Space And Human Intellectual Development

Have you ever looked up at the night sky and wondered not just about the wonders of the universe, but how it has affected human intellectual development since the beginnings of civilization? Children are given games and puzzles to enhance their intellectual development, and the mysteries of the skyscape has served us in the same way.

The most obvious benefit of the night sky is that the circuit formed by the phases of the moon serves as a timekeeper for the planting and harvesting of crops. But lunar and solar eclipses baffled early people across the world. The explanation would be obvious if there was both a lunar and a solar eclipse every month, but there is actually a difference of about five angular degrees between the plane of the earth's orbit around the sun and that of the moon around the earth. If this had not been the case, it would have been clear that the earth is spherical and that it revolves around the sun, but humanity would have missed the challenging intellectual exercise of making sense of periodic eclipses.

Another clear benefit is the use of stars as fixed reference points for navigation and for large-scale building projects. Very close to the north celestial pole is a star, Polaris or the North Star, which is pointed to by the outer stars on the bowl of the Big Dipper. Both the pyramids and Angkor Wat were built using the stars for alignment. Eventually the stars became the basis for the development of latitude and longitude, latitude is easily determined by measuring the angular altitude of the North Star above a flat horizon.

Humans mapped the stars in the sky long before the earth's surface. It was an exercise in imagination across the world to group the stars into constellations. I wonder how much of a coincidence it is that the map of the world, with it's nations, very closely resembles the map of the sky with it's constellations.

A major early intellectual challenge was the mapping of the ecliptic, the apparent path of the sun over the course of a year across the starscape. The twelve constellations that lie on the ecliptic are known as the zodiac (although I have no belief whatsover in astrology).

How would our mathematics, particularly geometry, have developed without the night sky? Geometry is one of the oldest branches of mathematics, far pre-dating algebra and calculus, and I am certain that trying to figure out the celestial objects, and using them as timekeepers and fixed reference points, is why.

Next, we come to the planets. The word comes from the ancient Greek word for "wanderer", because planets appear to wander along the ecliptic against the fixed backdrop of the stars. Trying to figure this out gave humans a great exercise in dealing with varying rates of motion, which led to such developments as calculus. To complicate things, and make it more of a puzzle, the ecliptic forms a sine wave that crosses the celestial equator at two points six months apart. The reson that the two do not correspond perfectly is that the earth is tilted on it's axis, which also creates the seasons.

How much of a coincidence is it that so many of the machines designed by humans closely resemble the patterns that we have observed for thousands of years in the night sky? To begin with, the simple harmonic motion of a pendulum very much resembles the moon going through it's phases and ending up as it began, and also the earth going through it's seasons.

All machines have two sets of parts, those that are stationary and those that are in motion. This is the same pattern in the sky as the stars remain still as the planets cross, at their varying rates, in motion. In vehicles, of course, the entire machine is in motion but there are parts within that are in relative motion. The rotary motion is very common in machines, and this is the same as the entire celestial sphere revolving around the celestial poles such as the North Star.

What would the world be like now if we did not have the view of the moon, stars and, planets that we do? It would surely be a very different place.