We are Stardust: A tour of how we got here, Part 1: The Gravity of the Situation

The greatest hunt ever lead in history, is the hunt for knowledge. A hunt as old as humanity itself. One generation picks up where the previous one left off, what is learned passes from father to son, from master to novice, from teacher to student, and now here we are, standing on the shoulders of those who came before us just like ‘those who came before us’ did. Everything we know today made one hell of a journey to get to us, yet there is so much of it we take for granted. We have all heard as mere children that light is made of photons, matter is made of atoms, and when we smash those atoms very hard, we get nuclear energy out of them. But these facts were proven by science less than a century ago, they were long mysteries finally solved by the very hard work of some very smart people.

Let's talk about stars. We know the Sun is a star, and like every other one it's a gigantic ball of flame. But imagine living in the past, a time before Google Images, before science books and telescopes. Looking up into the sky is suddenly much more mysterious. Stars now, are just tiny bright dots, in uncountable quantities. And they don't resemble the Sun at all! It is difficult for one to even dare to question what they are, the vastness of the world is scary, so we look for something just as vast, finding the answer in God.In the earlier days we had mythology. The ones who observed the skies would start naming planets after the gods of their belief, finding patterns to discover constellations. Understanding anything beyond that about the heavenly bodies, like how they move, why they shine, was thought to be impossible, our feeble minds thought not capable of accommodating such knowledge. Most pioneers of astronomy were severely punished because of this. They were accused of meddling with God's affairs and challenging the religious authorities. The time came however, when the authority of science started to flourish over them. In the year 1684, enters Sir Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727), perhaps the biggest pioneer in all of science, the man who challenged everyone’s knowledge, who broke us out of our tiny shell to start understanding the universe. Surprisingly, he was rather hesitant to do so; after Robert Hooke publicly accused Newton of stealing his work on the spectrum of light, he kept his work to himself (the discovery was in fact made by Newton), closing off to the outside world. Edmond Halley, a rather wealthy English astronomer in pursuit of the knowledge of gravity, was the one to contact Newton and convince him to publish his work. It was no easy task, it took a long time to find the opportunity to publish the book that revolutionized science, but in the end they were successful. The book is entitled "The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy", The Principia. With Principia, Newton revealed the inner workings of the heavenly bodies, they were influenced by the gravitational forces of each other. The book also contained the invention of calculus, and Newton's Laws of Motion. The mechanical knowledge that started the industrial age.

Edmond Halley worked for his whole life, applying Newton’s work to many things. He made many inventions and drew many maps of the stars and Earth’s winds. Perhaps most importantly, he conquered a comet. Comets at the time meant bad news, they were thought to bring plague, war and chaos to the world. Halley recognized the sightings of certain comets to be of the same one, orbiting the Sun in a large elliptical orbit and ‘visiting’ the Earth once every 76 years. He calculated the comets movement pattern, finding the specific date it would come back, from a specific spot in the sky, following a specific path. He became the first scientist to make a prediction of the future, with extraordinary precision.

Halley died in 1742, 15 years before the date he predicted. But his prediction was not forgotten. When the day came in 1758, the world proudly welcomed the comet. It was named in his honor, Halley’s Comet. The comet that proved the universality of science, Newton’s laws worked no matter how far from home they were applied to. The shell was broken, and the power of science finally conquered the fear of the skies.