Fascinating history of modern astronomy

(Originally posted on Saturday, 10 April 2021)

After I wrote this post:
Most universal types of binoculars
I started to think about buying a small telescope, but I was not quite sure. And then I stumbled upon a TV programme about history of modern astronomy that made me make up my mind. I simply wanted to feel as an astronomer, no matter how poor equipment I would have!

This TV programme (“Ancient skies - Our Place in the Universe”) is by far the most fascinating TV programme about the history of modern astronomy that I have ever seen! It can't be embed and has to be watched here:
https://www.facebook.com/AncientSkiesPBS/videos/ancient-skies-our-place-in-the-universe/180671763358209/

It's the third part of the series “Ancient skies”. This part starts after Mikołaj Kopernik (Nicolaus Copernicus) “stopped the Sun and moved the Earth” and this is why I call it “modern history”. However there were some other things that were still totally misunderstood then – for example people thought that the planets orbited the Sun moving in perfect circles (instead of ellipses). Another very good example is the fact that even in the early 20th century people, including Albert Einstein, thought that the universe was static (instead of expanding) and that there was only our own galaxy!

This programme was so fascinating that I also decided that I HAD to show it to my children. An error of my cable-TV decoder prevented me from recording this programme right away, so I decided to record it the next time it will be aired. Then I realized that the title of the programme was mistaken in the cable-TV, so I had to wait for it to end, so I could see the credits. It was already well past midnight, but I knew I couldn't let it go. When the credits rolled it was already past 1 A. M.! Fortunately I did find the original title of the programme on the Internet pretty quickly, so I was able to learn the correct title of the programme in my native language. As I predicted my children loved this programme and even my wife was fascinated by some things.

I myself was literally blown away when I learned that one of the most important people in the modern history of astronomy was a Catholic priest! Georges Lemaître was a brilliant mathematician who recalculated Einstein's equations and came to a conclusion that the universe would be expanding.

Similar calculations were made earlier by Alexander Friedmann, but it was Georges Lemaître who also noticed (using previous data) a roughly linear correlation between the increasing redshifts of, and distances to, galaxies. It was actually Lemaître who came up with what is now commonly called “Hubble's law” (less often it is called Hubble–Lemaître law).

And it's not the end! Georges Lemaître was the first one to suggest that “the evident expansion of the universe, if projected back in time, meant that the further in the past the smaller the universe was, until at some finite time in the past all the mass of the universe was concentrated into a single point, a "primeval atom" where and when the fabric of time and space came into existence.” This is actually the foundation of the Big Bang theory! This name (“Big Bang”) was actually used as a way of criticising Lemaître's theory! How ironic!

This TV programme (“Ancient skies - Our Place in the Universe”) is by far the most fascinating TV programme about the history of modern astronomy that I have ever seen! BY FAR!

PS. To be clear: some of the quotes and other info above come not from the TV programme, but from various Internet sites (mostly Wikipedia sites), but the TV programme covers most of these topics anyway and it inspired me to read more about them.