calculations have been made relating the arrangements of crude sandstone to the sunrise and sunset about the time of the summer solstice and to bright stars that would have been visible at the time archaeologists estimate its construction, about 200 to 400 years ago. Another medicine wheel, at Moose Mountain in southeastern Saskatchewan, has demonstrably similar relationships but has been estimated as dating from about 2,600 years ago.

A number of stone alignments have also been found in the South Pacific. Such stones on land would, of course, be useless at sea, but it has been suggested that the sites were used for observation and to train voyagers to identify the correct navigational stars before their departure. For example, the Micronesians and Polynesians used as navigational tools strings of bright stars that rose or set near the same point on the horizon. The Caroline Islanders had a 32-point star compass for defining this point, using Vega, the Pleiades, and other stars.

This article² was contributed by Dr. Gerard P. Kuiper, Late Director of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona, and by Dr. Thomas L. Swihart, Professor of Astronomy, University of Arizona.

the earth was at the center of all things. If everything in the sky revolved around earth, how could these wandering stars seeming stand still, move backwards, or speed up? It was trying to answer this question that mathematics, specifically geometry, came to act as our guide to understanding our world, what surrounds it, and began the science of astronomy. Geometry gave us our first inspiration to guess what else it could be. And even in theory it appeared to solve the problem beautifully even though it was an affront to everyday "common" knowledge. It is another fabulous clue to existence and quite ironic that the first giant leap in Understanding began with geometry. As Plato pointed out, geometry is a pure abstraction. Pure mind. Until expressed on paper, it has no reality whatsoever, and yet it was the greatest tool ever in solving the riddles of ancient times. Indeed, Plato believed that true reality was one of abstraction and that the material world was just a poor representation of it. For Plato true reality lay in the mind.

One cannot consider space, or the heavens, without also considering Time. This is a consideration that the ancient Greeks and Romans of classical times made sort of a national priority of. Besides war of course. I shall dare to say that all of the earliest understanding of the skies related to time. And this having to do with food, or more precisely Agriculture. When to plant for best results. When the seasonal rains were due, and so on. As we saw from the last chapter, it was the Church’s quest for a more accurate calendar that rekindled the science of astronomy in the Renaissance. It was time that has in many ways been

Alchemy Even during the middle ages, science was quietly at work in the background. This early science, as much magic as experiment, was known as alchemy.

Time

"There is a purpose to time. It keeps everything from happening at once." - Time Traveler from the movie Disaster In Time.

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#1 plan-et (planit) n. [[ME planete < OFr < LL planeta < Gr planetes, wanderer < planan, to lead astray, wander < IE base *pla-, flat, spread out > PLAIN1]] 1 orig., any of the celestial objects with apparent motion (as distinguished from the apparently still stars), including the sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn 2 now, a large, opaque, nonluminous mass, usually with its own moons, that revolves about a star; esp., one of the sun's nine major planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto: see also ASTEROID 3 Astrol. any celestial body thought of as influencing human lives [Back to Text]


	©2001 Jon Youngblood Unity Through Understanding A Guidebook for the Recently Alive

Unity Through Understanding

Part Two: Physics

Chapter Six: The Very, Very Large

6.2 The Classical World

Home Introduction Forward Part One Part Two Part Three - Links by Topic Timeline Glossary