Studying the Stars: How the Telescope Changed Astronomy As long as humans have been able to see, they have looked at the stars with either with worship or with wonder. The earliest cultures of humanity created their deities from the heavens, most of which were seating upon the glowing specks of light that show through the black night sky.
Humans only have a few senses that let them interact with and receive information from the environment, sight being the most useful. Trying to figure out what something far away is, in a star’s case, far enough away to make a giant ball of burning helium look like a speck, is something that requires a tool. Telescopes were the first tool that really helped humans see into the heavens, letting them study the stars and the ‘wanderers’ which eventually were found out to be planets moving around the sun (although at the time they were discovered, it was thought that everything revolved around the earth); albeit all of these stars and planets were discovered before Galileo’s telescope. The tool still helped gain better calculations of the stars, which helped Galileo support Nicolaus Copernicus’ heliocentric (sun-centered) solar system as opposed to the geocentric (earth-centered) solar system that people in those times believed.
With Isaac Newton, one of the most famous physicists, discovering most of laws of motion through his studies in astronomy, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, one of the greatest works in the Scientific Revolution, was born. From Newtonian physics, theories of fluid mechanics, electricity and magnetism, and most importantly, quantum mechanics.
Further along the line of the history of telescopes, humans eventually needed to see deeper into space. This was revolutionary because now mankind wasn’t just looking up into the constellations and the movement of the sun and the moon, now they were actually