Historical View of Man’s Place in the Cosmos

When the last Ice Age ended about ten thousand years ago and our ancestors around the world looked up into the sky, did they see different objects than we see today or did they just see the same objects we see today but see those objects differently? Since mankind has existed, we suspect that people have stared up at the stars at night and wondered about them. We will never know what those first “astronomers” thought because they have left us no records. However, about five thousands years ago, mankind began leaving us clues about what they saw and perhaps what they thought when they looked up in the sky. The one thing that is certain is that ancient man saw much more in the sky than we do today. In most of the world today, light (not only visible but also all electromagnetic radiation) pollution from cities and the activities of people have dimmed our view of the nighttime sky considerably. Ancient man also spent more time looking up at the nighttime sky than we do today and knew a great deal more about its movements and changes.

The oldest evidence that we have found of continuing interest in astronomy may be the Stones of Carnac in France. The earliest of these stones dates from about 4,500 B.C. The region contains many upright stones that are found in lines or circles and range in height from 0.8 meters to 6.5 meters. The question as to whether the stone were used as signposts, burial markers, or astronomical aides of some kind is currently being researched. Possible alignments of the stones with the sun or moon in some special pattern are the focus of the research.

Another ancient site with questionable astronomical connections is Pentre Ifan in Wales that dates from 3,500 B.C. No actual alignments with the sun or moon’s rising or setting positions or with the position of a particular star have been uncovered. The actual site has a 16-ton stone suspended on other stone supports eight feet off the ground.

The oldest site that has definite astronomical connections is Newgrange passage Tomb in Ireland that dates from about 3,200 B.C. For about 2 weeks on either side of the winter solstice, light passes through a roof box above the entrance passage. This incoming light causes the entire central passageway to be illuminated. Many of the stones that make up Newgrange are decorated with symbols that look like the sun.

The most famous English site for Neolithic astronomical use is Stonehenge. The main stones of the site date from about 3,000 B.C. Some people believe that the clear alignments of the stones with the sun and the moon allowed the Druids who built it to predict solar and lunar eclipses. However, most people believe that the very rough alignment of the main axis of the monument that faces the horizon where the Sun rises on the summer solstice is more a recognition of some religious importance attached to this date rather than of some astronomically predictive value of the monument.

Whatever ancient monument we view, whether it is in Europe, Africa, South America, or Asia we can be certain that every ancient culture had a view that put the earth at rest at the center of the universe. The Egyptians saw the sky as the arched body of the goddess Nut; the Hindus saw the sky resting on the tusks of an immense elephant; the Babylonians saw the sky as the inside of a huge bell jar; and the Arabs more recently saw the sky as an immense tent. In Greece and in later Alexandria, the actual number of views of the earth’s position in the universe had probably multiplied to equal the number of philosophers. Only a very few of these descriptions suggested that the earth actually turned.

The first individual that modern man identifies with a moving earth is Aristarchus who lived in Greece in the third century B.C. He suggested that the earth and the other planets revolve around the sun. His analysis was ignored. The man whose view of the universe was to become the accepted view of the Western World until at least the seventeenth century was Plato (~427-327 B.C.). Plato is arguably the most influential secular philosopher of all time. His grip on the Western World’s philosophical and astronomical views is beyond compare and lasted for about 2,000 years!

Simply described, Plato’s universe was built on the perfection of circles, spheres, and the immutable heavens made by an all-powerful creator. Plato’s knowledge of the universe was based his “perfect” logic, reason, and philosophical deductions and not on the observations of his “imperfect” senses. He placed the immobile Earth at its center and that is where it stood for the next 2,000 years.

The perfection of Plato’s astronomical schema was captured in the Almagest, a book written by Ptolemy of Alexandria (circa 150 A.D.), the famous Egyptian Astronomer. The Almagest is Ptolemy’s surviving star catalogue that contained the positions and apparent magnitudes of more than 1,000 stars. Hipparchus (circa 150B.C.) was the original developer of the magnitude scale but his smaller star catalogue has not survived until today. Because Ptolemy’s Almagest was critical to anyone who wished to know the names and positions of stars accurately enough to predict the passage of the planets among them, it became extremely valuable to every astrologer and astronomer for the next 1500 years.

St. Thomas Aquinas was arguably the most important and prolific Italian theologian and saint in the Roman Catholic Church for the entire time from the writing of the Gospels until the Renaissance. Lending to the enduring nature of Plato’s ideas about the nature of the world, in general, and astronomy, in particular, was the work of St. Thomas Aquinas. In the words of Dava Sobel, author of Galileo’s Daughter:

This consonance (between the harmony of Paradise and Aristotle’s distinction between the corruptible Earthly matter and the immutable perfection of the heavens) was no coincidence, but the fruit of the labors of the prolific Italian theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas, who grafted the third-century-B.C. writings of Aristotle onto thirteenth-century Christian doctrine. The compelling words of St. Thomas Aquinas had reverberated through the Church and the nascent universities of Europe for hundreds of years, helping the word of Aristotle gain the authority of holy writ, long before Galileo began his book about the architecture of the heavens.

To this world of the sixteenth century, with its total agreement between the all-powerful Church and the astronomers of the time came Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543). Copernicus, himself a cleric, had his notion of a heliocentric universe published as he lay on his deathbed. Except for his exchange of the position of the Earth and the Sun at the center of the Universe, Copernicus’ model resembled Ptolemy’s in every way. It was every bit as complex with its circular orbits, immutable heavenly spheres, and series of epicycles to account for the retrograde movements of some planets. At the time Copernicus published his views on the Universe, the popes of the time had their hands full with the Protestant Reformation instigated by Martin Luther. They were in no mood to discuss the movement of the Earth from its sacred placement at the center of the universe. The Church labeled this heliocentric view as suspect at best and heretical at worst. As proof of the reverence that the Church held for the Geocentric View, a Dominican friar Giordano Bruno was burned alive at the stake in Rome of refusing to recant his statements that the Earth actually moved.

It was into this world of rigidly held astronomical ideas that Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) thrust himself with his new scientific method and telescope. Galileo’s discoveries of spots on the surface of the Sun, of mountains on the moon, of moons circling the planet Jupiter, and the phases of the planet Venus put him in direct confrontation with the teachings of the Church and the Geocentric View of the Universe. Using the incredibly accurate data accumulated by Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) over twenty years of painstakingly careful astronomical observations without the aide of a telescope, Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) showed that the motions of Mars were not in good agreement with the Geocentric View of Ptolemy nor with the Heliocentric view of Copernicus. He discovered that he could resolve the discrepancies he found by changing the Copernican model to include orbits that were ellipses instead of circles. Finally in 1687, Sir Issac Newton published his Principia Mathematica in which he published his development of calculus, his formulation of the laws of motion, and his discovery of the law of gravitation. That enabled Newton to give a physical explanation for the accurate description of planetary motions that Kepler had derived from Tycho’s measurements.

With Newton’s final analysis, present day mankind has come to understand that we on the Earth reside on a planet that rotates on its axis every 24 hours or so while it revolves around the Sun every 365 and ¼ days or so. The Sun in turn rotates on its own axis every 25 days or so at its equator while it revolves around the center of The Milky Way Galaxy every two hundred or so million years. Finally we realize that the Milky Way Galaxy is caught in the midst of billions of swirling, spinning, and evolving other galaxies that are hurtling across the Universe at speeds approaching that of light itself.