Earliest Conceptions Of The Universe

Earliest Conceptions Of The Universe

All scientific thinking on the character of the universe are often copied to the distinctive geometric patterns fashioned by the celebs within the night sky. Even prehistoric people must have noticed that, apart from a daily rotation (which is now understood to arise from the spin of Earth), the stars did not seem to move concerning one another: the stars appear “fixed.” Early nomads found that knowledge of the constellations could guide their travels, and they developed stories to help them remember the relative positions of the stars in the night sky. These stories became the legendary tales that ar a part of most cultures. When nomads turned to farming, an intimate knowledge of the constellations served a new function—an aid in timekeeping, in particular for keeping track of the seasons. People had noticed terribly early that bound celestial objects failed to stay stationary relative to the “fixed” stars; instead, during the course of a year, they moved forward and backward in a very slender strip of the sky that contained twelve constellations constituting the signs of the zodiac. Seven such wanderers were Flegendary to the ancients: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Next in importance was the Moon: its position correlated with the tides, and its shape changed intriguingly over a month. The Sun and Moon had the facility of gods; why not then the opposite wanderers? Thus probably arose the astrological belief that the positions of the planets (from the Greek word planetes, “wanderers”) in the zodiac could influence worldly events and even cause the rise and fall of kings. In deference to the present belief, Babylonian priests devised the week of seven days, whose names even in various modern languages (for example, English, French, or Norwegian) can still easily be copied to their origins within the seven planet-gods.