Word: brahes
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Scientists, meanwhile, were demystifying the universe. Strangely, no one knows for sure who invented the telescope, but by 1609 Galileo Galilei had built one of his own. With it he was able to confirm the heretical speculations of Copernicus, Kepler and Tycho Brahe that the sun, not the earth, was the center of our universe. The specific origins of the microscope are equally obscure. In the 17th century, Robert Hooke used it to describe accurately the anatomy of a flea and the design of a feather; Antonie de Leeuwenhoek discovered a world of wriggling organisms in a drop of water...
Europeans left no known record of the Crab supernova, although some probably saw it, and no evidence has been found that they saw an 1181 stellar explosion. It was not until November 1572 that Europe joined the fraternity of distinguished supernova recorders. Although Danish Astronomer Tycho Brahe was not the first to spot the new star that appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia, he ensured that posterity would associate his name with it by writing a book titled De Nova Stella (Concerning the New Star...
...next supernova to be seen by the naked eye happened only 32 years later, in 1604, in the constellation Ophiuchus, and its best-remembered witness was Brahe's former assistant Johannes Kepler. Unlike most supernovas, this one was seen before it reached maximum brightness, so Kepler's descriptions of the blazing star are of particular interest to astronomers. His observations would have been even more detailed and valuable had they been made with a telescope. Unfortunately, the star's timing was off. The supernova lighted the night skies just a scant five years before Galileo made the first documented telescopic...
...Middle Ages, Copernicus displaced earth from its position at the center of the solar system. But Aristotle's thinking continued to dominate astronomy until 1572, when Tycho Brahe observed a bright new star (which scientists now know was a supernova, or exploding star) near the constellation Cassiopeia. Beyond any doubt, it had not previously been visible. Other blows to Aristotelian cosmology followed swiftly. By early in the 17th century, Galileo had used his telescope to discover spots on the sun−demonstrating that the solar complexion was somewhat less than perfect−and to prove that...
...language, ritual-all first products of the mind-did. And because the mind is father to the hand, it can reverse the mechanized march to doom. How that might happen will have to wait until Mumford's sequel; this book ends in the 16th century with Kepler, Tycho Brahe and Copernicus metaphorically anticipating the end machine-the bomb...