Cosmos
Cosmos#
Cosmos - greek work for the order of the universe - opposite of chaos
Orion Nebula#
- 1500 light years from earth
- Orion’s Belt
- The middle star in Orion’s sword - a stella nursery a place where stars are born
Our sun#
- Approaching a single ordinary yellow dwarf star
- 4 light hours from earth is planet Neptune and Triton moon
- 80 light minutes - 1 and a half billion kms
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1976 Voyager landed on Mars - Olympus Mons largest volcano on Mars. 22 Km high.
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100 billion galaxies
Earth#
- Size of Earth was discovered by Eratostinese
- Alexandria
- Precisely at noon - the shadow sone directly done into a well.
- He experimented to see if 800km away (in Syene) the stick cast a shadow but not in Alexandria.
- How could it be that no shadow at Sian and a large shadow Alexandria at the same moment? The only answer the earth is curved. The sun is so far away the rays of sun are parrallel.
- He worked out the angle - due to the observed difference in shadow.
- 7 degree is a 51.42th of 360.
- He hired a man to pace out the distance from Alexandria to Syene - 800km.
- 51.42 * 800 = 41142km must be the circumference of the earth
Library of Alexandria#
1 million scrolls at its peak
- Eratostinese
- Heparvus - Mapped constelations and established brightness of stars
- Euclid - Systematised geometry
- Darnecius - Defined the parts of speech
- Heraphalos - Phisiologist - brain instead of heart
- Archimedis - Greatest mechanical genius until Loenardo daVinci
- Ptolemy - Compiled astrology (earth centered universe held sway for 1500 years)
- Hypacia - mathematician and philosopher
- Aristarcos - Heliocentric - Sun as the centre (destroyed book) - then Copernicus rediscovered
The universe is estimated at 15 billion years
Plato and Pythagoreans suppressed the ionians thinking. They pushed their own agenda because they were comfortable in slave economy.
The total number of stars in the cosmos is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches in the world
You cannot look at the light without traveling back in time
From earth to the centre of the Milky Way galaxy is 30,000 light years.
The next spiral galaxy away from ours is 2 million light years away
Relativity:
Special theory of relativity rules
- light travels at the same speed whether it is moving or stationary
- Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light
- Speed of light is constant (300,000km a second)
The Human Brain#
- The right hemisphere: pattern recognition, creative insight, sensitivity
- The Left hemisphere: rational, analytic and critical thinking
The right generates ideas, the right tests their validity
Don’t trust, Verify.
- aggression, child rearing, sex and willingness to follow leaders blindly is in the lower part of the brain
- reading, speaking and writing is in the cerebral cortex - the top
You have to figure out much more than the genes know. The brain library changes quickly - our passion for learning. We are not trapped in the behavioural patterns of the genes.
We are responsible what is put into our brain - we are not at the mercy of the reptile brain. We can change ourselves.
But then we needed more than just our brain - we stored more inside libraries and the internet.
There are not many books we can read - but there are millions of options.
The trick is to know which books to read
The printing press n china 12th century. Printing books in Europe took a bit longer.