The great astronomical revolution
Patrick Moore, one of the great presenters of astronomy in our time, here tells the epic story of the historical development of astronomy which caused a revolutionary change in human outlook, both in its impact and on scientific thinking and upon religious belief. It is a fascinating story, well researched and told in a scholarly yet exciting narrative that will be read with enjoyment and profit by astronomers, historians and the general public. It had been believed according to cosmologists and Jewish/Christian/Muslim tradition that the Earth began at a finite time in the past. A scientific revolution began with Copernicus, the Polish priest, who in 1534 cast aside the ancient Greek idea that the Earth occupied the proud position in the centre of the universe. In his published work De Revolutionibus he stated that the planets revolved around the Sun. His theory was opposed by scientists and was regarded as heresy by the Christian Church, which in those times persecuted heretics who held such views. A scholarly Danish scientist, Tycho Brahe (between 1576 and 1596) made the essential observations which enabled the German mathematician Johannes Kepler in 1609 to prove that the Earth is indeed a planet travelling in an elliptical orbit around the Sun. Then came the Italian Galileo whose brilliant enquiring mind and courageous conviction led him to support the Copernicum theory at the risk of persecution by the dreaded Inquisition. In 1687 came the great Sir Isaac Newton who had the final say when, in his great work of genius Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, he developed the mathematical proof of how bodies move in space. In his Space Age Epilogue, Patrick Moore leaps forward three centuries to 1957 and the new astronomical revolution of our time which could never have happened without those earlier scientists' pioneer work. He examines space exploration by rocket power following the launch of Sputnik I and the probes to the planets of our Solar System; and controlled landings on Venus and Mars, culminating with the sensational achievements of Hubble as monitored by NASA. The linkage of these two revolutions, argues Patrick Moore, will no doubt be followed in future by a third of equal magnitude.
