eBookSecond Edition, Second edition (Second Edition, Second edition)
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
The single biggest and most difficult question that exists? From early religions through Greek Philosophy and Western Science, man has attempted to discover the meaning of the Universe and our place within it.
In the last twenty year these debates have all been stood on their head by amazing discoveries, big bang theory and ideas about new sub-atomic layers. The nature of Time and Space are truly up for grabs.
With a witty and accessible style Osborne leads us on a historical and informative adventure through the philosophies of the universe; including the importance of telescopes, mathematics and relativity theory and ending with contemporary mind-expanding concepts such as the reversibility of time and parallel universes.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781842439319 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Oldcastle Books |
| Publication date: | 03/30/2007 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 209 KB |
About the Author
Richard Osborne is the author of the internationally bestselling Philosophy for Beginners and the guide to all things cultural, Megawords.
Read an Excerpt
The Universe
Explained, Condensed and Exploded
By Richard Osborne
Oldcastle Books
Copyright © 2007 Richard OsborneAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84243-933-3
CHAPTER 1
From Stars in their Eyes to Telescopes and Beyond
Our modern ideas of the Universe, by which we mean basically scientific ideas that depend on observation, explanation and evidence, can be traced back to Nicolaus Copernicus in the fifteenth century, but they needed an awful lot of development before we were up to speed. Working out which way the planets go around isn't quite the same as working out when the Universe started, or how, or of understanding the forces at work in the Universe. The reason that Copernicus was so important, however, was that his model of the Universe was the first that was entirely based on a rational examination of all the known facts. In other words, he didn't let belief or general opinion sway him in any way. In one very interesting sense, his model was based on pure theoretical speculation rather than common-sense views: it got to the heart of the fact that the Universe wasn't like a bigger version of human society but had its own strange laws. The older Ptolemaic (earth-centred) system had used fancy maths to bend our view of the Universe into something that just about worked, as long as you ignored the bits that didn't add up, like the fact that some planets appeared to go backwards and have funny orbits. The continued belief in the earth-centred theory was undoubtedly because everybody wanted there to be a small, regular Universe, in which everything moved in neat spheres with the earth in the middle. Copernicus's model went against this common sense, which is why he didn't want to publish it, and, because of that counter-intuitive approach, science has never looked back. Copernicus didn't prove that the Universe was a lot more complicated than everyone thought, but he pushed the door open so wide it couldn't be shut again.
Once again, it would be actual observations that would take the arguments further, in the persons of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, who teamed up in Prague in 1601 to further their mutual interest in astronomy. However, it was always going to be observations teamed with mathematical theory that would expand true knowledge of the Universe. Brahe actually believed in the earth-centred stuff but couldn't help using his eyes. Kepler was, by all accounts, a lousy teacher, never in good health and couldn't see very well, which is why it was such a good thing that Tycho Brahe was such an unbelievably good observer of the heavens. Tycho's incredibly accurate observations, particularly of Mars, even without a telescope, threw up lots of problems with the basic Ptolemaic theory, in that his new observations didn't fit properly with the theory. Statistically speaking, Brahe's observations were estimated to be ten times more accurate than anybody else's at the time. He also discovered a supernova in a constellation of Cassiopeia, which is pretty good going for the time. (The instruments can still be seen in the Prague Museum of Technology.) Brahe himself believed in the Ptolemaic view of the Universe, which was ironic since his work effectively unpicked it. Apparently, he thought that God must have created a perfect Universe, in which everything would be regularly and neatly ordered and that, being a very tidy god, he would not have put stars randomly all over the place in huge empty spaces. (Because God only does rational, organised things by definition.) It is interesting just how often early theorists of the Universe start from a philosophical position and impose that belief on their observations. Brahe was a bit of a Neoplatonist (believed in essences and perfect structures), and so would then attempt to make the facts fit the theory, rather than consider them with a completely open mind.
Fortunately, Kepler wasn't like that and kept worrying about the problems that Tycho's observations had thrown up. He was also the maths whiz kid and, after Brahe died, he inherited his position of Imperial Mathematician (which sounds like something out of Harry Potter) but he couldn't manage to get paid – so not much has changed there for scientists and researchers. Kepler used Brahe's observations to show that the path of the planets was not circular, but actually elliptical and then he apparently cracked the only joke of his entire life when he said, 'I've laid an enormous egg' (you have to think about it). Kepler developed what he called laws of planetary motion, which again were quite extraordinary in terms of thinking about the relationship of the planets to the sun, and he alluded to some strange force he speculated about. He called it a 'whirling force' and it clearly prefigures what we later called gravity. His first two laws were published in 1609 and they were called the New Astronomy, for obvious reasons. One of Kepler's final three laws predicted that the way a planet behaved was in relation to its distance from the sun, which, being the largest planet, clearly affected the others, which also explained the elliptical orbits. He also calculated the most exact astronomical tables so far known, whose accuracy turned out to be right out there with the later observations made with telescopes.
Kepler's laws, which we shan't go into in any detail, dealt with the regularities of the movements of the planets and his whole outlook was summarised in the title of his great work, The Harmony of the World (1619). It would be fair to say that Kepler's use of mathematics to think about the motions of the planets laid the entire framework for conceptualising how the mysterious forces of the Universe functioned. Without his planetary laws, Newton's theory of gravity would not have been possible nor any of the new cosmology of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Kepler unfortunately died when travelling across Europe to try and get paid for some of his earlier work. In keeping with the earlier tradition of Copernicus, Kepler carefully predicted that Mercury would cross the sun on 7 November 1631 and then died just before it happened. The former demonstrated the regularity in the behaviour of the Universe that Kepler so admired. Another ironic regularity was that Kepler started out in life a pauper, worked incredibly hard and then died a pauper chasing up his meagre pay.
Kepler established that there was a connection between the time a planet took to go around (in its egg-shaped orbit) and its distance from the sun. This was important stuff, as was the utterly bizarre suggestion by the 'mathematician-comic' that it might be possible, working backwards, to work out the moment of the creation of the Universe. Now that was like laying a dinosaur egg and telling the world's best joke all at once. Admittedly, Kepler came to this idea because he thought the Universe had all of these strange and beautiful harmonies, sort of musical harmonies, but however you get to it, it is a profound and wonderful idea. Like Pythagoras before him, Kepler had believed that there was a mathematical and musical harmony at the heart of the Universe and that we might be able to unlock it, to find the hand of God. It is a mystical idea but the attraction of perfection is clearly a powerful one, albeit not up to the scale of gravity, which holds the Universe together in a more mundane but efficient way.
In 1600, when Kepler and Brahe first met, most people still believed that the earth was the centre of the Universe and that things moved about in perfect spheres. By 1700, hardly anybody believed this and scientific explanations were all the rage. The most curious thing about these developments in knowledge is not only their inter-connection, but also the strange and unlikely way in which advances in human knowledge get made; sometimes it is a miracle that any get made at all. For every astronomer in the sixteenth century, there were at least half a million others dedicated to superstition, war, alchemy and conquering other countries with extreme prejudice. Kepler really made the break between mysticism and astronomy, and made scientific explanations of planetary forces inevitable. One of the intriguing questions Kepler's endless puzzling away in a darkened room produces, apart from the question of why someone would spend ten years looking at the same observations, is just why is mathematics such an accurate and powerful means of speculating about the Universe? Or, in other words, why does mathematics work?
As though just to disprove the theory that astronomers were all boring, along came Galileo, cosmology's answer to Frank Sinatra – sort of Italian and sort of smoochy and a lot of, 'I did it my way'. Actually, he was completely Italian and generally a very good scientist. Born in Pisa in 1564, he is forever associated with the telescope, the Inquisition and the leaning tower from which he supposedly dropped things to prove that lighter and heavier things fall together, which is true. The bit about the tower may well have been a legend but he did experiment a lot on all sorts of things. He was also rude about lots of people, including the highly venerated philosopher, Aristotle, and charmed a lot of other people. Galileo got his hands on the newly invented telescope, improved it a bit and rushed into print, telling all astronomers to get one of these fancy new devices and look at Jupiter. He didn't actually claim to have invented the telescope but he definitely implied that his version of it was the real thing, which got him a well paid job via the Senate of Venice and thereby allowed him to do some very important stargazing. If he didn't write the song, he certainly exemplified the notion of 'I did it my way', because he pursued with great vigour a path that enabled him to make great discoveries, get rich and still be rude to people who were rather powerful. Rather more importantly, he also discovered Jupiter's satellites which, to coin a phrase, put the flying fox amongst the heavenly chickens, and he saw that there were far more stars than you could poke a celestial stick at. He also noticed that Venus, like the moon, had a range of sizes and changes that would be impossible according to the Ptolemaic version of the Universe (because of Venus's supposed place between the earth and the sun). Jupiter's moons, which clearly orbited around said planet, proved that there was not one fixed centre to the Universe, i.e. Rome, and that therefore, as I said before,' there's nowt so queer as the Universe'.
Strangely, at this very moment, a spaceship called Galileo, which has been orbiting Jupiter for the last eight years, providing untold information about Jupiter's moons, has just burnt up into the atmosphere after sending back evidence that there is water on one of the moons. Thus, 2003 may be the year when Galileo's observations pinpoint where there may indeed be life in the Universe. Back in 1610, Galileo made some speculations about these moons that he spied through his telescope, which sounded like a theory of gravity, but, importantly, it was the actual observations that changed things. Like, for example, his observation that our moon had craters and mountains, which meant that there had been change and development there as well as on earth, and thus once again contradicted the traditional view of a Universe fixed in aspic. The scientific implications of this were enormous, as were the political and religious effects. So, like a good diplomat, Galileo went around saying in print that the Church et al. were all backward and not up to speed, which led, as surely as the phases of the moon, to his getting sorted by the Inquisition.
Actually, the Papacy didn't really want to be terribly nasty to Galileo and Pope Urban VIII liked to have chats with him about the Universe and philosophy, but not in front of the children. However, when Galileo went for the big one and published a book in 1632, known as the Dialogo, which convincingly and completely set out the new Copernican system of the Universe, Pope Urban VIII lost it completely and condemned and prohibited all of the Copernican ideas. This sudden change of mind was very odd, as the Church almost seemed to be accepting the new view of the Universe, and caught everyone by surprise. Poor old Galileo had to write a retraction and sign it, and recant in public all his trendy ideas about the Universe, and then go off and hide in his villa. It's not known whether he blamed the newfangled telescope or if it was Venus that led him astray, but we know that his contribution blatantly outlasted that of the urbane Pope Urban (who sounds like a mass transit system).
What did this imbroglio prove? Mostly, that we all liked our fixed notions of the Universe, and that the Church very much liked the idea of its right to say what was right and what was wrong. But it also showed that science and religion are pretty much completely opposed and that this breach can be seen as the beginning of the end for the Holy Roman Empire. Perhaps that's what Pope Urban, belatedly, recognised. If the Church taught that the Universe was simple and perfect, and as Aristotle had argued, complete and full, then these newfangled ideas clearly implied that the Church was wrong. Given that the Pope was supposed to be infallible, this could be a serious problem. The idea that there were planets out there with moons flying about them that no one had ever known about, and that the earth whizzed about turning on its axis, was enough to turn a saint into a swearing sinner. Galileo had apparently called people who still believed in the old sun went round the earth stuff 'dumb idiots' and he implied the Pope was a simpleton in his Dialogo, so his retraction, as he well knew, looked pretty feeble. Galileo had seen through his telescope that the Milky Way was composed of a 'myriad of stars' and that nothing in the Universe was as simple as the earth-centred model. He also recognised political power, however, and bent his knee accordingly, with mockery and disdain.
Galileo also understood what he had seen through his telescope, however, and he knew that it was real and that nothing could put the Venus back into the Milo, or the Pope back into infallibility. He died in 1642 at the age of 78, quite sure that science would come out on top. Someone else once said that Galileo was the best scientist of the twentieth century, and the first one to use his eyes, or at least his telescope. Sometime earlier during Galileo's lifetime, Shakespeare had also written that wonderful line, 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy' (Hamlet – The Complete Works of Shakespeare, New York, Doubleday, 1967 p. 606). As so often, good old William put his finger right on the button. What Galileo had spied through his new telescope was not just moons, but another Universe, a wholly different space to anything we had thought about before.
For philosophers, like everyone else, this meant that we had to question many of the things that we had taken for granted, and the certainty of the world seemed to be evaporating in front of our new lenses. What was happening was that, as more and more people looked at the stars with telescopes and discovered more and more weird things flying about, it became obvious that the Universe was neither simple, fixed, static or easily understood. The idea that the Universe was a set size, which never changed, had been extremely common since the first cavemen had drawn bad pictures on walls (was this graffiti?) and has a deep psychological appeal. Apart from the infamous Heraclitus, the early Greek philosopher who argued that everything was in flux, and thereby claimed that the sun and the planets would probably blow up in due course, almost all thinkers and astronomers assumed that the Universe had always existed and would continue to do so. This idea of a finite, static Universe underpins every conservative view of the world that has ever existed, from the Babylonians to the Texans. From a general idea of a fixed Universe, all sorts of reactionary ideas can be assumed, like the notion of fixed male and female identities, or of gods and kings who rule things by natural decree. This is an important philosophical point that the Greeks realised. Ideas of the static and unchanging reality of being and nature lead more or less directly to repressive views of fixed political systems (idealism breeds repression. as someone once said), which empower elitism and unthinking political control. Thus, there is a connection between the stars of the nightly firmament and the leaders of the current political elite, and science and politics interact precisely in thinking about the fluidity of all things, particularly who owns and controls what. The famous moon landing in 1969 was as much about proving America's technological superiority over Soviet Russia as it was about exploring space, and was America's revenge on Russia for putting the first satellite into space in the 1950s.The Chinese have just announced that they are getting into space as well, and this is real geopolitics of the universal kind.
The idea of Galileo throwing balls off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or feathers or whatever, is a nice story but almost definitely not true. However, his work was to lead directly to Isaac Newton's famous work on grav-ity, which then got turned into another legend. What Galileo probably did was to roll different sized balls down a slope and then ascertain that balls of different weights moved at the same speed, or that some strange force acted on things equally. This was like thinking in miniature about the forces that made things whizz about in the whole Universe, like what made planets orbit, for example. Newton, who it is often said 'invented' gravity when an apple fell on his head (as though apples had never fallen on anyone else's head before), actually worked out the laws of motion of the Universe and theorised how the force of gravity might operate. It is possible that Newton was thinking about what caused apples to fall to the ground and that led to his theory of universal gravitation, but it was the mathematical mind that led him to the explanation, not a Cox's Pippin. (Weirdly, apples feature in a lot of legends from Adam and Eve onwards!)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Universe by Richard Osborne. Copyright © 2007 Richard Osborne. Excerpted by permission of Oldcastle Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
| 1 | Introduction: The Beginnings of Cosmology | 9 |
| 2 | From Stars in Their Eyes: To Telescopes, and Beyond | 33 |
| 3 | The Newtonian Revolution: Mechanics and Maestros | 47 |
| 4 | The Rise of Modern Cosmology: From Here to Eternity | 57 |
| 5 | New Dimensions | 75 |
| 6 | Holes, Bangs and Curvature: Eternity Gets Bigger | 91 |
| 7 | Epilogue: More Things You hadn't thought of | 107 |
| Further Useful Reading and Internet Sites | 123 |