Friday, February 18, 2011

Unknown exteriors (the universe) – Gustavo Grinsteins







I. First idea of the universe

The Greek mathematician Pythagoras Of Samos had a cozy picture of the universe. The earth was at the center, surrounded by a series of ever larger spheres, having the sun, the moon, the stars, and the other planets as part of these system. As the spheres turned Pythagoras describe that movement as a musical note. As they turned together they produced a perfect harmony (harmony is a state recognized by great philosophers as beauty, a compound is termed beautiful only when its parts are in harmonious combination). After this theory Aristotle a Greek philosopher tried to solve the idea of what caused he spheres to move, By the earth being static Aristotle thought that it wasn’t the cause of the movement of the spheres, instead he inferred that the movement of the outer most sphere was causing the movement of the other spheres. But what was causing this last sphere to move? Aristotle answer was something he called “primer mover” that resembled God. The universe described by Aristotle and Pythagoras was finite. Beyond the outer most sphere there was only the “prime mover”.

II. The Copernican Universe: “ A Solar System”

Nicolaus Copernicus Change the hole idea about the earth being the center of the universe. Copernicus borne in Poland was an astronomer, a student of economics, law and medicine, but his doctorade in canon law and spend his life as a canon in the cathedral in Frombork. This fact is interesting because the church was insistent in that the earth was the center of the universe. Many people before him thought that the Earth and other astronomical figures revolve around the sun (one of the ancient Greek astronomers, Aristarchus, did have ideas similar to those more fully developed by Copernicus but they were rejected in favor of the geocentric or earth-centered scheme as was espoused by Aristotle). Copernicus was a man of high reputation so he was allowed to present his theories in a series of lectures in Rome. The Copernican universe had the sun at its center with, in order, Mercury, Venus, earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and then the stars rotating around it. The “revolution of the celestial spheres”, probably was the greatest achievement in that era.

III. Galileo Galilei

Galileo was a brilliant astronomer, mathematician, physicist, and artist. Galileo learned of the invention of the telescope in Holland. He devised a vastly superior model. Galileo made a series of profound discoveries using his new telescope, including the moons of the planet Jupiter and the phases of the planet Venus (similar to those of Earth's moon). This caused Galileo support in the theory of the Copernican universe, causing to put him in direct opposition to church teachings. He was placed under house arrest and forced to deceive his conclusions.


IV. Science detects a “big bang” at the beginning of time.

We certainly know that our universe exists, however, this knowledge alone has not satisfied human request

for further understanding. Our curiosity has led us to question our place in this universe and furthermore, the place of the universe itself. The Big bang is a theory that asserts that about 13.7 billion years ago the universe emerged from an infinitely small, hot, and dense point that was called “singularity”, and began its expansion at once. Within three minutes after the explosion the first atoms were emerging. After this the production of light elements, like hydrogen, began to appear in vast numbers. All this took minutes, but it was another 380,000 years before the hydrogen gas cooled sufficiently to form molecules, and 200 million before the first stars coalesced. Everything was rushing outward from that initial burst. The big bang theory first began to take shape in 1927 when Georges Lemaitre publishes the theory.

V. Large Hadron Collider: “the big bang experiment”

The Large Hadron
(LHC), is the largest particle accelerator in the world, which has the aim of reproducing conditions similar to those produced during the Big Bang in order to study the origins of matter,and see how matter behaved a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers have some ideas of what to expect, but also expect the unexpected. The large particle accelerator is located in a 27 kilometers-long underground tunnel, which straddles the border between France and Switzerland. Inside the tunnel, proton beams will be accelerated at speeds close to the speed of light and will be made to collide. This will allow conditions of extremely high-density energy to be reproduced, close to those of the initial instants of the universe, the Big Bang. The collider was first proposed more than 20 years ago, and the beam for more than ten years.

VI. Sources


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