Multitude of Wonders

A Multitude of Wonders

Every civilization has scanned the heavens for clues to the Creation The next time you peer at the night sky and spot the North Star or the Big Dipper, think of the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, and Mayans doing the same thing. Written records of astronomical findings and theories go back the dawn of history.

The first students of astronomy were probably the Chinese. It is said that in 2159 B.C. Two Chinese astronomers, Hi and Ho, were executed for failing to predict an eclipse. Scientists now say the two could have been spared if the official calendar had been more accurate. By 750 B.C., the Chinese were keeping accurate records of meteors, and an astronomer named Shih Shen prepared what was probably the earliest star catalogue around 350 B.C.

Photo by Elena

The Babylonians and Assyrians knew the approximate length of the year several centuries before the birth of Christ. In pre-Christian Egypt, where the astronomers were priests, the main purpose of astronomy was to keep a calendar. Both the Egyptians and Babylonians learned to build fairly accurate sundials for time-keeping. The earliest Egyptian sundial, still preserved today, is from the eighth century, B.C. The Greeks took their study of the heavens a step further than the Chinese and the Egyptians by trying to explain what they saw.

The great Greek astronomer Thales, born in 624 B.C., introduced geometric concepts into astronomy and may have realized that the earth is a globe. His contemporary, Anaximander, may have been the first to speculate on the relative distances of the Sun, the moon, and the planets. Aristotle argued against the traditional theory that the earth is flat. He recognized the changing shape of the moon during the month and considered the possibility that the earth revolves around the sun rather than the sun around the earth.

The Greek astronomer Ptolemy was the first to calculate the distance to the moon, in about 140 B.C., using a technique that is essentially the same as the one used today. The next astronomical leaps forward came from the Hindus, who developed our current system of numbers and place counting, and the Arabs, who took the Hindu number system and developed algebra. The Arab astronomers Muhammad al Battani, working in the late ninth and early 10the century, A.D., predicted eclipses and complied tables of the sun’s and planets’ positions.

It took Nicolaus Copernicus, a 16th-century Polish scientist, to argue scientifically that the earth and other planets revolve around the sun and not the other way around, as people before then believed. Copernicus’s theory of the solar system was embraced by the Italian scientist, Galileo Galilei, who built a powerful telescope for studying the moon and the planets in the early 17th century, and figured out that gravity pulls a light object to Earth as fast as a heavy one.

Galileo was followed by Isaac Newton, who built the first reflecting telescope and firmly established the role of gravity in the laws of motion. Newton also figured out that white light is a blend of all the colors of the rainbow. Knowing that, scientists today are able to study the composition of stars by analyzing the spectrum of light that they give off.