English, nonfiction, educational + relatable femme reading
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EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
North American (General) North American (US General American - GenAM)Transcript
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a brief history of time, From the Big Bang to Black Holes By Stephen Hawking Chapter one Our Picture of the universe. A well known scientist. Some say it was Bertrand Russell once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun in turn orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said, What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise. The scientist gave her a superior smile before replying. What is the turkey is standing on? You're very clever young man, very clever, said the old lady, but it's turtles all the way down. Most people would find the picture of our universe is an infinite tower of tortoises. Rather ridiculous. But why do we think we know better? What do we know about the universe? And how do we know it? Where did the universe come from? And where is it going? Did the universe have a beginning? And if so, what happened before, then? What is the nature of time? Will it ever come to an end? Recent breakthroughs in physics made possible in part by fantastic new technologies, suggest answers to some of these long standing questions someday. These answers may seem as obvious to us as the earth orbiting the sun, or perhaps as ridiculous as a tower of tortoises only time, whatever that may be, We'll tell as long ago as 340. Bc. The greek philosopher Aristotle in his book on the heavens, was able to put four forward two good arguments for believing that the earth was a round sphere rather than a flat plate. First he realized that eclipses of the moon were caused by the earth coming between the sun and the moon. The earth's shadow on the moon was always round, which would be true only if the earth was spherical. If the earth had been a flat disc, the shadow would have been elongated, elliptical unless the eclipse always occurred at a time when the sun was directly under the center of the disk. Second, the Greeks knew from their travels at the north star appeared lower in the sky when viewed in the south than it did in the northerly regions. Since the north star lies over the north pole, it appears to be directly above an observer at the north pole, but to someone looking from the equator, it appears to lie just at the horizon From the difference in the apparent position of the North Star in Egypt and Greece, Aristotle even quoted an estimate the distance around the earth was 400,000 Stadia. It is not known exactly what length a stadium was, but it may have been about 200 yards, which would make aristotle's estimate about twice the currently accepted figure. The Greeks even had a third argument that the Earth must be round for why else does one first see the sails of a ship coming over the horizon, and only later see the Hall?