There was a time when the sky simply was, vast, glittering, eternal. It equipped itself well into myths and the pulse of stories of creation and people did not have to explain it. Then, at a crossroad in human history somebody raised his eyes and prayed aloud. It is not only thanked you but why? Not what the stars meant in a tale, but what they were composed of.
That was the time when wonder became wonder- how and that became astronomy. The sky was a perplexion.
From Story to Structure: The Speeds of Inquiry
The ancient societies attached great importance to night skiing. Human beings perceived deities, ghosts, spirits, and legends passing through space. Sky was not a background; it was a theatre where myths were performed. The actors in these stories were constellations. There were eclipses which were signs, and there were comets which were prologues of doom or change.
As people sat around the campfires they observed periodic cycles. Venus came out to shine night after night. The moon observed some cycles. The stars went in straight tracks. It was not so random sky and rather a clock.
This shift divided mythic thought. Had the heavens been operating in a regular fashion, then maybe they were governed by laws as well as by gods. The sky was intelligible.
Mesopotamia and the Math of the Heavens
Babylonians were one of the earliest to envisage that wonder could be translated into data. They were very careful in taking the positions of stars, planets and even eclipses. They did not consider themselves as scientists of the kind we know of nowadays; on the contrary they believed that the pattern represented the speech of the gods. To them, a knowledge of those patterns was cosmic literacy.
In so doing, they started a revolution. They produced the earliest tables of predictions concerning planet position–the ephemerides. Theology which was the satellite in the beginning began to lean towards empiricism. The interpretive process was established by way of observation.
The sky that Babylonians experienced was no longer a canvas of gods; it was now a puzzle.
Greece: When Philosophy Met the Stars
Wonder was the legacy the Greeks had and sharpened with philosophy. Only Thales, Anaximander, and–coming later–Pythagoras, did not merely ask what was being moved in the heavens, but why. They discarded mythology and wanted to find some explanations based on logic and symmetry.
Plato felt that the heavens displayed celestial geometry. Aristotle came up with the concept of a finite, perfect, and Earth center universe. His universe was hierarchical, rational and moral- in which everything had its parts.
Then there was Ptolemy who created a geocentric model that was so complex, it remained in use more than a millennium. It was complicated and it just worked. The stars remained divine, but they could be traced by formulable laws.
The Greek were still narrating stories; the stories were now spiced up with mathematics and metaphysics. Astronomy was becoming a philosophy of order.
Modern Astronomy: Wonder Reawakened
People today can peer further into space than was ever conceived by people in ancient times. We have plotted galaxies, we have measured dark matter, and we have photographed the light of ancient died-off stars billions of years ago.
And this is the kicker, the more we learn the more we marvel.
The new question now is-What was there before the Big Bang? How should time be defined? Are humankind clear by themselves? These are not mythological issues anymore or issues of science alone. They are as well philosophical. Yet with better instruments we have re-entered the cycle.
The sky has never ceased to be in question. It has become more complicated, a more beautiful one.
The Question that Never Ends
Astronomy does not revolve about stars, planets, or black holes only. It is also concerning us–one wonders, sensitive, and stubborn creatures who observe the sky asking the question Why?
When we started questioning the sky, we started a journey even beyond outer space. We questioned all we could know.
Today we remain the same inquisitive child gazing at the night sky. We do not merely observe but we ask. And we question the universe, and it further unfolds its mysteries.