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| English: Artist's conception of the spiral structure of the Milky Way with two major stellar arms and a central bar. "Using infrared images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists have discovered that the Milky Way's elegant spiral structure is dominated by just two arms wrapping off the ends of a central bar of stars. Previously, our galaxy was thought to possess four major arms." (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Exterior of the Chora Church in Istanbul, today a museum. It is famous for it Byzantine mosaics. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Nicolaus Copernicus Monument in Kraków, by Professor Cyprian Godebski. Esperanto: Monumento pri Koperniko ĉe la Malnova Universitato de Krakovo. Polski: Pomnik Mikołaja Kopernika w Krakowie. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Four elegantly cloaked gentlemen in idiosyncratic caps peer through what seems to be a porthole at distant Earth – a planet as spiky with spires as to look machine-made.
The tenor of the scene – the brilliant sun above, a pale crescent moon below the terrestrial sphere – suggests that these are the great astronomers of history, engaged in discussions about the design of the universe. They’re positioned, however, on a weedy slope, which raises a question: Where are they, exactly?
The picture comes from a 15th-century French translation of the 1240 work “De Proprietatibus Rerum” (“On the Properties of Things”), by one Bartholomeus Anglicus, among the earliest forerunners of the modern encyclopedia.
The image, by an anonymous artist, was revelatory: at once enigmatic and precise, a 600-year-old proto-science-fiction rendering of the cosmos. It is one of about 300 in my new book, “Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time,” a survey of many in about 4,000 years of attempts to represent the universe in graphic form, whether in manuscripts, paintings, prints or books, all the way up to 21st-century supercomputer simulations of galaxy groups in flux and sunspots in bloom.
In “Laniakea Supercluster,” for example, the astronomer R. Brent Tully uses a supercomputer to visualize gravitational flow lines knitting together an echoing expanse of space-time more than 500 million light-years in diameter. In this, the image was the discovery.
Perhaps the most extraordinary set of pictures depicting space-time’s origins dates from 1573. Discovered in the mid-20th century in an obscure notebook in the National Library of Spain, it was painted by the Portuguese artist and philosopher Francisco de Holanda, a student and lifelong friend of Michelangelo.
In one image, a set of elongated triangles represents the holy trinity, with the Greek letters alpha and omega on top and “Fiat Lux” (“let there be light “) just below. Swathed in flames, they extend down to a kind of clay vessel. The images are startlingly modern.
On another page, the Creator, belted by stars, has assumed a material form, centered on a single planet. It has become the multiple nested crystalline spheres that for more than 15 centuries were thought to carry the planets, the sun and moon on their courses, with Earth at their nucleus. This cosmological design was first proposed by Aristotle, and later modified and expanded by Ptolemy in the second century A.D.
Finally, de Holanda depicts a geometry of turning forms set in motion by God’s luminescent command. A giant sun pinions tiny Earth in a shadow-casting ray. This work contains a remarkable insight: Although the sun nominally rotates around Earth, in fact it dominates the picture, suggesting that the artist has grasped that it is the true center of our planetary system.
The image is one of several medieval and Renaissance depictions of cosmic design that seem to exhibit a kind of precognitive intuition of what Nicolaus Copernicus proposed in 1543 – the revolutionary notion of a heliocentric planetary system. (While de Holanda painted 30 years after Copernicus’s death, heliocentrism didn’t become accepted for at least another century, and it’s unlikely the artist meant to advocate it, if he even knew of it.)
We have had a gradually dawning, forever incomplete situational awareness about the cosmos and our place within it, rising across millenniums.
Among the narrative threads are the 18th-century visual meditations on the possible design of the Milky Way – including the work of the English astronomer Thomas Wright, who in 1750 reasoned his way to the flattened-disk form of our galaxy. Wright also conceived of another revolutionary concept: a multigalaxy cosmos.
We now have our contemporary understanding of space-time, in which whirling star-spirals glint all the way to the fading edge of the visible. But while the center doesn’t hold in this vision, neither does anarchy: We’re left with a spongiform universe of galaxy clusters foaming along weblike filaments of dark matter. It all looks rather like a visualization of the Internet.
So where will it all end? Maybe a 14th-century vision of weightlessness provides a clue: A fresco on the ceiling of the Chora Church in Istanbul depicts a human figure (evidently wearing a supernatural kind of space helmet). It has become known as “The Angel of the Lord Rolling Up the Scroll of Heaven at the End of Time.”
Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, November 1, 2014
