Composed and written by Harald Podgora in January 1950
During mankind's history, there were always people whose thoughts surpassed the average person's mind. Their minds wanted to discover the beauty and unknown complexity of our world. Poets, philosophers and artists were probably the first humans who rose above the general population. Among those were also people who tried to imagine a picture of the world and its creation.
During the early stages of the human race, one could not think even remotely about any type of scientific investigation. It was mostly expressed in fantasies and poetry. The imaginary gods played an important role in explaining the riddles of our world.
For instance, in the EDDA, a collection of old heroic folklore stories created between the 9th and 13th century B.C., one speaks about a giant man who was killed. His flesh was used to create the land, his blood the oceans and his bones the mountains. Similar thoughts were found at the Babylonian creation stories, which were recorded approximately 3000 years B.C.
Only when men began to observe nature did new ideas develop tempting man to find new explanations. Old thoughts were replaced by new ideas. In existence are old stories saying, "in the beginning was a giant egg, and subsequently, through a powerful command by god, the earth was created." According to those stories, the upper shell became heaven, while the lower shell became the earth and the egg white became the surrounding oceans.
Different was the imagination about the world in subsequent centuries. One thought the earth was a round disc covered with continents, mountains and rivers, completely surrounded by giant oceans. Above the whole thing was a crystal dome which formed the heaven. Connected to it were stars behaving like bright lights. It was not easy to change this concept which lasted thousands of years.
Just 500 years B.C., a drastic change took place. The Greek scientist Pythagoras taught that the earth is not a disc but a sphere. He also taught that heaven is not a dome but a large sphere in which sun and planets rotate around the earth. There were quite a few wise Greeks who surmised that not the earth but the sun is the center of our world and the earth and the other planets revolve around it. Those were only thoughts. People during that age did not understand those ideas and refused to accept them. Therefore, those thoughts did not find any acceptance. Up to the 15th Century AD, the belief existed that the earth was only a disc.
After the discovery of the Americas by Columbus and the first journey around the world by Magellan, the public first believed that the wise people of Greece came very close to the truth. Also, the invention of the printing press in the 15th Century by Gutenberg contributed considerably to the spread and understanding of those human ideas.
Then came a man onto the scene named Nikolai Copernicus. He proposed that the earth rotates within 24 hours around its own axis and within a year completes one revolution around the sun. The earth is not a disc but a sphere and it is not the center of our world. The sun is. This teaching caused heavy resistance. Even a man such as Martin Luther called Copernicus a jester who liked to mess up heaven. The teachings of Copernicus were declared as misinformation and only a few people in those years believed him.
Fifty years afterwards, a very important man was on his way to playing an important role in reshaping the world. His name was Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). He was one of the greatest scientists of his time. Two very important developments - the microscope and the telescope - helped him to rediscover the world. He recognized that Copernicus in his teaching was correct and therefore he supported him. The church disagreed with this teaching and called it blasphemous and prosecuted him in 1633. When he was 70 years old, he was forced to swear that the teaching of Copernicus was all wrong. In spite of it, the church was not able to stop the teaching and viewpoint of Copernicus.
During the same time, the German mathematician, Johannes Kepler (1570-1630), discovered the laws of how the planets revolve around the sun. Why it is this way was recognized in the year 1680 by the English genius Newton (1643-1727). While Newton was the man who, with his knowledge of mathematics, discovered the secrets in the universe and explained why planets move, it was Kepler who demonstrated how they moved. Therefore, it was in those years that the foundation of our view of our world was established.
During this period, many scientists came to the surface who thought about the creation and development of our earth. Many different theories were expressed. Special attention was given to the hypothesis of the German philosopher, Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804), as well as the French mathematician, Pierre LaPlace (1796-1827).
Kant developed the following theory: In the beginning there was just space which the sun and its planets in the universe occupied. This space was filled with a very fine dust which was named the primeval -nature of the universe. Due to gravitational forces, those minute particles formed huge clouds in space which eventually caused the sun and the planets to develop and be attracted to each other. Those gigantic masses condensed towards the center and formed very hot gas clouds in the course of long periods of time. Kant assumed that due to small local condensation of matter, and within other areas of the cloud, other planets were formed as well. The masses had from the onset rotated around the center, revolving around the sun, and thereby forcing all planets to rotate in the same direction.
A similar thought was expressed by the French mathematician, Pierre LaPlace. According to him, planets developed because tremendous masses separated from the very fast spinning primeval gas body. As we very well know, every fast rotating body causes gravitational forces at the periphery. Similar is the imagination from LaPlace. According to him, rings separated from the giant gas sphere of the sun. Those rings fell apart and individually coalesced and formed planets. Gradually, more and more planets developed, including the sun and our earth.
At one time those great thoughts from Kant, as well as from LaPlace, caused considerable excitement. One was believed to have found the answer to the creation of the world. Thorough investigation in the last decades have made us believe that the theories of those great men could not be sustained. Therefore a search began for different possibilities to explain the creation of the planets.
Astronomers of great reputation have lately developed the following viewpoints: We know that planets are not stationary. They are traveling with tremendous speed through space. One assumes now that suns encounter each other in the universe. If that is the case, then the gravitational pull of those bodies will result in an immense expulsion of water and other masses, of either body, which eventually form planets.
Regardless of speculation, we can say only one thing: those theories are assumptions and possibilities. The exact beginning of our earth we do not know. We know only one thing for certain. Never, as it was assumed centuries ago, was the earth a sun which moved through the universe until it cooled down.
Today we know that a body such as our planet could never have reached temperatures which would be necessary to behave like a sun. A sun has to have an immense mass, and, in relationship to the sun, our earth is much, much smaller. It would take three hundred and thirty-four thousand "EARTHs" to equal the body of our sun. The diameter of the earth equals 12,200 km (7924 miles) versus the sun which is 1,391,000 km (865,000 miles).
Regardless of how the earth was created, one question has been repeated again and again. Namely, how old is our planet? This question cannot be answered by astronomers but by geologists. Those scientists investigate the earth's crust in order to learn about the condition and the formation of rocks. That enables them to form a picture of the various developments and the age of the earth. The geologists, having employed various methods, have come to the following approximate values: The age of the earth is approximately 2 1/2 billion to 3 billion years old. The age of the oceans and their oldest sediment is approximately 1.5 billion years. The age of life on earth is 1 billion to 1.2 billion years. The probable age of human life, 750,000 years.
If we condense this tremendous time line it took the earth to develop into one day, then we would recognize that the age of mankind compared to the age of the earth is only a whisper. The human race exists just in the last 20 seconds of a day, and we humans of the 20th century are living during the last 1 thousandth of a second of that day.
Note: The above essay was written and verbally delivered by the author in the German language while attending the Engineering School "GAUSS" in Berlin.
