UNIVERSE

All the things that exist – stars and cities, planets and people, quasars and quarks – make up what we call the Universe. Everything we know is contained within its vastness. Questions about the physical Universe: what is it made of? How big is it? How and when did it form and what will happen to it? – have fascinated astronomers for centuries.

The word “Universe” comes from two Latin words, “unum”, meaning “one”, and “versum”, meaning “turn”. Perhaps originally the word meant everything that could be seen in one complete turn of the head. In time the Latin word “universum” came to mean “total” and was used as a translation of the Greek “kosmos”, meaning “the whole orderly world”. The word is the origin of the English words “cosmos” and “cosmic”, and “cosmos” and “universe” now mean the same thing: the whole of ordered creation.

The origin of the Universe and the planet Earth has puzzled the imagination of people since time immemorial. Throughout the centuries numerous theories have been proposed for the origin and structure of the Universe. On a clear night, with the naked eye, you can see about 6,000 stars. During the summer months in the Northern Hemisphere a faint band of light stretches from horizon to horizon on the background of the deepest black. Astronomers now know that the band is actually composed of countless stars in a flattened disk. The stars are so closed to one another along the line of sight that the unaided eye has difficulty discerning individual members. They call such vast collections of stars Galaxies after the Greek word for milk, and they call the local galaxy to which the Sun belongs the Milky Way Galaxy, or simply the Galaxy.

For the early Egyptians and Babylonians the band of light in the sky was the heavenly Nile flowing through the land of the dead ruled by Osiris.

The ancient Greeks likened it to a river of milk. Also, in ancient Greece the Miletian school of pre-Socratic thinkers, including Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes of the sixth century BC developed the view that the formation of the world occurred as a natural, rather than supernatural, sequence of events.

There is also a well-known religious theory of the creation of the Earth by God during six days.

Ancient Chinese had a very original imagination. They represented the structure of the Universe as an egg. The eggshell was the Universe, the yolk was the Earth, and the egg-white was the Heaven to which stars and planets were fastened.

This view was elaborated by the Pythagorean school of that era, which stressed the concept of an ordered cosmos governed by mathematical relations, and which culminated in the work of Leucippus and Democritus of the Atomist school. The Atomist view is expressed by the Roman poet Lucretius. He describes a boundless universe in which the interplay of atoms creates endless worlds in various stages of development and decay.

These early pictures of the physical world were supplanted by the geocentric finite cosmologies of Plato, Aristotle, and Ptolemey, which later were embodied in medieval theologies. During that ancient time five planets nearest to the Sun were discovered. They were the Mercury, the Venus, the Mars, the Jupiter and the Saturn. There is a very interesting fact that 6 centuries before Christ, Thales of Miletus was already clear about the Earth being round, he knew that the Moon is illuminated by the Sun and he had predicted the solar eclipse of the year 585 before Christ.

And only in the 16^th century Copernicus suggested that the Sun was at the true centre of the Universe and the Earth and other planets moved around it. Thus from the 16^th century the Copernican theory, the mathematical discoveries of Kepler and the arguments of Galileo and the theories of Newton in a period of about 200 years opened minds to the possibility of an apparently infinite universe whose centre has no specific location.

The realization that stars may be arranged into a system of “island universes”, now known to be galaxies, emerged in the middle of the 18^th century largely as a result of suggestions by such scientists and philosophers as Emanuel Swedenborg, Thomas Wright, Immanuel Kant.

Tasks:

Single out the vocabulary items that are helpful to discuss the prerequisites of space studying and space explorations.
What is the notion of “universe”?
Comment on the following:

the origin of the Universe

a river of milk

the creation of the Earth by God

the structure of the Universe

the geocentric finite cosmologies

a system of “island universes”

4. Make up 7 sentences in Russian that reflect the main issues of the text.

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Space and Human Survival, Part II	\|

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