Abstract
We have narrated how Homo sapiens has step by step discovered the vastness of the universe by inventing methods to measure distances and properties of celestial bodies. Along with deep space, we have deep time. The huge distances revealed are hard to imagine. Similarly painful for common sense are the huge lengths of time that one has to accept in order to understand the origin of the Earth (and our galaxy, of course). Anything much shorter than a tenth of a second is difficult to comprehend and anything much longer than the age of our grandparents goes easily beyond our normal thinking. We have to use various indirect methods to get to grips with very long times, millions or billions of years.
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Notes
- 1.
Maclaurin came from an academic line of well-known Scottish mathematicians. He had studied at Glasgow University under Robert Simson (1687–1768), an expert on ancient Greek Geometry. Simson was a student of Glasgow University, then went to London to learn more from leading experts in the field, including Edmond Halley. In the meantime, the University of Glasgow appointed him Professor of Mathematics, three days after granting him the MA degree.
- 2.
Playfair had able Scottish followers, among them Sir John Leslie (1766–1832) and Leslie´s student James David Forbes (1809–1868), a geophysicist who studied glaciology. Forbes’ student Balfour Stewart (1828–1887) specialized in meteorology and terrestrial magnetism. At Owens College, Manchester, he guided many scientists to prominent careers, including Joseph J. Thomson and Arthur Schuster (1851–1934), Arthur Eddington’s future teacher. Schuster is remembered for proposing the concept of antimatter already in 1898, well before its experimental discovery.
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A third theory was that both bodies were formed at the same time in situ from the protoplanetary disk. This was originally suggested in 1943–1946 by the late Academician Otto Y. Schmidt, and followed up by V. S. Safronov and is presently studied, e.g., by Dr. E. Ruskol, at the Schmidt Institute of Terrestrial Physics, in Moscow.
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Teerikorpi, P., Valtonen, M., Lehto, K., Lehto, H., Byrd, G., Chernin, A. (2019). Origin of Earth and Its Moon. In: The Evolving Universe and the Origin of Life. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17921-2_29
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17921-2_29
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