Propagation of knowledge, an example of the origin of
the earth
By Farsijana Adeney-Risakotta
Einstein concludes that imagination is the most important than knowledge. Imagination is a reality of knowing that does not block by any rules. It consists in an awareness of presence which appears as deep as our experiences in this universe.
Observing a little baby to grow is to see how she/he develops their perception of reality through their linguistic utterances. Their knowledge is still limited, but their awareness of being in a situation that is bigger than their sentences to keep them growing.
Perhaps it is too simple to compare children’s brain with a blank paper when we try to explain about how children develop their knowledge. Brain is the place where our knowledge to live and to develop. The arena of brain is a living place that directs each of neurons to recognize various qualities of realities to associate with a particular name given by society to distinguish from each other.
Children develop their knowledge within the language of adults. However, through the process of reforming their understanding, children make new meaning for what they learn from adults. The environment where they grow, determines the way they formulate their imagination to relate with a particular knowledge that they have before in their vocabulary of languages. The more they experience variously realities that impose their thinking, the more their knowledge is developed as large as their horizontal imagination.
In their entire life, along with adults, children have to examine their understanding throughout their questions to update the realities that they perceive. Sometime their questions start as an individual curiosity which never somebody brings up to be thought before. Most of times, the questions have been around the society but nobody has the answer yet. The imagination lie down in the history of people mind until there will be an answer coming out to respond to the long waited timeless questions. The wonder has its place to be within people’s history of mind.
Culture where people live has its own mechanism that allows human beings to grow their understanding toward their realities. I would like to take an example of how human beings came out with their idea about cosmology.
During our historical visit to Greek, I have paid so much attention to learn on the history of knowledge in which I like to observe the process of thinking which shows in their myth and how the continuity of the idea has developed later on by their philosophers. My special attention is to understand how the idea of cosmology was developed.
In the ancient Greek, the idea of how earth is being shaped, was formulated in a particular myth. In the cosmology of the Greek, it is said that the earth has female divine characteristics. She is the mother of Erectheus and Tithyus. She is named Gaea, the goddess who was the first made from the chaos. The way the Greeks names her, Ge to show that she has all qualities of producing and nourishing as a mother. She is the source for oracles to inspire the Greeks to worship her at various temples or altars around Athens, Sparta, Delphi, Olympia, and other places.
As a mother of earth, Geae is personified by giving the meaning for her body to represent the earth. For examples, her breast is the place where the sea and mountains emerge. The river of Okeanos encircles the body of Geae as the ancient Greek’s imagination of the reality of earth which was conceived as a flat disk. On the top of this flat disk is stood the solid dome of heaven which below it is the depth of sea (Tartaros).
The imagination of the ancient Greek on the earth was to personify it as a human body, especially the body of a woman. Woman's body is the place to grow a fetus. It is also the place where the natural liquid from fetal membrance flows to push out the embryo to the life. This quality of the water is personified within the imagination of the depth sea where there are so many sources of life. The Greeks expresse this symbol in their art work seen on the Greek vase painting to picture Geae half risen from the earth. Human’s center of understanding which concentrates on the body of human beings has lived within people imagination for a long time.
Only at the life time of Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) during his sailing experiences to the foreign countries, he realized of a new imagination of the origin of the earth which needed to be reproduced. He observed on the sailing process to point that a ship will show up over the horizon first then its hull. This observation changes the ancient understanding that Geae, the earth is a flat disk, in fact in this new experience, it suggests that the surface of the ocean is curved.
Aristotle also the one who observes the relations between the moon, the earth and the sun. He proposes geocentric model of cosmology. Geae, the earth is the centre. Claudius Ptolemaes (Ptolemy) who lived in 150 AD developed Aristotle's idea to produce a cosmological model. Geocentric model influenced to the western thoughts for about 2000 years.
Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543), a Polish astronomer, revisited the hereditary geocentric model to propose its opposite theory which was the heliocentric system. In this cosmology, the earth rotates the centre which is the Sun. Along with the earth, all planets cycle in their orbits around the Sun. His study returned to the earlier observation conceived by previous Greek philosopher such as the Pythagorean philosopher Philolaus (d. 390 BC) with some slightly differences. Philolaus assumed that the center of the universe was a "central fire", but he did not direct his observation of the fire with the sun because he thinks that earth, sun and moon rotates around the centre of the fire.
Therefore, only after 2000 years, the model of heliocentric cosmology of Copernicus was accepted again with an exacted explanation on the nature of the sun as the center. Copernicus combined Pythagorean assumption on the heliocentric model with the help of a geometrical technique which called a Tusi –couple. This technique is name after a Muslim scholar from Persian, Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Hasan Tusi who born in February 18, 1201. He was an astronomer, biologist, chemist, mathematician, philosopher, physician, theologians etc.
The shift of the cosmology of the earth has a deep struggle for the church at the time. In the Judaism-Christianity’s teaching, the idea of cosmology appears as what is written in Genesis about the creation of human beings and the earth. There is no such explanation on how all planets relate to each other. Church had adopted the geocentric model in which the earth was the centre of the universe.
However, with the new explanation of heliocentric model as the centre of the universe, it effected to the authority of church and theology which was seen as the mother of knowledge at the time. Copernicus was rejected by the church. To shorten the story, it shows a long process of acceptance up to the period when an English philosopher, Francis Bacon advocated the independent methodology of thinking to guard the process of doing a scientific analysis of study which is called as empiricism.
The rights of thinking pay its own price because it gives also the birth to many great theologians whose work have influenced to shape the church's understanding in linking to the science and to the faith. Examining the same process in Christianity to be compared with Islamic tradition, I could see somehow the process seems stopping in the way Muslim theologians develop their understanding of faith. Can the faith be studied to employ a scientific methodology? I will have to write in separate article on this phenomenon. What I want to say now, that the renaissance methodology of empiricism, with its weakness to apply in humanity studies, however, has inspired many further researches including what happened among theologians.
In modern cosmology, a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaitre from the Catholic University of Louvain, has formulated a theory of bing bang. I was amazed by the reconstruction process as I saw it at the American museum of Natural History at the Central Park in New York City. This work was a part of a connection imagination to the study that was conceptualized by Albert Einstein on the general gravity. According to the theory, the universe has developed itself from a black hole which was very dense hot to become current earth. Einstein, whose theory on general gravity has impacted to the astrophysical explanation of the way our universe to evolve.
My conclusion to pinch from my understanding can be drawn into three points. Firstly, in the beginning, the construction of cosmology involved people to personify earth and other planets into their understanding toward themselves. Human body was used to conceptualized the origin of macro cosmos around for the reproduction of a new understanding. This process occurred because people’s experiences were still limited in their own physical territory where they live. Secondly, from the sailing experiences of Aristotle, he could propose another cosmology to what was believed among the Greeks. However, his conclusion showed his steady control to the entity that was studied.
For 2000 years, this was a belief that influenced the knowledge of common and intellectual society at the time. The theory and its methodology was seen as a sacred entity that could not be changed until somebody came to challenge it. Thirdly, freeing our control is to let the entities of being studied to be examined their own origins, will contribute to reveal amazing mystery around our universe and ourselves. The results of the openness somehow have impacted to our current life in which we could enjoy travelling on the sky as same as sailing on the ocean.
New knowledge arrives within a landscape of imagination of human beings. Its accumulations to the process of human’s understanding are written as what we call as theories. It starts from a low abstraction of human observation to be absorbed into a high abstraction of human understanding on a particular explanation toward an issue that is being studied.
My purpose to reflect this process of thoughts brings me to deeply wonder on how this has influenced my ways to think while at the same time keeping my spirituality. This further thought will have to be shared in separate pages.
By Farsijana Adeney-Risakotta
Einstein concludes that imagination is the most important than knowledge. Imagination is a reality of knowing that does not block by any rules. It consists in an awareness of presence which appears as deep as our experiences in this universe.
Observing a little baby to grow is to see how she/he develops their perception of reality through their linguistic utterances. Their knowledge is still limited, but their awareness of being in a situation that is bigger than their sentences to keep them growing.
Perhaps it is too simple to compare children’s brain with a blank paper when we try to explain about how children develop their knowledge. Brain is the place where our knowledge to live and to develop. The arena of brain is a living place that directs each of neurons to recognize various qualities of realities to associate with a particular name given by society to distinguish from each other.
Children develop their knowledge within the language of adults. However, through the process of reforming their understanding, children make new meaning for what they learn from adults. The environment where they grow, determines the way they formulate their imagination to relate with a particular knowledge that they have before in their vocabulary of languages. The more they experience variously realities that impose their thinking, the more their knowledge is developed as large as their horizontal imagination.
In their entire life, along with adults, children have to examine their understanding throughout their questions to update the realities that they perceive. Sometime their questions start as an individual curiosity which never somebody brings up to be thought before. Most of times, the questions have been around the society but nobody has the answer yet. The imagination lie down in the history of people mind until there will be an answer coming out to respond to the long waited timeless questions. The wonder has its place to be within people’s history of mind.
Culture where people live has its own mechanism that allows human beings to grow their understanding toward their realities. I would like to take an example of how human beings came out with their idea about cosmology.
During our historical visit to Greek, I have paid so much attention to learn on the history of knowledge in which I like to observe the process of thinking which shows in their myth and how the continuity of the idea has developed later on by their philosophers. My special attention is to understand how the idea of cosmology was developed.
In the ancient Greek, the idea of how earth is being shaped, was formulated in a particular myth. In the cosmology of the Greek, it is said that the earth has female divine characteristics. She is the mother of Erectheus and Tithyus. She is named Gaea, the goddess who was the first made from the chaos. The way the Greeks names her, Ge to show that she has all qualities of producing and nourishing as a mother. She is the source for oracles to inspire the Greeks to worship her at various temples or altars around Athens, Sparta, Delphi, Olympia, and other places.
As a mother of earth, Geae is personified by giving the meaning for her body to represent the earth. For examples, her breast is the place where the sea and mountains emerge. The river of Okeanos encircles the body of Geae as the ancient Greek’s imagination of the reality of earth which was conceived as a flat disk. On the top of this flat disk is stood the solid dome of heaven which below it is the depth of sea (Tartaros).
The imagination of the ancient Greek on the earth was to personify it as a human body, especially the body of a woman. Woman's body is the place to grow a fetus. It is also the place where the natural liquid from fetal membrance flows to push out the embryo to the life. This quality of the water is personified within the imagination of the depth sea where there are so many sources of life. The Greeks expresse this symbol in their art work seen on the Greek vase painting to picture Geae half risen from the earth. Human’s center of understanding which concentrates on the body of human beings has lived within people imagination for a long time.
Only at the life time of Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) during his sailing experiences to the foreign countries, he realized of a new imagination of the origin of the earth which needed to be reproduced. He observed on the sailing process to point that a ship will show up over the horizon first then its hull. This observation changes the ancient understanding that Geae, the earth is a flat disk, in fact in this new experience, it suggests that the surface of the ocean is curved.
Aristotle also the one who observes the relations between the moon, the earth and the sun. He proposes geocentric model of cosmology. Geae, the earth is the centre. Claudius Ptolemaes (Ptolemy) who lived in 150 AD developed Aristotle's idea to produce a cosmological model. Geocentric model influenced to the western thoughts for about 2000 years.
Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543), a Polish astronomer, revisited the hereditary geocentric model to propose its opposite theory which was the heliocentric system. In this cosmology, the earth rotates the centre which is the Sun. Along with the earth, all planets cycle in their orbits around the Sun. His study returned to the earlier observation conceived by previous Greek philosopher such as the Pythagorean philosopher Philolaus (d. 390 BC) with some slightly differences. Philolaus assumed that the center of the universe was a "central fire", but he did not direct his observation of the fire with the sun because he thinks that earth, sun and moon rotates around the centre of the fire.
Therefore, only after 2000 years, the model of heliocentric cosmology of Copernicus was accepted again with an exacted explanation on the nature of the sun as the center. Copernicus combined Pythagorean assumption on the heliocentric model with the help of a geometrical technique which called a Tusi –couple. This technique is name after a Muslim scholar from Persian, Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Hasan Tusi who born in February 18, 1201. He was an astronomer, biologist, chemist, mathematician, philosopher, physician, theologians etc.
The shift of the cosmology of the earth has a deep struggle for the church at the time. In the Judaism-Christianity’s teaching, the idea of cosmology appears as what is written in Genesis about the creation of human beings and the earth. There is no such explanation on how all planets relate to each other. Church had adopted the geocentric model in which the earth was the centre of the universe.
However, with the new explanation of heliocentric model as the centre of the universe, it effected to the authority of church and theology which was seen as the mother of knowledge at the time. Copernicus was rejected by the church. To shorten the story, it shows a long process of acceptance up to the period when an English philosopher, Francis Bacon advocated the independent methodology of thinking to guard the process of doing a scientific analysis of study which is called as empiricism.
The rights of thinking pay its own price because it gives also the birth to many great theologians whose work have influenced to shape the church's understanding in linking to the science and to the faith. Examining the same process in Christianity to be compared with Islamic tradition, I could see somehow the process seems stopping in the way Muslim theologians develop their understanding of faith. Can the faith be studied to employ a scientific methodology? I will have to write in separate article on this phenomenon. What I want to say now, that the renaissance methodology of empiricism, with its weakness to apply in humanity studies, however, has inspired many further researches including what happened among theologians.
In modern cosmology, a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaitre from the Catholic University of Louvain, has formulated a theory of bing bang. I was amazed by the reconstruction process as I saw it at the American museum of Natural History at the Central Park in New York City. This work was a part of a connection imagination to the study that was conceptualized by Albert Einstein on the general gravity. According to the theory, the universe has developed itself from a black hole which was very dense hot to become current earth. Einstein, whose theory on general gravity has impacted to the astrophysical explanation of the way our universe to evolve.
My conclusion to pinch from my understanding can be drawn into three points. Firstly, in the beginning, the construction of cosmology involved people to personify earth and other planets into their understanding toward themselves. Human body was used to conceptualized the origin of macro cosmos around for the reproduction of a new understanding. This process occurred because people’s experiences were still limited in their own physical territory where they live. Secondly, from the sailing experiences of Aristotle, he could propose another cosmology to what was believed among the Greeks. However, his conclusion showed his steady control to the entity that was studied.
For 2000 years, this was a belief that influenced the knowledge of common and intellectual society at the time. The theory and its methodology was seen as a sacred entity that could not be changed until somebody came to challenge it. Thirdly, freeing our control is to let the entities of being studied to be examined their own origins, will contribute to reveal amazing mystery around our universe and ourselves. The results of the openness somehow have impacted to our current life in which we could enjoy travelling on the sky as same as sailing on the ocean.
New knowledge arrives within a landscape of imagination of human beings. Its accumulations to the process of human’s understanding are written as what we call as theories. It starts from a low abstraction of human observation to be absorbed into a high abstraction of human understanding on a particular explanation toward an issue that is being studied.
My purpose to reflect this process of thoughts brings me to deeply wonder on how this has influenced my ways to think while at the same time keeping my spirituality. This further thought will have to be shared in separate pages.
