Monthly Archives: February 2016

Pharrell was probably thinking of bodies when he helped penned this hit for Nelly. Despite what the title may suggest I don’t think he had thermal radiation in mind… Continue reading →

Unlike Vegas, the effects of your space trip come back to Earth with you. Continue reading →

While reading the textbook, I found it very disappointing just how close the Greeks were to figuring out that Earth was not the center of the universe. Had they not been fooled by looking for parallax, they would have been led to the right conclusion that the Earth orbits the sun, rather than that everything […] Continue reading →

We talked a bit in class on Tuesday about what would happen to someone’s body if he were to spend too long in space. His bones would start deteriorating, his muscles would get weaker, and his body would produce less blood as he adjusts to zero G. I was reminded while we were talking about […] Continue reading →

2. Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) was important to astronomy because he served as a pioneer in drifting away from the geocentric model of the universe. He dove tediously into the tables and mathematics of the previous, geocentric model of the universe and found enlightenment in geometry. He thereby successfully determined the distances between planets and the Sun, as […] Continue reading →

Let’s talk about Galileo [February 15th, 1564 – January 8th, 1642]. Not only was he a champion of the Copernican heliocentric view of the cosmos; he also discovered four of Jupiter’s moons with his telescope – giving less and less credence to a critics of the heliocentric model because it showed that small objects could … Continue reading a most galilean affair → Continue reading →

Nicholas Copernicus- February 19, 1473 to May 24, 1543 Nicholas Copernicus’ greatest contribution to science was the idea that the Sun was the center of our solar system rather than the Earth. In other words, a heliocentric model rather than a geocentric model. This was a major step forward in determining that the Earth is […] Continue reading →

Contemporary Events   “Romeo and Juliet” is published– the manuscript was printed in 1597, and then performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in a theater outside of London. Harvard university was founded – in 1636, the university was established by the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and named after a minister called John Harvard. Today, […] Continue reading →

For this assignment I chose to focus on Tycho Brahe: Tycho Brahe (14DEC1546-24OCT1601) is arguably most important to astronomy (and physics) because of his observation of a supernova (SN 1572– which he called a “new star”). Before this observation people still clung to the Aristotelian view of the universe (and physics), Aristotle’s influence in other fields such […] Continue reading →