Animals that have pattern recognition had a clear advantage over others. If an animal could recognize patterns in prey and predators, it could predict when danger would occur and avoid it, or predict when food would show up and catch it easily. Humans also have this cognitive trait, but with the development of language and speech came the development of abstract pattern recognition. Which helps us discover the secrets of the universe. And believe in wacky shit.
Hey, it beats Real Housewives
Stars were the original TV. It only took humanity a few thousand years to figure out that the stars had a slightly different position every night, but repeated those positions yearly. By the time humans practiced agriculture, the stars were literally telling them when to plant and when to reap. Because stars did this so well, humans used them for all sorts of guidance, both useful and not. From here, it was a pretty easy leap to early astronomers deciding that the stars themselves were living beings, or represented real beings that ruled the weather, seasons, and public health. It wasn't hard to start "seeing" pictures in the stars, that would one day become constellations. This mix of true and false pattern recognition guided humanity through millenia.
There were two big problems with this. First, early humans had no way of knowing why the stars seemed to move in the sky, and decided supernatural forces made them move around the earth, leading them to think the Earth was the center of the universe, and everything, including the Sun, went around the Earth, powered by gods and magic. Second, any disruption in the normal course of the stars, planets, and sun led to chaos. Solar eclipses and comets were bringers of bad news, sickness, crop failures, and assassinations. In fact, the belief led to a word for catastrophe- disaster, which means "bad star" in ancient Greek.
Blamed for celebrity break-ups for centuries
People really believed this. Around the world. Every star-gazing civilization hated any break from normal in the sky. This continued right up into the late 1600s. What changed then?
A few things. In 1660, King Charles 2 established the Royal Society in London. Set up as a club for the budding field of intellectuals just starting to use empirical observations and mathematical models to explain how the universe, both organic and not, worked. It's motto was Nullius in Verba, which Latin for Put Up Or Shut Up. It boasted lots of members, but Tyson focuses on four: Christopher Wren, architect of London after the Great Fire of 1666; Robert Hooke, President of the Society, Inventor of numerous things, and resident crank; Edmond Halley, boyish adventurer for science and probably the greatest facilitator of science at the time; and one Isaac Newton, reclusive professor at Cambridge. Newton and Hooke had just come off a raging disagreement over Newton's last publication, where Newton basically told everyone how light works and gave 11th grade high school science students a whole new set of required experiments. Hooke insisted that he came up with the theory. For some reason, it was never settled one way or another, and Newton retired from public life.
But not from feverish inquiries, scientific and not. Newton, the product of a lonely childhood alienated from his mother and step-father, was really great at entertaining himself with theories. Newton was an alchemist searching for the Elixir of Life, a biblical scholar searching the ancient text in multiple languages for hidden predictions of the Second Coming, and a rigorous mathematician who figured out gravity's relationship to mass, as well as the three basic Laws of Motion (once again, making more work for 11th grade science students).
Hooke was no slouch himself: he invented the first microscope, using it to discover cells in living things. He derived the law of Elasticity, and even did some experimenting with Marijuana, thereby discovering the Munchies. Hooke just seemed to overreach when he got into kerfuffles with Newton. Must have been the dope.
Hooke, Halley, and Wren liked to sit around London's new coffeehouses, where caffeine made people discuss important shit and rich people couldn't pretend to be better than everyone else. The three were pondering Kepler's work in establishing that planets went around the sun in elliptical orbits, and that planets nearer the sun went faster. Sure, the math checked out and Kepler's theories could predict where the planets would be and when. But why did it work? What made the planets orbit the Sun just the way they do? Hooke insisted a mathematical equation could explain it, and he had the equation. When he couldn't produce one, Halley took a tip from a friend and visited Isaac Newton at Cambridge.
Of course I know the answer! But it's highly classified, like the source of the zombie disease!
When Halley explained the dilemma, Newton agreed to send him the work he'd already done. Newton already knew that an object's mass created the attraction between it and different objects, and that this attraction was proportional to the object's mass- bigger objects created more attraction, with the attraction increasing if objects were close together. When Halley received a copy of Newton's work in the mail, he knew this needed to be published. But a lot of fish got in the way.
Before studying gravity bored kids in school, people thought it was totally cool shit.
The Royal Society was impressed with Newton's work and wanted to publish it; but, in an early example of institutional fuck-ups, had lost their entire publishing budget on a huge, amply illustrated history of fish. In face, so many copies sat around un-bought, that the Society was paying salaries with it, including Halley's. It must have saved the Halley family a fortune in kindling. Halley, being a stand-up guy in addition to a scientist, made good on his promise to publish Newton's work by self-financing all three volumes of Principia, which presented all of Newton's scientific work on gravity and motion, as well as publishing calculus for the first time in Europe, thereby securing him immortality whether he made the damn Elixir or not. Newton succeeded Hooke as the President of the Royal Society, where it is believed that he chucked the only portrait of Hooke into a fire. The world was blown away by his work.
Not just by the genius of the math. But by the implications. Gravity was a natural force, produced by an object's mass in the real world. Newton, alchemist and End Times nut that he was, discovered a completely non-supernatural way for the planets to revolve around the sun. Objects no longer moved because that was their nature- they moved because gravity was pulling them towards the bigger object. The momentum produced once a planet started moving made it orbit the bigger object. The increased attraction of closer planets led them to move faster, making their orbits faster around the Sun. Which led to middle-school science students making diaramas out of styrofoam, wire and tempera paint. Newton's theory of motion also led him to predict that if you chuck an object with enough force, it would be fast enough to break Earth's gravity, and leave the atmosphere, making way for NASA's Saturn and Apollo programs, as well as a really cheesy movie with Billie Bob Thornton.
Halley did a shitload of other stuff, most of it cool stuff like sailing all over the Southern Hemisphere to make the first star map of Southern Stars, and inventing the diving bell so people could explore and collect stuff at the bottom of the ocean. He calculated the distance between the Sun and Earth using the time it took for Venus to cross in front of the Sun. He also figured out, based on analyzing birth and death rates of Europe's major cities, that most adults don't actually produce kids, so families would need to produce four each in order to keep the population stable. The world took that knowledge and used it to produce, like, ten kids per family, thereby jacking our numbers up.
Halley's other big accomplishments included figuring out that stars move. Stars were thought to be motionless in the sky, as they only changed where they seemed to be, in conjunction with the Earth's position. But Halley looked through star charts from over 1000 years before his time, realizing that the stars actually do move, but are so far away that their movements appear so small we can't perceive them over one lifetime. In other words, Halley discovered just how limited by illusion human knowledge can be. He used the same analytical skills on comet sightings, going back through centuries of observations and drawings made in Constantinople. By seeing patterns in the sightings, Halley identified the comet that bears his name and predicted when it would return, where in the sky it would be, and what path through the sky it would make. Haley did not live to see his predictions come true in 1758. It didn't just bring about the end of superstitions about comets. Using math, we could predict future movements and events, even ones not in our control. With math, humanity could 'see' into the future. With math, humanity could explore above Earth. Halley's work on comets would later be expanded by Jan Oort, Danish astronomer who was the first to use a radio telescope and discover that there was some serious shit at the center of our galaxy. The collection of comets that hang out beyond the planets, is named for him.
Tyson ends on a huge prediction, slated to come true in a few billion years- our galaxy will have a fun collision with the nearby Andromeda Galaxy. Stars actually won't collide, because they are too far apart to, but the collision of the gravitational fields of all those stars will produce quite the night-time light show. Maybe we'll go back to watching the sky at night, instead of reality shows.
Better than Walking Dead. But we'll all be dead when it happens.
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