Untitled - the ultimate blog

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Galileo, four centuries on As important as Darwin Aug 13th 2009 From The Economist print edition In praise of astronomy, the most revolutionary of sciences MEPL FOUR hundred years ago our understanding of the universe changed for ever. On August 25th 1609 an Italian mathematician called Galileo Galilei demonstrated his newly constructed telescope to the merchants of Venice. Shortly afterwards he turned it on the skies. He saw mountains casting shadows on the moon and realised this body was a world, like the Earth, endowed with complicated terrain. He saw the moons of Jupiter—objects that circled another heavenly body in direct disobedience of the church’s teaching. He saw the moonlike phases of Venus, indicating that this planet circled the sun, not the Earth, in even greater disobedience of the priests. He saw sunspots, demonstrating that the sun itself was not the perfect orb demanded by the Greek cosmology that had been adopted by the church. But he also saw something else, a thing that is often now forgotten. He saw that the Milky Way, that cloudy streak across the sky, is made of stars. That observation was the first hint that, not only is the Earth not the centre of things, but those things are vastly, almost incomprehensibly, bigger than people up until that date had dreamed. And they have been getting bigger, and also older, ever since. Astronomers’ latest estimates put the age of the universe at about 13.7 billion years. That is three times as long as the Earth has existed and about 100,000 times the lifespan of modern humanity as a species. The true size of the universe is still unknown. Its age, and the finite speed of light, means no astronomer can look beyond a distance of 13.7 billion light-years. But it is probably bigger than that. Nor does reality necessarily end with this universe. Physics, astronomy’s dutiful daughter, suggests that the object that people call the universe, vast though it is, may be just one of an indefinite number of similar structures, governed by slightly different rules from each other, that inhabit what is referred to, for want of a better term, as the multiverse. Star trek The shattering of the crystal spheres which Galileo’s contemporaries thought held the planets and the stars, with the sphere containing the stars representing the edge of the universe, is (along with Darwin’s discovery of evolution by natural selection) the biggest revolution in self-knowledge that mankind has undergone. The world that Galileo was born into was of comprehensible compass. The Greeks had a fair idea of the size of the Earth and the distance to the moon, and so did the medievals who read their work. But these were distances that the imagination might, at a stretch, embrace. And it was easier to believe that a human-sized universe was one that might have been brought into being with humanity in mind. It is harder, though, to argue that the modern version of cosmology, let alone any hypothetical one which is -13-
multiversal rather than universal, has come about for mankind’s convenience. Four centuries on, it is difficult to think of Galileo’s intellectual heirs, meeting this week in Rio de Janeiro under the auspices of the International Astronomical Union (see article), as firebrand revolutionaries. Yet their discoveries—from planets around other stars that may support alien life, to dark matter and energy of unknown nature that are the dominant stuff of reality—are no less world-changing than his. Moderns may be more comfortable than medievals with the idea that man’s notion of his place within the universe can suddenly change. That should not blind them to the wonder of it. Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved. -14-
Page 2 and 3: Search Requires subscription Econom
Page 4 and 5: Politics this week Aug 13th 2009 Fr
Page 6 and 7: Business this week Aug 13th 2009 Fr
Page 8 and 9: KAL's cartoon Aug 13th 2009 From Th
Page 10 and 11: Asia’s rebound has several causes
Page 12 and 13: democratic region. But Brazil’s l
Page 14 and 15: World trade and commercial aircraft
Page 18 and 19: Correction: America's sex laws Aug
Page 20 and 21: SIR - You mentioned the slaughter d
Page 22 and 23: Professor of the history of art Sch
Page 24 and 25: Their arrival coincides with, and i
Page 26 and 27: and integrated well.) Peru has beco
Page 28 and 29: Clean energy in the Midwest Greenin
Page 30 and 31: The economics of natural gas Drowni
Page 32 and 33: meetings on health reform planned f
Page 34 and 35: Drought in Texas Not a cloud Aug 13
Page 36 and 37: Rich animals The dog will have his
Page 38 and 39: twice the national average. But it
Page 40 and 41: international institutions and the
Page 42 and 43: Energy v environment in Canada Bomb
Page 44 and 45: further sanctions. Yet it is doubtf
Page 46 and 47: egistered voters are frauds. Yet Mr
Page 48 and 49: Australia's opposition His own wors
Page 50 and 51: Taiwan's typhoon Taiwan's disastrou
Page 52 and 53: Banyan The Burmese road to ruin Aug
Page 54 and 55: Fatah and the Palestinians Fresh fa
Page 56 and 57: Iran and human rights The crackdown
Page 58 and 59: Security in Iraq A return to the ba
Page 60 and 61: Ethiopia's resilient prime minister
Page 62 and 63: America and Africa Hillary (not Bil
Page 64 and 65: Southern Italy's ills The messy mez
Page 66 and 67:
Copyright © 2009 The Economist New
Page 68 and 69:
Italy's vigilantes On the beat Aug
Page 70 and 71:
crisis-driven entanglement in banks
Page 72 and 73:
colluded with the Russian patriarch
Page 74 and 75:
Prospects for recovery Mervyn's rea
Page 76 and 77:
Conservatives will be fighting over
Page 78 and 79:
advanced to scale down much. If the
Page 80 and 81:
Scotland's capital and recession Pa
Page 82 and 83:
Edinburgh festivals Fringe-onomics
Page 84 and 85:
Bagehot Love in the time of swine f
Page 86 and 87:
Correction: Teaching in Britain Aug
Page 88 and 89:
Their aim is more modest. It was sp
Page 90 and 91:
At a review conference next year, s
Page 92 and 93:
All this would not matter much, wer
Page 94 and 95:
with state aid. In an average year
Page 96 and 97:
Mauro Cutrufo, Rome’s head of tou
Page 98 and 99:
Online auctions Mind the pennies Au
Page 100 and 101:
hire in anticipation; they will wai
Page 102 and 103:
Face value Top of his game Aug 13th
Page 104 and 105:
Emerging Asian economies On the reb
Page 106 and 107:
y 70%. One reason why Asia’s emer
Page 108 and 109:
industries with subsidies and under
Page 110 and 111:
Of the three firms, AIG represents
Page 112 and 113:
Assessing quantitative easing Muzzl
Page 114 and 115:
All these rules failed and the sche
Page 116 and 117:
Retail bonds in Europe Small fry wa
Page 118 and 119:
A current-account surplus that has
Page 120 and 121:
politicians still seem fixated by e
Page 122 and 123:
In an influential early example of
Page 124 and 125:
Thinking space Another way to encou
Page 126 and 127:
Detecting habitable new worlds The
Page 128 and 129:
The history of science Kepler's wor
Page 130 and 131:
Engels (whose name resembles the wo
Page 132 and 133:
prose, having gone from Uighur to G
Page 134 and 135:
anks to hold more capital, the flow
Page 136 and 137:
Football and economics Game for gee
Page 138 and 139:
There are two intellectual bugbears
Page 140 and 141:
she continued to lurk, roiling the
Page 142 and 143:
Output, prices and jobs Aug 13th 20
Page 144 and 145:
The Economist commodity-price index
Page 146 and 147:
Trade, exchange rates, budget balan
Page 148 and 149:
Markets Aug 13th 2009 From The Econ
Page 150:
Office vacancy rates Aug 13th 2009
show all

Untitled - the ultimate blog

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?