Sunrise Sunset

"The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it arose." --Ecclesiastes 1:5

  It's hard to argue with the Bible. The sun certainly appears to rise in the east and set in the west.  The Prophet who wrote Ecclesiastes wonders, what's the point of existence. He also says further, "There's nothing new under the sun." He may be right, but there is a different way of looking at the sun. Way back in the third century BC, Aristarchus of Samos, using just his eyes and his brain, concluded that the earth rotated on its axis and orbited the sun. 

  Some of his fellow scientists agreed with him, others didn't. All the knowledge of the Greek scientists was eventually housed in the Great Library of Alexandria. The library burned in a couple of war-related fires so that knowledge of the heavens went underground for awhile. The Roman Empire fell into a dark age when people just hoped to see the sun come up without worrying about who was orbiting what.

  Meanwhile Arab and Indian astronomers in the Middle Ages came up with the theory that the earth orbited the sun while spinning on its axis.  Once the West got on its feet it put its faith in the ancient Ptolemaic system which put the earth at the center with sun, stars and planets orbiting it. To explain the erratic movements of the planets, the Ptolemaic system had to grow increasingly complex. Putting the sun in the center would have made everything so much simpler.

  Finally in the early 17th century, a Dutchman invented the first telescope. We don't know what happened to him, but Galileo heard about it and on this day in 1609, demonstrated the telescope he had designed for his instrument maker to make for him. Galileo already believed that the earth orbited the sun but he needed proof. With his telescope he discovered the four moons of Jupiter which he noted over a period of weeks orbited Jupiter. When he tried to show the moons to others they said they couldn't see anything. One them said the moons were imperfections in the telescope itself.

  The Church did not like these theories because the Bible indicated that the sun went around the earth. Galileo said the Bible was an authority on faith and morals, not science. Galileo had some support from open-minded clergymen within the Church, but he had to walk a fine line to avoid falling into the hands of the Inquisition, which had the power to torture and execute heretics. In 1623 one of Galileo's allies became Pope Urban VIII. Urban invited Galileo to write a book in the form of a debate. Galileo made the mistake of putting the Church's view in the mouth of a fictional philosopher named Simplicio. Galileo's enemies told the pope he was being ridiculed. The pope called in the Inquisition and Galileo had to recant. He was sentenced to house arrest for the last nine years of his life.

  People who opposed Galileo’s sun centered theory said that if the earth circled the sun there would have to be a noticeable change in the position of the stars relative to each other. If no change was visible that would have to mean the stars were really, really far away and very, very big. Duh? 

  It wasn't until the 1830s that telescopes capable of detecting this slight difference were developed. One final tidbit: there are 100 billion stars in our galaxy and there are 100 billion galaxies, each with 100 billion stars. The total number of stars is 10 with 23 zeroes after it. We don't know how many earth-like planets are out there, but odds are good there's another Wannaska on one of them, but definitely not another Wannaskan Almanac.

Man, the measure of all things