Dan Allosso
We’re all aware that one of the major changes precipitating the
European Enlightenment was the realization that the Earth was not the center of the universe. Through a series of discoveries, often fiercely opposed by protectors of the status quo, western cultures slowly embraced the idea that the universe is much bigger than we had previously believed. But perhaps we ought to consider how recent many of these discoveries were, and how new information is coming to light almost daily that promises to remake our worldview all over again.
 |
The shape of our Galaxy as deduced from star
counts by William Herschel; the solar system
was assumed near center, as first published
in the Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society in 1785. |
To review some of the milestones on this journey of discovery, Renaissance astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published his heliocentric theory,
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, in 1543. Copernicus replaced the Earth with the Sun as center of the solar system, but the universe was still a smallish place, extending only to Saturn, which had been known since prehistoric times. The next planet, Uranus, was discovered by
William Herschel in 1781, while his countrymen were fighting to retain their thirteen rebel colonies. Neptune was discovered in 1846, based on mathematical predictions made by Urbain Le Verrier to explain observed perturbations in the Uranian orbit (this was also a dramatic confirmation of Newton’s theories of gravity). But again, although our gaze had widened to include the solar system and the Milky Way, a background of more distant stars which had once been thought to all inhabit a single “sphere,” the universe was still pretty small and we were at its center.
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