Cosmology - Blog Posts
Dark Academia Cosmology mood board for @the-shooting-star
Hope it’s what you wanted ✨🪐💫
Welcome to the second episode!
Below the cut are my sources, music credits, a glossary, a timeline of all the people I mention in the podcast, and the script I was working with. I’m on Twitter @HDandtheVoid if you want to tweet at me instead of tumblr-ing me!
Let me know what you think of this episode, let me know what you think I should research next*, tell me a fun space fact… any feedback is helpful!
*(My current thoughts are henges, spectroscopy dark matter, or black holes. Let me know by April 27th so I can start researching before I put up the next podcast on May 8th!)
Glossary:
astronomy - first used to describe a field of study in the 12th century, it concerns the study of objects and matter outside the earth's atmosphere, as well as their physical and chemical properties
corpuscles - any very small particles. A precursor to atoms.
cosmology—the study of the properties of our universe as a whole.
eccentric orbit - an orbit proposed by Ptolemy’s model of the universe where each planet's circular orbit is not centered on the Earth but at a point slightly away from Earth. See an example in the link.
elliptic orbit - also known as a Kepler orbit, it is an orbital system where a smaller body, like the moon or the planets, orbits a larger body like the Earth or the Sun, with the Earth or Sun at one focus of the ellipse while the other focus is empty. See an example in the link.
epicycle - a planet’s smaller orbit around a point on the larger orbiting sphere it is assigned to. See an example in the link.
Platonic Solid - a regular, 3-dimensional, convex polyhedron constructed by regular polygonal faces with the same number of faces meeting at each vertex. Only five shapes meet these criteria: tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron. See an example in the link.
precession of the equinoxes - also called axial precession, it is a slow and continuous change in the orientation of an astronomical body's rotational axis due to gravity. On Earth, it is seen as a westward movement of the equinoxes along the ecliptic relative to the fixed stars, opposite to the yearly motion of the Sun along the ecliptic. See an example in the link.
solar system - first used in 1704, this term describes the Sun together with the group of celestial bodies that are held by its attraction and orbit around it.
Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe—a spacecraft operating from 2001 to 2010 which measured temperature differences in the cosmic microwave background radiation leftover from the Big Bang.
Script/Transcript (It’s not exactly what I said, but it’s what I was going off of. It’s conversational and it’s less rambly than what I actually said)
Timeline of people mentioned:
Claudius Ptolemy, Greek (100-170) Al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham, Arab (965-1040) Nicolaus Copernicus, Polish (1473-1543) Tycho Brahe, Danish (1541-1601) Giordano Bruno, Italian (1548-1600) Galileo Galilei, Italian (1564-1642) Johannes Kepler, German (1571-1630) René Descartes, French (1596-1650) Sir Isaac Newton, English (1642-1726/7) Edmond Halley, English (1656-1742) Immanuel Kant, German (1724-1804) Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace, French (1749-1827) William Huggins, English (1824-1910) Heber Curtis, American (1872-1942) V. M. Slipher, American (1875-1969) Albert Einstein, German (1879-1955) Harlow Shapley, American (1885-1972) Edwin Hubble, American (1889-1953)
Sources:
Mars in retrograde during Tycho’s time
History of the idea of black holes
Size of the universe since 1919, presented as a teacher resource
Timeline of cosmological models
Current cosmological model
Measuring the size of our universe via NASA, with links to further universe-size resources
19th-century size of our universe debate between Shapley and Curtis
Cosmological Constant via NASA
Cosmological Constant via HubbleSite
NASA’s breakdown of the makeup of our universe
Dark Energy via NASA
Kirshner, Robert P. “Hubble’s Diagram and Cosmic Expansion.” In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 101.1 (Jan. 6, 2004), 8-13. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3148363 [accessed 2 December 2013].
McLennan, Evan. Cosmological Evolution: Critical and Constructive. 2nd ed., Gazette-Times Press: Corvallis, OR, 1916.
Pickover, Clifford A. Archimedes to Hawking: Laws of Science and the Great Minds Behind Them. Oxford UP: NY, 2008.
Sabra, A. I. “Configuring the Universe: Aporetic, Problem Solving, and Kinemaic Modeling as Themes of Arabic Astronomy.” In Perspectives on Science 6 (1998), 288-330. Retrieved from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/posc [accessed Oct. 4, 2013].
Shank, Michael H. “Setting the Stage: Galileo in Tuscany, Veneto, and Rome.” In The Church and Galileo, 57-87. Edited by Ernan McMullin. Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 2005.
Sharratt, Michael. Galileo: Decisive Innovator. New York: Cambridge U P, 1994.
Smith, R. W. “The Origins of the Velocity-Distance Relation.” In Journal for the History of Astronomy 10.29 (Oct 1979), 133-165.
Westfall, Richard S. Essays on the Trial of Galileo. Vatican City: Vatican Observatory Foundation, 1989.
…and class notes from a class on Ancient Astronomy I took with Prof. James Evans.
Intro Music: ‘Better Times Will Come’ by No Luck Club off their album Prosperity
Filler Music: ‘Epigram’ by Tycho off their album Dive
Outro Music: ‘Fields of Russia’ by Mutefish off their album On Draught
Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking and Arthur C. Clarke - God, The Universe and Everything Else (1988) [52:10]
Bummed I missed the first episode of the new Cosmos, but I'll catch it on Sunday!
A couple of clips from this excellent video, an hour well spent... Big questions and Curiosity Science, Politics, and Skepticism Creativity
![Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.❞ — Jeremy Knowles, discussing the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery. (via alliterate) OH WAIT LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT CECILIA PAYNE • Cecilia Payne’s mother refused to spend money on her college education, so she won a scholarship to Cambridge. • Cecilia Payne completed her studies, but Cambridge wouldn’t give her a degree because she was a woman, so she said to heck with that and moved to the United States to work at Harvard. • Cecilia Payne was the first person ever to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College, with what Otto Strauve called “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.” • Not only did Cecilia Payne discover what the universe is made of, she also discovered what the sun is made of (Henry Norris Russell, a fellow astronomer, is usually given credit for discovering that the sun’s composition is different from the Earth’s, but he came to his conclusions four years later than Payne — after telling her not to publish). • Cecilia Payne is the reason we know basically anything about variable stars (stars whose brightness as seen from earth fluctuates). Literally every other study on variable stars is based on her work. • Cecilia Payne was the first woman to be promoted to full professor from within Harvard, and is often credited with breaking the glass ceiling for women in the Harvard science department and in astronomy, as well as inspiring entire generations of women to take up science. • Cecilia Payne is awesome and everyone should know her. (OP: Matthew Gardner)](https://64.media.tumblr.com/62252d2e0b47b6782fbd6ef350407812/5bd09b4ca294947e-d3/s500x750/58ae690a544239d5a7cdf38d6193c1e114d908a1.jpg)
