PERSPECTIVES What do you see in the skies?
written and illustrated by Gauri Nagpal
“Ah, yes We shall not cease from exploration And the end of our exploring Shall be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time�
T.S. Eliot
The Early Man
The early man was the first of our kind to look up to the sky in order to frame a better understanding of his existence. No one had wondered and questioned the way man did then and this was when astronomy originated. In the early days, before the invention of scientific tools that would aid the observational process, man simply saw the sun, the moon and the stars. He devised the concept of days and nights, years and seasons. He started building tools that enabled him to understand the skies better. To him, the night sky was a clock; it would tell him when to plant and when to harvest. He identified celestial objects like stars with Gods and spirits he believed in and associated them with patterns that he named constellations, such as: Aries, Leo and Virgo. These patterns helped him locate himself at any place on Earth.
Why do you think man felt the need to look up to the skies in the first place? How does understanding the function of an object change the way you think about it?
The Greeks Around 390 BC, the Greeks came up with a theory that changed the way we perceived celestial bodies forever. They observed a certain difference in the stars. There were some stars that seemed a bit bigger than the others. These stars moved slowly as compared to the others in the night sky. They named these stars, ‘planets’ which translates into English as a ‘wandering star’. These planets were named after Greek Gods such as Venus, Jupiter and Saturn.
Around the same time, Aristotle, one of Greek’s infamous philosophers came up with a theory of his own. His claim was that if the stars revolve around the earth in the night sky, it implied that the earth was the center of the universe.
Ptolemy, another one of Greek’s leading mathematicians and astronomers accurately traced the path of the planets that didn’t move haphazardly as the previously formed notion of the wandering star stated. He theorized that the positions of these planets could be calculated.
What if Aristotle never claimed that the earth was the center of the universe? How would this change our current understanding of the same? What do you think was the significance of discovering that the positions of the planets can be calculated?
Centered
In 1473, a Polish mathematician, Nicolaus Copernicus was born who changed the face of astronomy forever. Copernicus had a crazy idea, he said that the stars moving around the earth were just an illusion for the earth itself was not static; it too moved in a orbit in space. He claimed that the sun was the center of the universe and that the earth, along with other planets, moved around the sun on its own axis. This was called heliocentricity. ‘Helios’ means sun and ‘kentron’ means center. We were henceforth, no longer the center of the universe.
Later in 1571, in Germany, Johannes Kepler was born. He was a great mathematician, astronomer and astrologer. He laid the foundation of the planetary laws of motion that stated that the planets revolved around the sun, not in circular but in elliptical orbits. He also observed that as the planets approach the sun, they speed up but when they are farther, they slow down. He wondered what caused this strange behavior. It seemed as though the sun somehow influenced the movements of the planets, but how?
How do you think heliocentricity changed the way we realized the universe? How did it change the way we thought about ourselves? What do you think was the significance of wondering why the sun influenced the movement of the planets?
The East In the East, there were Astronomers who too were in favor of the heliocentric model of the solar system. Aryabhata was an Indian astronomer who is known for popularizing the same in India. He advocated an astronomical model in which the Earth turns on its own axis. His model also gave corrections for the speeds of the planets in the sky in terms of the mean speed of the sun. It has also been suggested that Aryabhata’s system may have been derived from an earlier, likely pre-Ptolemaic Greek, heliocentric model of which Indian astronomers were unaware.
The eastern school of thought derived equivalence between the outer and inner cosmos. The form of a being and that of the cosmos weren’t considered distinct but the being was regarded as the extension of the universe. In Hindu culture the division of the physical world is split into three; the earth, the atmosphere and the sky. This translates into the division of human form as; the body, the pranas and the inner sky. What if there was a well-established communication system between the east and the west? How would that change things? What is the significance of relating the cosmos to ourselves?
Zooming In Galileo Galilei was an Italian astronomer, physicist, engineer, philosopher and mathematician. He had the power to bring distant objects closer. He did this by building a magnificent telescope and with this he decided to look at the sky. He saw thousands of stars that weren’t visible to the naked eye. He saw the moon with its large craters, the surfaces of other planets and he saw Saturn’s rings. He could now see things bigger and clearer than ever before and this made all the difference.
Galileo also conducted an experiment through which he found that falling objects on earth fall with the same acceleration despite their mass. There were necessary conditions for this such as negligible air draft relative to the mass. In other words, if an elephant and an earthworm jumped from the same floor of a building in vacuum, they’d both hit the ground at the same time. He made these observations but never could derive the mathematics for the same and hence, he could never really understand the mysterious ways in which the force that enabled this to happen functioned.
Do you think human imagination could have fathomed an idea so vast as that of infinite stars in the sky if Galileo never made his model of the telescope?
Fortunate Casualty
Newton was an English physicist and mathematician. He was thoroughly intrigued by this mysterious force that lead Kepler to theorize his planetary laws and which Galileo discovered influenced falling objects on earth. To Newton, Math was the language of the cosmos and using the same he started deducing this seemingly magical force that shaped and formed everything in the universe from the moving planets in the solar system to apples falling off of trees on earth. Newton was the one to remove the last doubts about the heliocentric model of the solar system when he formulated his laws of motion and universal gravity. Gravity changed everything. We now started realizing that our existence wasn’t planned like we thought it was but in fact the reason we were in a position to contemplate existence itself was because all the forces in the cosmos had somehow managed to coherently form the perfect conditions for our being. Our existence was only, a fortunate casualty.
How did knowing that our existence was a mere accident change things?
Begin Being
Albert Einstein was a German physicist. He thought a lot about how we came to be. He liked the idea of an infinite, static universe and philosophically believed that the universe had no beginning and no end, that it was eternal. Einstein had a whacky theory, one that seemed like it was right out of a science fiction film. He believed that the two of the primary entities that are inherent to all of us, space and time aren’t two at all. They weren’t distinct, but were one, Spacetime. He claimed that Spacetime was the fabric of the universe. Everything we knew of was crafted within it. Moreover, he realized that gravity worked because matter that every form is constituted of, influenced Spacetime.
Einstein’s revelations conflicted his beliefs. They suggested that the universe was not static but expanding. This implied that there indeed was a beginning and an end. Einstein lead us to that moment in creation when our being, began. We live in Einstein’s world, that of Spacetime. What if we knew more about it than we do today? How would it change what we think about it?
Some Hindus have an elephant to show. No one here has ever seen an elephant. They bring it at night to a dark room. One by one, we go in the dark and come out saying how we experience the animal. One of us happens to touch the trunk. A water-pipe kind of creature. Another, the ear. A very strong, always moving back and forth, fan-animal. Another, the leg. I find it still, like a column on a temple. Another touches the curved back. A leathery throne. Another the cleverest, feels the tusk. A rounded sword made of porcelain. He is proud of his description. Each of us touches one place and understands the whole that way. The palm and the fingers feeling in the dark are how the senses explore the reality of the elephant. If each of us held a candle there, and if we went in together, we could see it.
Rumi
A work in progress