The Universe.

Myths and Misconceptions

This age of human daring and resourcefulness is dawning at a time when man’s concept of the larger cosmos beyond his own planet is more humbling than ever before. Whereas he once thought with utmost confidence that the entire universe-moon, sun, planets and myriad stars –revolved around him, he knows that the earth is one smallish planet of a medium-sized star in the outskirts of only one among uncounted billions of galaxies. Man has not begun to amass knowledge even of the nearby moon at firsthand, but he has penetrated many of the greatest mysteries of space by observing celestial events at a distance and making careful deductions about what he has seen.

In Ancient Times

From the earliest prehistory, man has gazed into the flat confusion of the night sky and pondered the glittering configurations he saw there. Before writing was invented, man had names for the celestial bodies. Before he conceived of ethical systems, he bowed to images of the sun and moon. Before devised sand glasses or water clocks, he followed the the heavenly motions, numbering the days, months, seasons and years. To nomad seafarer, the stars in the sky were signposts that told directions. To farmers and herdsman, the moon’s phases and the sun’s annual journey foretold the times of planting and of rains. The earliest astronomy was an eminently practical pursuit long before the cause in which it was undertaken earned the name of a science.

Humanity Takes a Step Forward

Man’s path to the launching pad has not been easy. Many ideas that seem common sense today were once that very opposite. They contradicted what the eye saw and required pyramid of difficult deductions and endless nights of watching with crude instruments before they could be proved. The sky, in the eyes of the observers, was a great vault, set nightly with tiny flecks of fire. The sun moved across the vault everyday, rising out of the seas to the east and plunging to bed in the western ocean. The pale moon, brightest of all bodies in the night sky, seemed to be some sort of feminine creature, waxing and waning on a 29 day cycle.

Some Major Problems

But even this simple picture of the heavens contained difficulties. A person armed with nothing but a straight stick could see that the sun’s daily path across the sky was not changeless. Moreover, the wheel of its season brought heat and cold, floods and drought. A count of the moon’s recurrent extinctions helped to time these seasonal changes approximately, but not exactly: by moon-count, the floods of springs or the rains of autumn might come early or late. It took the patient counting of untold generation to discover that 12 lunar months does not make a year, but fall 11 days short. And what could be said about eclipses, when the bright master of day or the softer lamp of the night was slowly extinguished, only to be restored? More puzzling still, the fiery flecks the stars were all sensibly fixed in place on the revolving, heavenly vault; all, that is, except for five erratic wanderers, the visible planets that we know as Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

Awareness of different civilizations towards the Cosmos

The Mayas were superlative astronomers. Their calendar was in many ways, more convenient than the system of weeks, months, years and February 29^th that we use today. They predicted eclipses and worked out the length of solar year and the lunar month with amazing precision. Unfortunately, since we can read only the Mayas numbers not their words, the full extent of their astronomical knowledge is remains unknown.

The first truly scientific astronomers appeared among the Greeks. The Greeks had an invaluable scientific asses-geometry-which they developed, along with astronomy, into a marvelous instrument. In the city of Miletus, as early as 600 B.C., the philosopher Thales conceived of the Earth as round. Two centuries later, the disciples of Pythagoras maintained that the Earth is spherical and also moved through space. Unfortunately the Pythagorean mixed their brilliant deductions with mystic numerology. They had evidence for nine different circular motions in the sky: that of the fixed stars and five planets, the earth, moon and sun. But nine in their view was an imperfect number, so they brought total up to 10 by inventing an “anti-earth” that always stayed side of the world where it could never be seen-at least not by Greeks.