The Universe

I ' d like to digress for a few minutes to consider the mind boggling revolution in physics and cosmology of the 20th Century. Copernicus and Galileo established that the earth and planets revolve around the sun in the 17th Century. This overturned established doctrine, but did not in itself pose a major challenge to the human centered philosophy of the Abrahamic religions, in which we are the principal preoccupation of the all powerful creator God. However, as astronomers continued to look through telescopes and discovered the vast number and great distance of the stars of our galaxy, that belief became less tenable. Then, in 1924, Edwin Hubble discovered the universe. With the newly available 100 inch Hooker telescope at Mt. Wilson, he found that the so-called nebulae, cloudy appearing objects, were in fact galaxies beyond our own. Then, in 1929, he found that the universe was expanding -- that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it appears to be receding from us. Combining this observation with Einstein ' s revolutionary understanding of space-time, cosmologists were able to run the movie backwards, as it were, and determine that the universe originated as an incalculably small, dense singularity which, about 13 1/2 billion years ago, began to expand. (The current best estimate is actually 13.8 billion years ago.) The quantum theory, also first developed in the 1920s, enabled physicists to model what the early universe must have been like and how it evolved into ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs