by Srinidhi Alladi, I B.Com (Accounting and Finance)
“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.” - Stephen Hawking
Some of us may believe in the creation of the Universe being in the hands of a Special Someone, others seek refuge in the theory of a single point expanding and stretching.
Our ability to even have a choice of what to believe in is the result of those now dubbed “the greatest minds in history” who were thinking and writing about the beginnings of this world all their lives. Imagine getting paid to think – then again, there wasn’t a lot of living expense to consider back then.
We all know the usual greats – Socrates, Aristotle, Galileo, Hawking and so on. What we don’t know is that though these people are highly accredited in the world of science, they were also thinkers, philosophers and believers. After some investigation of my own, this is what I have come to understand – it would take a considerable amount of dedication to their work to be able to understand what they have communicated to the rest of the world.
A little bit on Aristotle – born in Greece, he is considered to be one of the most influential thinkers in human history. His works covered an extremely wide range of topics varying from ethics to physics. One of the reasons why Aristotle is so widely known is because he directly tutored Alexander the Great – a man who grew up to conquer a large chunk of the world we know. That gave Aristotle a bit of an edge when it came to publishing his work.
One of his books is called “On The Heavens” (ΠΕΡΙ ΟΥΡΑΝΟΥ) that encompasses his observations regarding the universe. The first main component of his book talks about the nature of the universe. He described the four main elements – earth, fire, water and air. He also believed a fifth element existed called aether (the material that fills the region of the universe above the terrestrial sphere). Another segment of the book was on motion. Aristotle believed that everything that moved was moved by something – basically a less polished version of Newton’s first law of motion. And most importantly he also created a model of the universe popularly known as the ‘Geocentric Model’, where the earth was at the center followed by the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, and the stars in a fixed position.
With all this information and inspiration, the thinkers yet to come had a base to bounce ideas off of. For example, Galileo Galilei. He improved upon the telescope to discover many things about our universe – that the moon had craters, that Jupiter had four moons, and he set out to prove Copernicus’ theory that the Earth revolved around the sun (and not the other way around).
An unfortunate contribution is that of Thales – who believed that the Earth is a disk... Floating… On an endless ocean. His argument: the Earth is at rest because it is of the nature of wood and similar substances to have the capacity to float on water, but not on air. Seems ridiculous now, but there are some people who believed it. Go figure. Thankfully, Anaximander, a Greek philosopher (a contemporary of Thales) was the first person to make detailed maps of the Earth and the sky. He knew that the Earth was round, free-floating and unsupported. However, he is known for his greatest contribution -- being the first to conceptualize that space has depth.
Now for some female representation! Probably the most underappreciated women to ever go down in human history – Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, a woman who proposed in her Ph.D thesis an explanation for the composition of stars, and Annie Jump Cannon who was a member of the Harvard Astronomers called “Pickering’s Women”. The Director of the college observatory hired women to organize data relating to the stellar classification of stars. Annie single-handedly classified 400,000 stars and discovered 300 variable stars. Another woman named Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who was a part of the same group, discovered that a specific variable star called a Cepheid, could be used as a distance marker – making it possible to determine astronomical distances to objects.
In my opinion, Stephen Hawking was the first person to have an accurate view of how the universe began. His book, A Brief History of Time, was the ultimate source of information for us common folk to understand the mysteries of the universe.
Of course, there are many other people in history that have contributed to our current understanding of the universe and fortunately there will be many more to come, because there are still a multitude of secrets to discover and wonders to behold in this ever-expanding universe.