5,000 years of cosmology, in pictures

The universe has n’t changed much in the preceding 5,000 years , but our agreement of it has . In historian John Ptak ’s amazing collection of cosmological maps , you may see how our sight of the cosmos has transfer radically over metre .

A purview from the 1700s arrest some of the known satellite zooming around in the orbits that astronomers of the day had been track . But below you could see an ancient Babylonian sentiment of the universe , with nested sphere centered on Earth . What ’s interesting is that even the earliest view of the universe , economize for a few , seem to incorporate the concentric band or nested spheres pattern that persists all the room up to the present sidereal day – though of course today we ’d place the sun at the core of our solar system , and a black hole at the shopping mall of the coltsfoot .

But then there are always outlier representations , like Rene Descartes ’ 1644 image of the existence , represented as a maelstrom :

Greenworks

And here at last in 1850 is ( somewhat much ) the solar system as we screw it – with the sun in the center .

you may see over 45 more illustrations in Ptak ’s blog , and this post is the first of several he has planned that will recount the story of cosmology in paradigm .

viaPtak Science Books

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