Background 3

Decades after Copernicus, the church found a problem with his theory, as I stated in the last entry. Galileo took the brunt of the church's ridicule. He was forced to denounce his belief in a heliocentric universe and was placed under house arrest until his death. But eventually this all disappeared and was replaced with acceptance. Kepler came up with all his equations governing the movements of celestial bodies and Newton discovered, or rather gave a name to gravity. He set it down in Principia Mathematica and from there everything seems set into stone. People thought that 'physics' had been figured out. People thought the world made sense. But you may say, what about the beginning, didn't they question the details of the beginning of the universe. They didn't. That is the rather shocking truth. They didn't question. They assumed that the universe had always been the way it was now. They believed in God and a literal account of what Genesis has to say about the begging. Those that didn't believe that account thought the universe had always been, would always be. This was the steady state theorem. There was little to no change in the heavens. They were stagnate and unmoving. They were not the dynamic shifting body we are familiar with today. And this view stayed for a very, very long time. In fact, Einstein himself took this view and formulated special and general relativity around it. Only in this past century has a stagnate universe not been assumed.