A Shite History of Nearly Everything

Anonymous

THE STORY OF CREATION I

DAY ONE – Night and Day: In the beginning . . . the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep . . . And God said, ‘Let there be light’: and there was light . . . And God called the light Day, and the darkness Night.

DAY TWO – Heaven: And God said, ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.’ . . . And God called the firmament Heaven.

DAY THREE – Earth and Seas: And God said, ‘Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear’: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas.

DAY FOUR – Sun, Moon and Stars: And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night.’ And God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

DAY FIVE – Sea Creatures and Birds: And God said, ‘Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth’ . . . And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth . . . and every winged fowl after his kind.

DAY SIX – Land Animals and Man: And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle and beast of the earth’ . . . And God made the beast of the earth . . . And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’ So God created man in his own image . . . male and female he created them.

DAY SEVEN – A Well-Earned Rest: Thus the heavens and the earth were finished . . . And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested . . . And God blessed the seventh day.

WAS GOD A CLEVER GUY? MAYBE. MAYBE NOT

‘In the beginning was nonsense, and the nonsense was with God, and the nonsense was God.’

Friedrich Nietzsche

‘ . . . in the beginning, when the world was young, there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts.’

Sherwood Anderson

‘On the sixth day God created man. On the seventh day, man returned the favour.’

Anonymous

‘It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.’

Arthur C. Clarke

‘I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an awful mess.’

William S. Burroughs

‘ . . . that a God like Jehovah should have created this world of misery and woe, out of pure caprice, and because he enjoyed doing it, and should then have clapped his hands in praise of his work, and declared everything to be good – that will not do at all!’

Arthur Schopenhauer

‘Which is it, is man one of God’s blunders or is God one of man’s?’

Friedrich Nietzsche

‘If the Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarking upon Creation, I should have recommended something simpler.’

Alfonso the Wise, King of Castile

‘If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the Universe.’

Carl Sagan

THE STORY OF CREATION II

In the beginning (about 13.7 billion years ago), there was a . . . Bang. A Big Bang. Scientists used this term to explain how the Universe was generated from an enormous explosion of space and matter, in a dense and hot state. After the Big Bang, the Universe got bigger and bigger and bigger as time passed by. After a billion x 365 days it made the galaxies and the stars. After the next 12 or so billion x 365 days yet more galaxies and stars were created. So no time to rest just yet then . . .

THE BIG BANG

‘For every one billion particles of antimatter, there were one billion and one particles of matter. And when the mutual annihilation was complete, one billionth remained – and that’s our present Universe.’

Albert Einstein, on the Big Bang Theory

‘I don’t pretend to understand the Universe – it’s a great deal bigger than me.’

Thomas Carlyle

LET THERE BE SUNTANS

Our solar system began forming about 5 billion years ago when a drifting gas cloud on the very edge of the Milky Way slowly began to shrink and spin round. This cloud – or nebula – gradually contracted, and as it did so it got hotter. After it had warmed to a few thousand degrees, it began to separate. Meanwhile, the scorching centre continued heating up until, eventually, it exploded and there was light, i.e. the Sun.

AND THEN THERE WERE PLANETS

After the Sun (which is a star, by the way) was created, things cooled down a bit and some gas and dust that were hanging about condensed into little bits of rock, metal and ice. These bumped into each other quite a lot and mashed together to form pebbles. These grew into rocks, which grew into boulders, which, eventually, after around 100 million years, grew into planets. There used to be nine official planets in our solar system (until Pluto was downgraded to the level of ‘dwarf planet’ in August 2006), and should you forget them, try recalling the following phrase that lists them in order of closeness to the Sun:

Men Very Easily Make Jars Serve Useful Necessary Purposes

‘I doubt that the phenomenon was a terrestrial reflection, because . . . nothing of the kind has ever appeared before or since. I was so unprepared for such a strange sight that I was really petrified with astonishment.’

Clyde Tombaugh upon discovering Pluto in 1930

A PLANET NAMED GEORGE?

The name ‘planet’ comes from the Greek word for ‘wanderer’. Five of the planets were known to people thousands of years ago, as they are bright enough to be seen with the naked eye. Though people in different lands doubtless had various different names for them, the ones we use come from the ancient Romans who named the planets after several gods: Mercury – god of commerce and cunning, and also messenger to the gods; Venus – goddess of love; Mars – god of war; Jupiter – chief god; Saturn – god of agriculture.

In 1781, Sir William Herschel (1738–1822) found a new planet. He wanted to call it after his patron, King George III, but as nobody else seemed to share his patriotic views, it ended up being named Uranus, after the father of the Titans. Sixty-five years later, Urbain Jean-Joseph Le Verrier (1811–77), John Couch Adams (1819–92) and Johann Gottfried Galle (1812–1910) were credited with finding the planet Neptune (named after the Roman god of the seas) in September 1846. The last of the nine planets, Pluto, was found on 18 February 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh, the first American to discover a planet. It was named after the Roman god of the underworld – not the Disney doggy. However, in August 2006, Pluto lost its status as the ninth planet in the solar system, and was reclassified as a dwarf planet.

In October 2003, American astronomers Michael E. Brown, Chad Trujillo and David L. Rabinowitz found a tenth planet in our solar system. It was believed to be larger than Pluto and three times as far away. Its existence was revealed in July 2005 and it was given the temporary name of 2003 UB313. Later named Eris, the new planet is the most distant object ever seen in orbit around the Sun.

‘Eppur si muove.’ (‘But it does move.’)

Galileo’s alleged protestation, after being forced to renounce his view that the Earth moves around the Sun in 1632

EARTH AND SUN

Though it is now understood that the Sun is the centre of the solar system and the planets all orbit the Sun, many found this hard to believe for a long time. In 1543, the Polish astronomer and mathematician, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), who is often referred to as the founder of modern astrology, wrote a book suggesting that the Sun was at the centre of the Universe and the Earth orbited around it and rotated daily on its axis. He dared not publish the book in his lifetime, however, and only saw the first copy of it on his deathbed. As he feared it would be, the book was swiftly banned by the Catholic Church.

A follower of Copernicus, Giordano Bruno (c.1548–1600), openly disclosed his ideas that the Universe was infinite, the Earth moved around the Sun, the stars were other suns with planets around them, and that life was not confined to the Earth. After a period of imprisonment for disseminating such controversial notions, he was tried and burnt at the stake for heresy. Similarly, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), under threat of torture, was forced to deny that the Earth moved around the Sun, and though the Catholic Inquisition spared him his life, he was subject to house arrest from 1633 until his death nine years later. Eventually, however, the Church came to accept the validity of these scientific findings.

Enter This Solar System At Your Own Risk

• The hottest planet in the solar system is Venus, with an estimated surface temperature of 462ºC (864ºF).

• 1 AU (astronomical unit) is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun, about 150 million km (roughly 93 million miles).

• In 1911, a dog was killed in Nakhla, Egypt, when a chunk of Mars fell on it.

‘There is no gravity. The earth sucks.’

Graffito

EXERCISING A BIT OF PULL

The planets are held in position by the Sun’s gravity. Gravity, eh? Well, the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC) had the idea that a body falling to the ground is seeking its ‘natural place’. The Greek astronomer, Hipparchus (c.190–120 BC), who some consider to have been the greatest astronomer of antiquity, wrote a treatise entitled ‘On Objects Carried Down by their Weight’, while the philosopher, astronomer and mathematician Varahamihira (AD 505–587) wrote about gravity in AD 575. Generally though, in those days little attention was really paid to the subject.

The English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher and alchemist Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) wrote the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (published in 1687), in which he described universal gravitation and his laws of motion. People started to sit up and listen after that.

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) had a theory about gravity, too, and assumed it travelled at the speed of light. He didn’t know that for sure, but he built his 1915 General Theory of Relativity around this idea and became world famous because of it. (In truth, though, that particular theory is far too complicated for most people to get their heads round.)

Pulling Power

• All matter in the Universe exerts a pull. The bigger something is, the stronger its pull. The Earth has strong gravity, but the Sun is much bigger and has more powerful gravity.

• In the absence of the Sun’s gravity, the Earth would move off in a straight line.

• It was recently discovered that gravity does travel at the speed of light.

‘Bodies fall towards the Earth as it is in the nature of the Earth to attract bodies.’

Varahamihira

‘Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love.’

Albert Einstein

10 AMAZING THINGS ABOUT EARTH

1. Our planet was formed from a ball of dust and hot gases about 4,500,000,000 years ago.

2. The Earth is not flat, nor is it round – it’s an ellipsoid (it is flattened at the Poles and bulges at the Equator).

3. Nearly one-eighth of the land on Earth is desert, while almost one-fifth is mountainous.

4. About one-tenth of the Earth’s surface is permanently covered with ice.

5. If you navigated your way around the circumference of the Earth, you would undertake a journey of 40,000 km (25,000 miles).

6. Oxygen is the most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, waters, and atmosphere (about 49.5 per