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Loading contentHow astronomy became modern science, and how it knows what it knows — the revolutions that remade our picture of the cosmos, the instruments that opened each new window, and the philosophy that tells us when a claim about the sky is really knowledge. Built on real history and philosophy of science.
The shift from an Earth-centred to a Sun-centred cosmos — from Copernicus's heliocentric proposal, through Galileo's telescopic evidence and Kepler's laws of planetary motion, to Newton's gravity that explained them all. The founding revolution of modern astronomy, and the archetype of a scientific revolution.
The recurring pattern by which a new instrument opens a new window on the universe and a wave of discovery follows — the telescope, the spectroscope, the photographic plate, the radio dish, the gravitational-wave detector each launching a new astronomy.
The criterion, associated with the philosopher Karl Popper, that a scientific claim must be testable and capable in principle of being proven wrong. It is one influential attempt to mark the boundary between science and non-science.
From Einstein's 1916 prediction that mass in motion should ripple spacetime, through a century of doubt about whether they could ever be detected, to the first direct detection of a black-hole merger in 2015 — and a new way of observing the universe.