2009-04-04 09:00:00
One morning in 1750, in the Prussian villa of Koningsburg, a young man named Immanuel Kant was avidly reading the Hamburg newspaper. Between pages of events, his attention was drawn to the review of the latest work by the English astronomer Thomas Wright, entitled “An original theory or new hypothesis of the Universe”
Kant, who at that time had no reason to suspect that he would become one of the greatest philosophers of all time, read with interest the article in which a lax journalist commented, more badly than well, on the content of the book.
Wright was a pious man who had endeavored to demonstrate the greatness of God through astronomy. His theories on the origin of the Universe mixed astronomical knowledge with the search for the Throne of God, which he placed in the center of the Universe, or of hell, which he relegated to the dark end.
In his work, Wright assumed that the Universe is spherical, with the stars located in successive layers, like the layers of a huge onion, placing the stars in the layer furthest from the center. Plato, Aristotle and Ptolemy defended this idea and placed the Earth in the center but the English astronomer proposed, and this is one of the few things in which he was right, that the Sun is one more star, located on the sphere of stars fixed far from the center of the Universe.
If the Sun had its place in the sphere of fixed stars, Wright reasoned, we would have a very peculiar view of the firmament. When looking tangentially to see the closest stars, we would observe that the stars accumulate one after the other in the field of vision, showing a light band very similar to the Milky Way, when looking in other directions, instead, the stars are scattered. .
The image seemed to fit reality quite well but the newspaper article did not explain the theory correctly, it left out the existence of the spheres and only highlighted the last part. Kant drew the wrong conclusion that Wright was describing the Universe not as a sphere but as a flat disk of stars. Thinking that this was what the English astronomer was advocating, Kant began to develop his own view of the Universe.
“Just as the planets are confined in their movement to a common plane,” the philosopher reasoned, “the stars are also located approximately in the vicinity of a plane that is drawn by the firmament in a very similar way to the strip of light that we call the Milky Way. I think that since that area, illuminated by innumerable suns, has the almost exact shape of a great circle, the Sun must be located very close to that great plane.”
Later, Kant learned of the existence of elliptical nebulae thanks to work by the French astronomer Maupertius and suggested that they were huge clumps of stars (later called galaxies) like the Milky Way.
This is how the book of a crazed astronomer, the article of a poorly informed journalist and the mind of a brilliant philosopher managed to dethrone the Sun from the center of the Cosmos and open the doors to an infinitely larger and more beautiful Universe.
Listen to the story of the life of Emmanuel Kant. It starts like this:
May 29, 1781 was apparently a day like any other in the small Prussian town of KONINGSBURG. Like every afternoon, a small, sickly-looking man came out the door of his house accompanied by a servant who held his umbrella in case it started to rain. . Without saying a word, they both headed down the street along the main avenue and, as soon as they saw them, the neighbors rushed to set their watches.
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