The Age of a New World View: AP World History
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The Age of A New World View: AP World History In dialectical and functional thinking this age may be human histories most significant. The Renaissance gave us the creative burst to remove ourselves from the self‐imposed “nonage”/doldrums that was the Middle Ages. The Renaissance gave us the knowledge that human beings had extraordinary talents above and beyond religious submission. The critical stage came in the form of the Reformation, which saw human beings change the very entity that had yielded them into submission for nearly 1000 years. The change that occurred was remarkable, responding to the changes societies engaged in warfare and exploration competing with each other in both venues. Slowly simmering in the backwaters of the Reformation was a new movement that was emerging in response to both the Renaissance and the Reformation; a new World View. The ages mentioned had empowered people to think, and they had done so creatively and critically. What was left was the revolution that would bring about synthesis‐the advent of a new order; an order developed out of the wake of old orders. Brand new ideas and concepts were emerging in response to the combination between classical antiquity and Ren/Ref thought processes. The ages of creativity, criticism and discovery will lead to the age that will bring about a new world order, an order based on human intelligence, observation and rationality. The Scientific Revolution: Science is described as the precise knowledge of the physical world based on the union of experimental observations with sophisticated mathematics. Science had been subordinate to the past, to religion and to darkness. The advent of modern science and the subsequent social scientific thought is the basis for the modern world. Scientific Thought in 1500: The Aristotelian Universe: According to Christian theology the Prime Mover that enveloped the system became the “God” figure. This feature made Aristotle the only respected opinion amongst developing Christians and by the age of Scientific exploration the views of the Aristotelian universe will as much a part of church dogma as those ideas that Martin Luther challenged. Aristotle (384 ‐ 322 BC), who studied under Plato, believed the heavens were more perfect than the Earth and that everything in the heavens was unchanging. He explained planetary motion as being uniform circular motion (motion of a constant angular speed on a circle) because cyclical motion brought an object back to its original starting point and therefore the object was unchanging. Aristotleʹs Universe consists of 55 concentric crystalline spheres to which the celestial objects were attached. The Earth is at the center and the last sphere is that of the Prime Mover. The Prime Mover caused the outermost sphere to rotate at a constant angular velocity. This movement was then imparted to the other spheres. The major problems with Aristotleʹs model were its inability to explain varying planetary brightness (as the planets were supposed to never change) or the retrograde motion of the planets. To explain this, Aristotle created epicycles. Aristarchus of Samos (~250 BC) is the first recorded person to develop a sun‐centered solar system. Although Copernicus is regarded as the father of this model, it is recorded within his published works that he was aware that Aristarchus was before him. Aristarchus not only was before his time in terms of the sun being the center, he also proposed that the Earth rotates as it revolves around the sun. Aristarchus was not well received however because Aristotleʹs model had a very strong following and the introduction of Ptolemyʹs similar proposal a little afterwards made Aristotleʹs hold even stronger. The Ptolemaic Universe: Ptolemy (~200 AD) fully believed in the Aristotelian model of the solar system and simply made some further refinements upon it to account for the detailed motion of the celestial sphere. Epicycles upon epicycles were needed, however in many models, the epicycles no longer revolved around the deferent (center), but instead a point displaced from the center. Eventually the Prime Mover was replaced by God and its sphere by heaven to accommodate the constant theme of centering scientific study around religion. Aristotle on Elements: Aristotleʹs theory of the basic constituents of matter looks to a modern scientist perhaps something of a backward step from the work of the atomists and Plato. Aristotle assumed all substances to be compounds of four elements: earth, water, air and fire, and each of these to be a combination of two of four opposites, hot and cold, and wet and dry. (Actually, the words he used for wet and dry also have the connotation of softness and hardness). Aristotleʹs whole approach is more in touch with the way things present themselves to the senses, the way things really seem to be, as opposed to abstract geometric considerations. Hot and cold, wet and dry are qualities immediately apparent to anyone, this seems a very natural way to describe phenomena. He probably thought that the Platonic approach in terms of abstract concepts, which do not seem to relate to our physical senses but to our reason, was a completely wrongheaded way to go about the problem. It has turned out, centuries later, that the atomic and mathematical approach was on the right track after all, but at the time, and in fact until relatively recently, Aristotle seemed a lot closer to reality. He discussed the properties of real substances in terms of their ʺelementalʺ composition at great length, how they reacted to fire or water, how, for example, water evaporates on heating because it goes from cold and wet to hot and wet, becoming air, in his view. Innumerable analyses along these lines of commonly observed phenomena must have made this seem a coherent approach to understanding the natural world. In the Aristotelian view the elements that made up matter moved by their weight the light elements Air/Fire moved upward whereas the heavy elements Water/Earth moved downward, further solidifying our universe. The Copernican Hypothesis: Copernicus made a great leap forward by realizing that the motions of the planets could be explained by placing the Sun at the center of the universe instead of Earth. In his view, Earth was simply one of many planets orbiting the Sun, and the daily motion of the stars and planets were just a reflection of Earth spinning on its axis. Although the Greek astronomer Aristarchus developed the same hypothesis more than 1500 years earlier, Copernicus was the first person to argue its merits in modern times. In Copernicus’ Sun‐centered (heliocentric) view of the cosmos, the planets’ occasional backward, or retrograde, motion comes about naturally through the combined motions of Earth and the planets. As Earth speeds around the Sun in its faster orbit, it periodically overtakes the outer planets. Like a slower runner in an outside lane at a track meet, the more distant planet appears to move backward relative to the background scenery. Copernicus’ model also explains why the two planets closest to the sun, Mercury and Venus, never stray far from the Sun in our sky. And it allowed Copernicus to calculate the approximate scale of the solar system for the first time. That’s not to say Copernicus’ model was without problems: He still clung to the classical idea that the planets should move in circular orbits at constant speeds, so like Ptolemy, he had to jury‐rig a system of circles within circles to predict the planets’ positions with reasonable accuracy. Despite the basic truth of his model, Copernicus did not prove that Earth moved around the Sun. That was left for later astronomers. The first direct evidence came from Newton’s laws of motion, which say that when objects orbit one another, the lighter object moves more than the heavier one. Because the Sun has about 330,000 times more mass than Earth, our planet must be doing almost all the moving. A direct observation of Earth’s motion came in 1838 when the German astronomer Friedrich Bessel measured the tiny displacement, or parallax, of a nearby star relative to the more distant stars. This minuscule displacement reflects our planet’s changing vantage point as we orbit the Sun during the year. Copernicus realized the gravity and complex nature of his discovery, he waited until he felt he was near death before publishing his momentous “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres”, largely for fear of the religious controversies it was sure to yield. Images and portions of text courtesy of Stephen Hawking. Tycho Brahe: (courtesy of Michael Fowler Uva.) Tycho Brahe, born in 1546, was the eldest son of a noble Danish family, and as such appeared destined for the natural aristocratic occupations of hunting and warfare. However, he had an uncle Joergen, a country squire and vice‐admiral, who was more educated, and childless. Tychoʹs father had agreed with the uncle before Tycho was born that if Tycho was a boy, the uncle could adopt and raise him. He changed his mind and reneged. Then, when a younger brother was born, the uncle kidnapped Tycho. The father threatened to murder the uncle, but eventually calmed down, since Tycho stood to inherit a large estate from the uncle. When Tycho was seven, his uncle insisted that he begin studying Latin. His parents objected, but the uncle said this would help Tycho become a lawyer. At age thirteen, Tycho entered the University of Copenhagen to study law and philosophy. At this impressionable age, an event took place that changed his life. There was a partial eclipse of the sun. This had been predicted, and took place on schedule. It struck Tycho as ʺsomething divine that men should know the motions of the stars so accurately that they were able a long time beforehand to predict their places and relative positionsʺ.