America’s history can also be told through astronomy.
Long before the United States became a scientific power, a revolution was already taking place in the way humanity understood the Universe. Copernicus moved Earth from the center of the Universe. Kepler discovered that planets move around the Sun in elliptical orbits. Galileo turned the telescope toward the sky and revealed a Universe far more complex than anyone had imagined. Then, in 1687, Isaac Newton explained the motion of planets and other bodies through the universal law of gravity. These discoveries changed more than astronomy. They changed the way educated people thought about order, nature and the world around them. When the American Revolution began, these ideas were already part of intellectual life in the colonies. Benjamin Franklin was interested in science, and John Winthrop, Harvard’s professor of mathematics and natural philosophy, was an accomplished astronomer. In 1761, Winthrop travelled to Newfoundland to observe the transit of Venus across the Sun — one of t...