Hello Philosophy, Rest Well Astronomy.

Today’s birthday is brought to you by the phrase “Confucius say”.

That’s right kids, today is Confucius’s 2563^rd birthday. I think. I have issues with working out time due to the fact that unlike normal maths there is a no need for 0… anyway… give or take a year.

While we may all know the silly phrase we don’t all know what Confucius actually did. Well, at least those of us who didn’t take a philosophy course at Uni…

Moving on.

Confucius had a lot to do with Ethics (and yes, it deserves the capital E). As a philosopher, he was more than capable of coming up profound ideas that have changed the course of human existence, but as humans, we are all capable of that kind of thought. What Confucius was able to do, was communicate those ideas as a teacher, politician and author/editor of many of the texts that made it into the public consciousness.

Today is also the anniversary of the day the world said a fond farewell to Astronomer Edwin Hubble (and if you don’t recognize his last name… shame). Hubble is the guy we really have to thank for the dreams we have about just how big the universe really is. At the time Edwin Hubble began his work at Mount Wilson, it was thought that the Universe consisted only of The Milky Way (or Home, as we like to call it). From 1922-1923, Hubble made some observations, and these observations were scrutinized and poked and prodded until it was conclusive… there is more than one house on our street. Edwin Hubble found other galaxies. 

Hubble also discovered a few things to do with the now pretty much accepted belief that the Universe is in a constant state of expansion. The big one is cosmological red-shift. The massively dumbed-down version of red-shift is that it happens when something is moving away from you really, really fast (Doppler effect) but in the case of cosmological red-shift, the change in the wave-length of the light does not occur because of relative velocities of the object and the observer, instead the photons (light) are expanded and stretched by the expansion of The Universe. Yeah?

Hubble figured this out because he found a rough correlation between the amount of red-shift he saw and the distance of the galaxy he was observing. He found that the greater the distance, the greater the red-shift.

We lost Edwin Hubble at the age of 63 to cerebral thrombosis, and although he was pretty young to go; he did a hell of a lot for us, our thinking and how we view ourselves, the world and the Universe.