The Universe 09
Gazing our Universe
By 1600, the long-forgotten ideas of Aristarchus had been rediscovered. Johannes Kepler constructed elaborate models to understand the motion and arrangement of the planets; the clockwork of the heavens. And at night, he dreamt of traveling to the moon. His principal scientific tools were the mathematics of the Alexandrian Library and an unswerving respect for the facts—however disquieting they might be. His story, and the story of the scientists who came after him, are also part of our voyage.
Seventy years later, the sun-centered universe of Aristarchus and Copernicus was widely accepted in the Europe of the Enlightenment. The idea arose that the planets were worlds governed by laws of nature, and scientific speculation turned to the motions of the stars. The clockwork in the heavens was imitated by the watchmakers of Earth. Precise timekeeping permitted great sailing ship voyages of exploration and discovery which bound up the Earth. This was a time when free inquiry was valued once again.
250 years later, the Earth was all explored. New adventurers now looked to the planets and the stars. The galaxies were recognized as great aggregates of stars; island universes millions of light years away. In the 1920s, astronomers had begun to measure the speeds of distant galaxies. They found that the galaxies were flying away from one another. To the astonishment of everyone, the entire universe was expanding. We had begun to plumb the true depths of time and space. The long, collective enterprise of science has revealed a universe some 15 billion years old. The time since the explosive birth of the cosmos the Big Bang.
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