Taken from the fall, 2006 Course Catalog of the Osher Lifelong
Learning Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
The history of astronomy is rich in the competition of ideas, personality
conflicts and serendipitous discoveries. Many of these led to paradigm
shifts in the way we view ourselves and the universe. This course will
consider six outstanding examples:
1. Copernicus, Kepler, Tycho and Galileo; the beginning of awareness.
2. Newton’s gravity and orbital mechanics; the discovery of Neptune
and the non-discovery of Vulcan; Einstein’s gravity
3. William Hershel’s structure of the Milky Way and Immanuel
Kant’s island universe hypothesis; the Curtis Shapely debate on
the nature of the spiral nebulae
4. Stellar spectroscopy and the beginning of astrophysics; the nature
of nebulium; a triumph for quantum theory
5. Hubble’s discovery of the nature of galaxies and the expansion
of the universe; the origin of the “big bang” theory
6. Modern cosmology and what is the nature of “dark matter?”
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