World order concepts. How did our understanding of the world evolve?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

At first there was nothing. Including human heads. When heads with brains inside appeared, they began to observe the world and put forward hypotheses regarding its structure. During the time that civilization exists, we have made significant progress in understanding: from the world - mountains surrounded by the ocean and a hard sky hanging over it to a multiverse of unimaginable sizes. And this is clearly not the last concept.

1. Mountain of the Sumerians

We are all a little bit Sumerian. This people, which appeared in Mesopotamia in the second half of the 4th millennium BC, invented civilization: the first writing, the first astronomy, one of the first calendars, bureaucracy - these are all innovations of the Sumerians. Through Babylon, the knowledge of the Sumerians reached the ancient Greeks and the entire Mediterranean.

On the clay tablets filled with cuneiform writing, we will not find a full-fledged cosmology of the Sumerians, but it can be isolated from the epics inscribed on them. This was done most consistently by the American Sumerologist Samuel Kramer back in the middle of the last century.

The picture of the world was not very complicated

one. In the beginning there was the primordial ocean. Nothing is said about his origin or birth. It is likely that, in the mind of the Sumerians, he existed forever.

2. The primordial ocean gave birth to the cosmic mountain, which consisted of the earth combined with the sky.

3. Created as gods in the guise of man, the god An (sky) and the goddess Ki (earth) gave birth to the god of air, Enlil.

4. The air god Enlil separated the sky from the earth. While his father An lifted (carried away) the sky, Enlil himself lowered (carried away) the earth, his mother. Enlil's marriage with his mother - the earth laid the foundation for the structure of the world: the creation of man, animals, plants and the creation of civilization.

As a result, the world is arranged like this: a flat earth, above which the dome of the sky rises, under the ground is the empty space of the land of the dead, even lower is the primary ocean of Nammu. The movement of the luminaries, studied by astronomers quite well, was explained by the prescriptions of the gods, of whom there were several hundred or even thousands in the Sumerian pantheon.

2. Viviparity of the world

Basically, the world in ancient mythologies was born either from chaos or from the ocean. Sometimes - as a transitional stage - something living or divinely living appears. It turned out well, for example, with the ancient Chinese. One of the myths is about the shaggy first man Pan-Gu. At first, however, there was still chaos, which formed an egg, consisting of halves of Yin and Yang. Pan-Gu hatched from the egg and immediately separated Yin and Yang with an ax. Yin became the earth, Yang became the sky. Then Pan-Gu grew for many years and expanded the earth and sky. When he died, his breath became wind and clouds, one eye - the sun, the other - the moon, blood - rivers, beard - the Milky Way, and so on. Everything went into action, right down to the parasites on the skin, which turned, you know, into people. The myth was written down rather late (the last of the dates is the 2nd century AD), and it is not very clear: it is metaphorical through and through or reflects the actual faith of some very ancient Chinese.

A similar motive existed in Babylon. The good Sumerian cosmogonic tale was changed for political reasons: Marduk (the patron saint of Babylon) fights Tiamat (the ocean, but a monster), kills her, dismembers and creates heaven and earth from his body.

3. What the Earth is supported by

While the Earth was flat, it had to hold on to something. It was held by giant elephants standing on a turtle, or just a turtle, or, at worst, three whales. Then Aristotle and Ptolemy came and explained that the Earth is a sphere. Many will remember exactly this sequence of events learned in school lessons. In fact, where the ancient Greeks lived, no one ever held the Earth. There were no such animals either in Babylonian myths, or in Egyptian or Greek. This is an oriental tradition: in the Indian epic Ramayana, people dig up to just four elephants, simultaneously scaring away underground spirits. In the same place, in India, the god Vishnu incarnates in a turtle, and then this turtle holds the Mandara Mountain, which has begun to sink. The Eastern peoples had an extensive zoo of the Earth holders: fish, snakes, bulls, wild boars, bears … Russian folklore whales in number from one to seven also fit here, only now they arose relatively recently - in the last thousand years.

In general, there is no bundle - first, animals hold the Earth, and then Aristotle and the spherical Earth - no. At the time when the Hindus added elephants to the tortoise (for greater beauty, apparently), the Greeks were already specifying the radius of the Earth.

4. Ball

Ancient Greece by about the 6th century BC acquired philosophy and laid the foundation for all European science (that is, all science in general). The first guess about the globe is attributed to Pythagoras (VI century BC), but he is generally credited with a lot, despite the fact that he did not leave any writings. However, the thought of Pythagoras was highly appreciated by Plato, who passed it on to his student Aristotle. By that time, the Greek school of exact sciences was formed (not without borrowings from Egypt and Babylon), and the sphericity of the Earth was discussed more and more often. Aristotle gave evidence: some stars that are visible in the south are not visible in the north, and the shadow of the Earth during lunar eclipses is circular. Less than a century later, Eratosthenes calculated the length of the meridian, being in error within 2–20%. He measured the angle at which the sun is visible in Alexandria and Siena, and then applied trigonometry to calculations. By the beginning of the new era, the spherical Earth was already a common place, as Pliny wrote about.

The Greeks did what no one else in the oecumene had been able to do before: they created the continuity of science. Their works, controversial, naive, mathematically verified, were available to Arabs, Persians, and medieval Europe. And no one, of course, will believe that thanks to these eccentrics, Kepler, Newton, Einstein were wearing tunics … It's a joke. Everyone knows that.

5. Center of the world

Greek science also figured out what to place at the center of the universe - the Earth, the Sun, or something else. There were many ideas. Anaximander considered the earth a low cylinder with a height three times less than its diameter, it was in the center of the world, and huge bagels filled with fire were concentrically located around. These tori were full of holes, and fire broke through them, which was the luminary. The closest to the Earth was a torus with a weak fire and many holes - stars were obtained, then a donut with a hole for the Moon, then for the Sun, and so on … Democritus, who invented atoms, also invented a plurality of worlds, although he considered the Earth flat. Aristarchus of Samos put forward the hypothesis that the Earth revolves around the Sun and around its axis, and the sphere of fixed stars is at a great distance. But Aristotle defeated all, placing the spherical Earth in the center of the world and attaching the stars and stars to the moving spheres. Launched the celestial mechanics, of course, God, for which Aristotle was greatly appreciated even with Christians.

6 ptolemy forever

In the 2nd century AD, the Alexandrian scholar Ptolemy wrote a fundamental work in 13 books known as the Almagest. He generalized knowledge of the astronomy of Babylon and Greece, added his own observations and a serious mathematical apparatus to explain the movement of the stars.

The system is geocentric: the Earth is in the center, the luminaries are located on spheres around. Ptolemy based his calculations on the epicycles already known by that time. The bottom line is simple: take two spheres - one larger, the other smaller - and put a ball between them. If you move the spheres, the ball will spin. Now let's choose a point on this ball - this will be the planet. It will describe the loops when viewed from the center of the spheres. Ptolemy introduced several amendments to this model and, as a result, achieved excellent accuracy: the positions of the planets were determined with an error of 1 °. Ptolemy's system lived for 14 centuries - before Copernicus.

7. Copernicus

1543 year. "On the rotation of the celestial spheres." The work of Nicolaus Copernicus, the Polish astronomer, which turned the worldview of the entire civilized world. Copernicus worked on it for 40 years and published it in the year of his death as a seventy-year-old man. And in the preface he wrote: "Taking into account how absurd this teaching must seem, I hesitated to publish my book for a long time and thought whether it would not be better to follow the example of the Pythagoreans and others, who passed on their teachings only to friends, spreading it only through tradition." The "absurdity" was that the scientist refuted the geocentric system of the world. Copernicus cosmology looked like this: in the center of the sun, around the planet (still attached to the celestial spheres) and very, almost infinitely far away - the sphere of stars. The earth rotates both on its axis and around the center of its orbit. So are the planets. The world is finite, but very large.

Copernicus contradicted Ptolemy and Aristotle. He was the first, his system was not mathematically perfect, and for a long time many colleagues preferred to regard it as a "mathematical model". Moreover, it was safer - the church did not really approve. Others came for Copernicus. Their names are known, only a few people. And the fates of all these people - all without exception - who made the first revolution in cosmology, evoke respect and admiration for the pride of their thought.

8. Down with the spheres

Giordano Bruno, more a philosopher than an astronomer, built a logical picture of the world based on the teachings of Copernicus. He "removed" from the universe the spheres that carry the planets. The result is this: the planets move around the Sun by themselves, the stars are the same suns surrounded by planets, the Universe is infinite, it has no center, there are many inhabited worlds. Was burned in Rome in 1600 for heresy.

9. Kepler's ellipses

German astronomer Johannes Kepler finally destroyed the Ptolemy system. He deduced the exact laws of planetary motion: all planets move in ellipses, in one of the focuses of which is the Sun. The Earth has become the same ordinary planet. However, Kepler believed that the sphere of stars exists and the universe is finite. The main objection to an infinite universe is the photometric paradox: if the number of stars were infinite, then wherever we looked, we would see a star, and the sky would shine like the sun. This paradox was not resolved until the discovery of the expansion of the Universe and the creation of the Big Bang theory in the 20th century.

10. Moons of Jupiter

In 1609, Galileo Galilei looked at Jupiter through a telescope he had invented. It was found that satellites can be not only on the Earth, but also on other celestial bodies. In addition, by observing the Milky Way, Galileo found out that with increasing magnification, the nebula disintegrates into many stars. He found mountains on the moon, that is, he directly confirmed: yes, this is not an abstract body, but a completely material planet, like the Earth. He tried to convince the leadership of the Catholic Church of the correctness of the Copernican system, for which he was convicted, and only renunciation saved him from the fire. He founded the experimental method in physics and laid the foundations of Newtonian mechanics. He formulated the principle of relativity of motion, that is, he explained why we do not feel either the rotation of the Earth or its movement around the Sun.

11. What drives the planets

In 1687 Isaac Newton published Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. In this work, he formulated the law of universal attraction, which turned out to be necessary and sufficient to explain the reasons for the motion of the planets according to Kepler's model.

Newton's laws made it possible to solve any problems of mechanics with great accuracy, and from the point of view of these laws, the Earth, the Sun, planets and stars are ordinary bodies of certain sizes and masses. Newton considered the universe to be eternal, endless and evenly filled with stars. Otherwise, gravity would inevitably blind all matter into one large lump. Despite the photometric paradox, this picture of the world lasted until Einstein.

12. Very Big Bang

In 1915, Albert Einstein formulated general relativity. She "corrected" Newton's theory of gravity: now gravity has become a property of space and curved it depending on mass and energy. Einstein's universe was still infinite and eternal, but Alexander Fridman already in 1922-1924 solved the equations so that the universe could either contract or expand. In 1927, Georges Lemaitre postulated a "primordial atom" - the point at which all matter in the Universe is concentrated before its birth. The Universe of Friedmann - Lemaitre swells from this point, and it swells up - in all places equally - and does not fly away from the center. Later it will be called the Big Bang. In 1929, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble observes the redshift of galaxies and finds out that distant galaxies are moving away from us at a faster rate than close ones. Thus, the idea was confirmed that the Universe was born in a Big Bang and is expanding. During the XX century it was found out that it was born 13, 8 billion years ago, and we see only a small part of it - from the “big” Universe, light will never reach us.

13. Cold blast and multiverse

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Russian physicists Alexei Starobinsky, Andrei Linde, Vyacheslav Mukhanov, and American Alan Guth proposed a model for how the universe exploded. It turned out that it swelled up from a very small bubble of vacuum (only our galaxy turned out from a region 10–27 cm in size), and only then the energy turned into matter - particles and fields - and the hot stage of the Big Bang began. This hypothesis implies that there are an infinite number of universes, they are born all the time - this is the so-called multiverse.