History of the Universe Online Exhibit

I was thumbing through the March issue of Physics Today when I saw a little blurb advertising this:
Cosmic Journey: A History of Scientific Cosmology

This site gives a very thorough account of the history of how we’ve viewed the cosmos. There’s a section on the Greek World view, the ideas of Copernicus, Isaac Newton and many others.

There’s even a section on Cosmology and Religion in the Dark Ages. Since this site emphasizes scientific cosmology, that’s a pretty terse section.

One section I found particularly interesting was a page about Ptolemy entitled: Ptolemy: Scientist or Fraud? This section offered a discussion on Ptolemy about an issue that I hadn’t really known much about:

Was Ptolemy the greatest astronomer of antiquity or the most successful fraud in the history of science?

His observations match his tables in an uncanny way; agreement between theory and observation are too good to be true. Seemingly Ptolemy fabricated his stated observations.

I never knew there was that sort of doubt about his tables as compared to his observations. Still, the page states, that his values are too close to those of modern times so they are correct. Since there wasn’t a concept yet of error bars and standard deviations, he must have only included those observations that matched his expected results.

This is a great resource for anyone writing a paper on cosmology and needed some context, or for anyone who is just curious about where we’ve been in our thinking about the universe we live in.

Image Credit: Cosmic Journey

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