Page 143 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol V

1920 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

As this story suggests, once they have explained the that many of the stars were themselves suns, each per-
origins of the universe, origin stories face many other haps with its own solar system. The new models gen-
complex questions: Can they explain the great variety erated during the early years of modern astronomy
and complexity of our universe? Which things came first, envisaged a universe much larger than Ptolemy’s, in
and which came later? Was there always conflict between which the place of the earth and human beings became
different parts of the universe, or was the universe once increasingly insignificant. By the end of the seventeenth
a place of harmony? A Californian creation myth from century, many accepted that the universe might be both
the Cupeno tribe offers its own symbolic answers to these eternal and infinite.
questions: “In the Beginning all was dark and void.A bag
hung in space. In time it opened out into two halves. An Expanding Universe
From one half came coyote (isil), from the other came The idea of an eternal universe created new problems.The
wild cat (tukut). They immediately fell to arguing as to astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) pointed out
which was older” (Sproul 1991, 242). Primeval chaos, that in an infinite universe there ought to be an infinite
gods, fertilized eggs, sexuality, and a primordial division number of stars and an infinite amount of light pouring
into two—these elements weave their way through many down on the earth both by day and by night.The devel-
traditional creation myths. opment of the theory of thermodynamics in the nine-
teenth century suggested another problem: in an infinitely
Early Scientific Theories old universe all useful energy ought to have dissipated
Modern scientific origin stories face the same questions into heat, leaving no free energy to create or sustain com-
and paradoxes, but they try to deal with them without plex objects such as stars, planets, and living beings.
supposing the existence of gods or even of intentionality. Solutions to these problems, along with a new view of
Can the origins of everything be explained purely by the the universe itself, emerged early in the twentieth century.
operation of blind natural laws? The question remains Studies of the structure of the universe revealed, first, that
open even today for, despite the spectacular achievements it consisted of many galaxies, not just the Milky Way, for
of modern cosmology, we still don’t know how best to many remote objects turned out to be galaxies in their
explain the moment of the universe’s origin. The origin own right. Then, in the late 1920s, Edwin Hubble
myths of medieval Europe, from which modern cosmol- (1889–1953) used the Mount Wilson telescope outside
ogy evolved, described how God created a universe of Los Angeles to show that most distant galaxies seemed
whose shape and movements could be described ration- to be moving away from earthbound observers. Techni-
ally within the cosmological models of the Egyptian cally, he found that the light from distant galaxies was
astronomer Ptolemy (2nd century CE). In Ptolemy’s sys- “red-shifted,” or moved to lower frequencies, which
tem, the earth lay at the center of the universe, sur- seemed to be the result of a Doppler shift. (The same
rounded by a series of transparent, revolving spheres to effect accounts for the drop in pitch of a siren as an am-
which were attached the planets, the sun, and the stars. bulance moves away from us.) Even more astonishingly,
Ptolemy’s model worked extremely well for a long time, he found that the farther away they were, the more “red-
and proved quite accurate at predicting astronomical phe- shifted” their light was, and the faster they seemed to be
nomena such as the movements of planets and stars. moving away from the earth. Assuming that the earth’s
However, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, position in the universe is not in any way special, so that
it was supplanted by other models. The Polish astrono- observers elsewhere in the universe must be seeing the
mer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1533) argued that the same thing, Hubble concluded that the entire universe
earth and planets revolved around the sun, while the Ital- must be expanding. If it was expanding now, it followed
ian philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) argued that it must have been smaller in the past, and that at