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Astronomy in History

by Malcolm Heath
Longtime Alachua Astronomy Club member shares some thoughts about our ancient hobby

When we use our calendars or set our clocks and watches, we tend to forget that the precision that we use so casually was preceded by thousands of years of careful observation and recording the positions and motions of heavenly bodies. But with all the sifting and sorting we still divide the day into 24 hours, the years into 12 months, and use a calendar that was designed with those observations in mind over four hundred years ago.

James Cornell in his book The First Stargazers tells us much about how dependent early people were on the positions of the heavenly bodies. To quote Cornell:

"In primitive societies the sky was map, calendar, clock and more -- more perhaps than modern humans can ever conceive. The sky was both a part of daily life and the presence of supernatural power. The sun and moon were beings with characters, personality, and gender. The stars, as they rolled slowly from horizon to horizon, became animate objects imbued with spirit and intelligence."

Stonehenge frequently heads the list when the subject is astronomy before our time. There is no question but that the people who designed, constructed, and modified that circle of stones were trying to use their knowledge to tie them to their past and future. Guesses about the age of their observatory begin at about 10,000 BC. But if we raise our sights a bit, there have been many people in many places who saw more than just stars when they looked at the sky. There is a story in the Bible about some stargazers from the East who made a long journey for a look see.

The Babylonians and Egyptians left much evidence that they were active stargazers. There is some thought that the Babylonians were the first ones to divide the circle into 360 degrees. The Aztecs and Mayans in what we now call Mexico and Central America got sophisticated enough with their observations that they kept records and developed calendars. The remains left by other peoples in this country are extensive and complex enough that discussion in this short article would be difficult. That the people in what we now call the United States were aware of the heavenly bodies is shown in the "Pawnee Buckskin Star Chart" on display at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

In no way can a short article like his offer more than the tiniest peek into what those before us say when they looked at the stars. We must certainly include the Chinese record of what we now believe was the death explosion of a star. Our term for the event is supernova. This excerpt is from Cornell's book:

"On the day of keui-hai in the tenth month of the second year of Chung-P'ing reign period a guest star appeared with Nanmen. It was big as half a mat. It was multi-colored and fluctuated. It gradually became smaller and disappeared in the year following the next year."

It is now believed that they saw the supernova that we call the Crab Nebula, with the pulsar which is the remains of the original star.

Until the observations and analysis of Copernicus (1473-1543) the Earth was thought to be the center, with the universe going around it. His ideas were so revolutionary that they were not published until after his death. The Earth and the humans on it were now only a very small part of a very large universe. The reverberations shook the philosophers as well as the astronomers. In astronomy at least the things that had been problems now fell into place. After Galileo (1564-1642) and Kepler (1571-1630) one could think about elliptical orbits rather than Ptolemy's (2nd century AD) epicycles.

And as we come closer to our time, the names of Isaac Newton (1642-1727), Albert Einstein (1879-1955) and Stephen Hawking stand out for telling us how it all worked. Allow me to quote the closing paragraph in Hawking's book, A Brief History of Time:

"If we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God."

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