revolutionaries of the cosmos the astro-physicists jan 2006

[...]... cupboard, and some beds There were many clergy, monks, and nuns of the Catholic church, who depended on the rest of the population for their support The Church was by far the largest organisation of the times, dominating life in every way Apart from taking care of the souls of the population, it provided for various social needs, such as looking after the poor and the sick It offered most of the school-level... discovered the laws followed by planetary orbits While this was an essential step in the process that led to Newton’s theory of gravitation, his way of thinking was a hybrid of the mystical and the scientific Though in the early decades of the seventeenth century there were several who elaborated the finds of Kepler and Galileo, it was the masterly synthesis by Newton that laid the foundations of mechanics... the real method must have been He devised a simple form of lever balance that could be used to determine the mass and volume of an irregular lump of metal using Archimedes’ principle, that the apparent loss of weight when an object is weighed in air and then in water is equal to the mass of water displaced By dividing the mass of the body by the mass of water displaced, he obtained the density of the. .. have repeated the statement of Bernard of Chartres, who lived in the twelfth century, ‘We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, able to see further than they because we are carried high and raised up by their giant stature’ For the most part their advances can be attributed to the application of new ideas drawn from the simultaneously developing field of physics To the scientist, the modern era... for dramatic changes to the world-pictures they inherited They showed that celestial objects are made of materials familiar to us on earth and that they obey the same physical and chemical laws They displaced first the earth, then the sun, and finally the galaxy from being the centre of the universe Yet the inspiration for their insights was drawn from ideas already in circulation They could each, like... examination of the sky While incidentally this led to the discovery of the first planet not known to the ancients, his quantitative investigation of the Milky Way and his discovery of stars that were in orbit around one another were even more important The latter showed that gravity was not confined to our own solar system but controlled the orbits of bodies far away in the depths of space In the nineteenth... recognised the value of the pendulum as a precise timekeeper, supposedly by using his own pulse to time a swinging lamp in the cathedral of Pisa, while his mind was wandering from the subject of some tedious sermon! He noticed that the time taken by one swing of a pendulum is essentially independent of the arc of the swing The real scientific awakening for Galileo came when he met Ostilio Ricci, a mathematician... understanding the interiors of the stars Still falling within the modern period, but 300 years after its beginning, was the last of the figures in this book, Edwin Hubble He proved that the galaxies lie beyond the Milky Way and determined their distances From his lifelong study of the redshift-distance relation he is regarded as the founder of modern observational cosmology Since about the time of Hubble’s... simplification could be made if the sun was taken to be the centre of the planetary system For example, the periods of revolution of the planets would then increase in accordance with their distances from the centre, which was not the case in the Aristotelian scheme Unfortunately, it was difficult to produce evidence that his model was the correct one He did not, of course, know that the actual planetary paths... On the other hand, the degree of opposition that often arose towards a new fact shows that contrarian thinking and a determination to proceed in spite of opposition from the established members of the profession were also essential Another significant personal trait is that many of the innovators in this book combined practical ability with their mathematical competence The fact that they had a feel for . social 1 Full title: History of Physical Astronomy from the Earliest Ages to the Middle of the Nineteenth Century. Comprehending a Detailed Account of the Establishment of the Theory of Gravitation by Newton,. demolished a favourite tenet of the Aristotelians, that the earth was the only centre of rotation in the universe. Further, his finding of the moon-like phases of the planet Venus demonstrated. step in the process that led to Newton’s theory of gravitation, his way of thinking was a hybrid of the mystical and the scientific. Though in the early decades of the seventeenth century there