Word: heavensent
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For nearly 2,000 years, astronomers, theologians, skeptics and believers have pondered the story of the star of Bethlehem. Did some celestial display actually mark Jesus birth, or is the biblical reference merely figurative? Did a new star really appear in the heavens? Could it have been what contemporary astronomers...
In one way, the choice of the star was more appropriate than the ancients knew. Like the infant whose birth they symbolize, stars, by living and dying, enable whole new worlds to be born. Conceived in the frigid darkness of space, stars during their lives produce the elements that make...
The Greeks philosophized about the physical nature of stars. Xenophanes, who lived in the 6th century B.C., argued that heavenly bodies were luminous clouds, rather than gods. Anaximander of Miletus described the sky as a sphere surrounded on the outside by wheels of fire; the stars, he thought, were the...
In 1718 Astronomer Edmund Halley of comet fame showed that Sirius, Procyon and Arcturus had changed positions−relative to other stars−since Greek times, establishing for the first time that the stars were not fixed in the heavens. By the early 1900s, astronomers had learned that the sun...
MYTHS by Alexander Eliot. 320 pages. McGraw-Hill. $39.95. This dizzying book hurls the reader around the world and across the centuries in pursuit of the common roots of mankind's myths. Here is Himbui the Hummingbird, the fire bringer of Peru's Jivaro Indians, cheek by jowl...