Astronomy and (Our Picture Of) THE Universe

ASTRONOMY AND
[Our Picture of] THE

UNIVERSE
J.T. II Olivar, MAEd
FACULTY OF ARTS AND LETTERS
University of Santo Tomas
Outline of the Lecture
 Historical Development of the
Universe
 Motion of Stars
 Infinity
 Big Bang
Historical Development
of the “Universe”
 Aristotle (340 B.C.)
 Ptolemy (140 A.D.)
 Copernicus (1473-1543) – 1514
 Kepler (1571-1630) – 1609 (2), 1619
(3)
 Galileo (1564-1642) – 1609, 1610
 Newton (1642-1727) – 1687
 Einstein (1879-1955) – 1915
 Hubble (1889- 1953) – 1929
Bertrand Russell
(1872-1970)
 Hedescribed how the earth orbits

around the sun and how the sun, in
turn, orbits around the center of a
vast collection of stars called our
galaxy.
Aristotle (340 B.C.)
On the Heavens
 Argumentsthat the earth was a
round sphere rather than a flat plate
– Eclipses (Lunar)
– North star
– Ships coming over the horizon
 Didnot like the idea of creation
because it smacked too much of
divine intervention
Ptolemy
(200 A.D.)
 Elaborated the idea of Aristotle
 Cosmological model
 Geocentric theory
 The death blow to the
Aristotelian/Ptolemaic theory came in
1609
Nicolaus Copernicus
(1473-1543)
 1514
 Heliocentric theory
 Got rid of Ptolemy’s celestial spheres
 The universe had a natural boundary
 Fixed stars were objects like our sun
but very much farther away
The Foundations of Copernican
Revolution
1. The celestial spheres do not have
just one common center.
2. The center of the Earth is not the
center of the universe but is instead
only the center of gravity and of the
lunar orbit.
3. All the spheres revolve around the
sun.
1. The ratio of Earth’s distance from
the Sun to the height of the
firmament is so much smaller than
the ratio of Earth’s radius to the
Sun that the distance to the Sun is
imperceptible when compared with
the height of the firmament.
1. The motions appearing in the
firmament are not its motions but
those of Earth. Earth performs a
daily rotation around its fixed poles
while firmament remains immobile
as the highest heaven.
1. The motions of the Sun are not its
motions but the motion of Earth.
2. What appears to us as retrograde
and forward motion of the planets is
not their own but that of Earth.
Johannes Kepler
(1571-1630)
 Modified Copernicus’s theory,

suggesting that the planets moved
not in circles but in ellipses.
Kepler’s laws of planetary
motion
1. All planets move in elliptical paths
around the Sun with the Sun at one
focus of the ellipse.
2. An imaginary line (radial vector)
joining a planet to the Sun sweeps
out equal areas in equal periods of
time.
3. The square of the sidereal period of
a planet is proportional to the cube
of its semimajor axis (one-half of
Or.
1. Law of elliptical paths
2. Law of equal areas
3. Harmonic law (De Harmonice
Mundi)
Galileo Galilei
(1564-1642)
 Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry

Messenger) supported the
Copernican theory in 1610.
 Galileo was instructed by the church
to abandon his cosmological pursuit
in 1616.
Isaac Newton
(1642-1727)
 Philosophiae
Naturalis Principia
Mathematica (1687)
– The most important single work ever
published in the physical sciences
 In
1684, discussed with Edmund
Halley-Why do planets move
according to Kepler’s laws?
– Theory of how bodies move in space and
time
Newton’s laws of motion
1. A moving object will move forever
in a straight line unless some
external force changes its direction
of motion.
– Every body perseveres in its state of
rest, or of uniform motion in a straight
line, unless it is compelled to change
that state by forces impressed
thereon.
1. The acceleration of an object is
directly proportional to the applied
force and inversely proportional to
its mass. (i.e.) the greater the force
acting on the object, or the smaller
the mass of the object, the greater
its acceleration.
1. Forces cannot occur in isolation.
– To every Action there is always
opposed an equal Reaction: or the
mutual actions of two bodies upon
each other are always equal, and
directed to contrary parts.
Or.
 Law of Inertia
 Law of Acceleration
 Law of Isolation / Action-Reaction
Motion of stars
 Stars
should attract each other, so it
seemed they could not remain
essentially motionless
– Would they not fall altogether at some
point?
 Only happen if they were only a finite
number of stars distributed over a
finite region of space
Infinity
 In an infinite universe, every point
can be regarded as the center,
because every point has an infinite
number of stars on each side of it
 It is impossible to have an infinite
static model of the universe in which
gravity is always attractive
 Itwas generally accepted that either
the universe had existed forever in
an unchanging state, or that it had
been created at a finite time in the
past more or less as we observed it
today
Modification of Newton’s theory:
Implications that the universe is not
static
 Making gravitational force repulsive
at very large distances
 In an infinite static universe nearly
every line of sight would end on the
surface of a star
Heinrich Olbers
(1758-1840)
 1823
 Light from distant stars would be
dimmed by absorption by intervening
matter
 The intervening matter will
eventually heat up until it glowed as
brightly as the stars
 Stars had not been shining forever
but had turned on at some finite time
in the past
Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804)
 1781
 Critique
of Pure Reason
 Antimonies (contradictions) of pure
reason
– Thesis: The universe had a beginning
– Antithesis: The universe had existed
forever
Edwin Hubble
(1889-1953)
 1929
 Wherever you look, distant galaxies
are moving rapidly away from us
 In other words, the universe is
expanding
– It means that at earlier times objects
would have been closer together
 Suggested that there was a time,
called the big bang
Big Bang
 When the universe was
infinitesimally small and infinitely
dense
The Goal of Science
 Theeventual goal of science is to
provide a single theory that
describes the whole universe
– There are laws that tell us how the
universe changes with time
– There is the question of the initial state
of the universe
Implications to Modern
Astronomy
 Today,scientists describe the
universe in terms of two basic partial
theories
– General theory of relativity
– Quantum mechanics
General theory of relativity
 Describes the force of gravity and
the large-scale structure of the
universe
Quantum mechanics
 Dealswith phenomena on extremely
small scales
Darwin’s principle of natural
selection
 Inany population of self reproducing
organisms, there will be variations in
the genetic material and upbringing
that different individuals have
 Thus, our goal is nothing less than
complete description of the universe
we live in.
Reference
 S.W.Hawking. 1988. A Brief History
of Time. New York: Bantam Books
Publishing.

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ASTRONOMY AND

[Our Picture of] THE

 Hedescribed how the earth orbits

 Modified Copernicus’s theory,

 Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry

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