‘Here is the letter that has destroyed my universe’ and 4 more astrophysic revolutions

On this day, on April 25, in 1929, the world learned how astronomer Edwin Hubble had discovered that the universe was much larger than we believed. On this day in 2025, you can book a book and in 29 learn about this and four other astrophysics discoveries that changed the way we see the universe, and ourselves, in The history of astrophysics in five revolutions.

By Ersilia vaudo, translated by Vanessa Di Stefano. If you use This link We have a penny or something.

I had published Your seminal role In the March edition of Astrophysical Journal (1) but on April 25 in minutes of the National Academy of Sciences, published How, and people began to think about what it meant. He had discovered that the collection of gas and dust we call Andromeda was actually another galaxy.

Legend: hubble that shows cephated variables in an image of Messier 31

Harlow Shaley, who among others was at the forefront when trying to calculate the size of the universe, there were Mathematically shown visible spiral nebulae were still part of our galaxywhich meant that the Milky Way remained the scope of the universe, a a whopping 300,000 years in diameter. Hubble wrote it before showing his findings and Shapley said when reading it; “Here is the letter that has destroyed my universe.”

That is what the revolutions do.

In the book, you will read about this revolution and another four, and you will have an idea of ​​why exploration consumes us.

Our word “desire” comes from Latin Delaware and Accessed – “deprivation” and “star”. Symbolically, we are deprived of the stars, and we want to leave. (2) That is an excellent way to start thinking about everything we have achieved in astrophysics and why it has consumed so many throughout the millennia.

We want to make everything quantifiable, even time. Humans do it in all cultures. But how we perceive time in front of how it exists has been a mystery for a long time. He is using the example of a tribe in the Andes that perceives time as a field in front of them; Because they can ‘see’ the past in their minds. The future is behind them, because it is unknown. Unlike the stars, if there is no one to experience it, time ceases to exist.

They are more right than bad. If Hubble or Webb detect a statistical blip and astronomers infect him, they are looking at the past. What is happening there now may not be known for hundreds or thousands of millions of years. Because we have only seen it now, that is our experience. While I feel in my patio reading this book, the sun could have exploded 7 minutes ago and we would not have the way we were about to die. If our tool listened to the past instead of seeing it, we would be even more behind reality. If the sound could travel through space, nothing would detect the sound of the sun exploiting and causing our eventual disappearance up to 13 years after our planet became an icy rock.

Humans instinctively imagine time as tribes do without writing, the past in front of us because we see it, and a giant brain was needed like Newton to change that perception. He showed that what we could perceive could be reduced mathematically. Quantified. Instead of seeing, we could really predict.

Newton was finally successful in changing our perception of the universe that when Einstein appeared and said that we still do not perceive everything, movement and severity and, therefore, time is relative, his The work was considered revolutionary.

Gravity is one of the five revolutions and is going to cover a lot of land, you learn something important in each paragraph. Words are not wasted. She is not comfortably linear, she can create a reference point and then bounce to Kepler by astrology (hey, he still had to pay the invoices) and you see why wandering are important before they bring you back. This is how humans think and that’s how we read better.

In 200 energetic pages, you get some surprising cultural touch stones, such as Ts Eliot using poetry to talk about disturbing the universe, while astronomers were actually bothering our universe. It shows how the change of the twentieth century was an exciting moment, the scope of the vast extension was in everyone’s mind, as if you read pieces of the 50s and 60s and all talked about human exploration.

Vaudo shows the knowledge that made possible in just a few decades to believe that only a galaxy existed to be able to look back 200 million years after the Big Bang. Looking back in time.

That is not bad for the small image that Voyager 1 sent in 1990, which led Carl Sagan to call us a “pale blue point.” We can be insignificant for the universe, but only if it is devoid of any understanding.

Otherwise, we have achieved a lot in a short time. Good work, humanity.

And not deprive yourself from the opportunity to spend a weekend learning about physical discoveries over time. This is worth your space on the shelf.