Interesting Universe.

The interesting thing about our universe is the extent to which it is mind-boggling; mostly because so many people have opinions about how it works and exists. Some say that it is static and unchanging while some snort and contradict them with an air of arrogance, saying that our universe is dynamic and ever-changing. Some say that our universe had a beginning and that since everything succeeds a cause, our universe must have also begun by some “First Cause”; while some adamantly ignore the idea of a beginning of the universe on the grounds of the involvement of too much divine intervention and stick to the belief that the universe was always there. Some believe that the universe is infinitely large and that infinite stars are uniformly distributed across it in equilibrium, while some believe that the stars are always falling towards each other owing to the gravitational force of attraction.

The search of the universally accepted picture of the universe has been going on since 340 B.C. when Aristotle postulated in his book On the Heavens that the earth lay at the center of the universe and the planets (5 were known at that time), the sun and the moon rotated around it in circular orbits, in their own spheres. Over the centuries, models changed minds, authority changed hands and understanding changed its level from crude beliefs to holistic proofs. The throne of the center of the universe was handed to the sun, the circular orbits became elliptical and the boundary of mankind’s observable universe was eliminated. While Galileo proved Aristotle’s idea that heavier objects fell faster than the lighter ones wrong, Newton postulated the universal law of gravity in his book Principia Mathematica that explained the movement of heavenly bodies around the sun and sparked the belief that the universe was dynamic. While Christensen Roemer showed that the light traveled at a finite speed, James Clark Maxwell proved through his equations the existence of wave-like disturbances in the electromagnetic field that traveled at fixed speeds. While Newton’s laws of motion eliminated the existence of an absolute space, Einstein’s theory of relativity eliminated the existence of an absolute time and dramatically changed our ideas about space and time (according to his theory, time wasn’t separate from and independent of space and that they both combined to form an object called “space-time”). While Edwin Hubble observed the night sky with his telescope and saw that the galaxies were moving away from each other, John Mitchell theorized black holes: massive and compact stars that would have such strong gravitational fields that would pull back the light leaving from their surface therefore making them black voids in space. While Einstein explained how the force of gravity affects the photons of light, Newton satisfied himself with the belief that light was a wave and that gravity won’t have any affect on it at all.

Now, is it just me or do you feel that our universe is interesting too?

- AG.