Page 6 - Curriculum Visions Dynamic Book

Origins of the Universe
We now think we have a reasonable idea of how the Universe works, when it was formed, and what will happen to it in the future. This will be set out in more detail later in the book. But we are not the first people (and probably not the last) to feel that they know the answer to the fundamental question of where we are.
Since earliest times people have wondered about the Universe they live in. Many people have believed through the millennia, and still do today, that the Universe has a supernatural cause.
The ancient Greeks were among the first to think that the Universe had developed naturally. Their reasoning for this was that wherever they looked, they saw a Universe that seemed
to obey the laws of mathematics. It was, in effect, an ordered Universe. This, they thought, could easily have come about by natural means.
They also developed a startlingly perceptive theory that the Universe was due to the interplay of atoms coming together or breaking apart and creating endless worlds in various stages of development and decay.
By the 4th century b.c. one Greek thinker, Heracleides, was already teaching that the Earth rotated freely in space and that Mercury and Venus revolved round the Sun.
The ancient Greeks also knew that the Sun is much larger than the Moon even though both appear to be the same size from Earth. Aristarchus suggested that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and not the Sun around the Earth.
Copernicus to Newton
After the Greeks and Romans mathematical theories were lost for many centuries, and the Earth was once again thought of as flat and as the center of the Universe.
It was not until the 16th century that observations by scientists such as Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo opened the minds of scientists once more to the fact that the Sun was the center of the solar system and that it was but one part of the Universe. This was given support by the calculations of Sir Isaac Newton, who developed the important laWs of motion.
 Our knowledge of
the Universe has been greatly improved by newer telescopes that can see farther and more clearly.
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