Moondark for January: 2009's Incredible Year of Anniversaries

2009 has been proclaimed the International Year of Astronomy for some very good reasons. It marks 400 years since Galileo first used the newly invented telescope for astronomical observation. On the moon, Galileo found mountains and craters, topographic relief on what was believed to be a perfect heavenly sphere.  The phases of Venus and presence of four moons circling Jupiter showed that the Earth was not the center of the Universe but simply one of several planets orbiting the Sun. Galileo demonstrated that empirical observations could reveal the natural world as it is, at times contradicting ancient philosophers and religious authority. Through his astronomical discoveries and studies of motion, Galileo essentially invented the scientific method, without which the technological advances of the past four centuries would not have been possible. Galileo’s accomplishments alone would be enough to merit a year of commemoration, but there are many other individuals and events we could celebrate in 2009. For example, also in 1609, Johannes Kepler published Astronomia nova, establishing that the orbit of Mars was an ellipse, a discovery based on Tycho Brahe’s meticulous records. Precisely one hundred years earlier, Leonardo da Vinci studied mathematics and published a series of geometric drawings in his mentor’s book, De Divina Proportione. Jump ahead a couple of centuries, during which Newton and Leibniz invented calculus, and Pascal, Fermat and the Bernoulli brothers developed modern ideas of probability and statistics, and we reach 1809. Two hundred years ago on February 12th, Charles Darwin was born, incidentally, on the very same day (it was a Sunday) as Abraham Lincoln. There is a double-Darwin of sorts this year, as it is also the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, rushed into print to establish priority because Alfred Russell Wallace had independently uncovered the same mechanism. It was just 100 years ago when the word “gene” was first used in its modern sense as a unit of heredity. Although natural selection is still central in modern evolutionary theory, modern genetics and molecular biology has demonstrated far more complexity in an organism’s development and inheritance than anyone imagined. In 1929, Edwin Hubble, building on results from Milton Humason and Vesto Slipher, published "A Relation between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae,” essentially what we know today as Hubble’s red shift law. And these notables are just those with which I am familiar as a professional scientist and amateur observer. There are many others in scientific disciplines, cultures and religions, and philosophies. And the 2009 IYA is a perfect year to expand your own knowledge. Today’s technology is deeply rooted in this scientific legacy of the past 400 years. While there are many influences on societies and geopolitics, our present day dominion of the planet would be impossible without such technology. There would be no cars or bridges without experiments or Newton’s Laws expressed as differential equations, and we could not fight hunger or battle disease without understanding inheritance and the tangle of gene expression that is cancer. There are well over six billion of us and counting, and we are unlikely to make things better without technology and science as part of a solution. And here’s another anniversary – just passed – worth noting: Earthrise, the photo snapped by the Apollo 8 astronauts on Christmas Eve a mere 40 years ago, just one-tenth of the way back to Galileo. While his observations relocated the Earth at a conceptual level, that single image of a gibbous, blue and white swirled Earth depicted our isolation, yet it simultaneously declared the planet’s independence and unity. Taking that image from just above the lunar surface (we got there thanks to Galileo, Kepler and Newton, of course) and comprehending its meaning are our first steps toward ensuring our home planet is an accommodating place for all mankind. Marking progress toward that goal is certainly worth a year of celebration well beyond astronomy. The graphic at right, composed of images from Wikipedia, the Galileo Project and the Hubble red shift paper  linked above, was produced using Collage tool in Picasa 3.  Moondark is written by Douglas C. Miller, published at the Moondark web site, and printed in the Delmarva Star Gazers' Star Gazer News. This document was last revised on 28 December 2008. Text on this web page is free for non-commercial use with attribution under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial 3.0 License. Ask Doug about other uses.