When Sir Isaac Newton came to maturity, circumstances were auspiciously combined to make possible major changes in ways of thought and endeavor on human beings. The uniqueness of Newton’s achievement could be said to lie in his exploitation of these unusual circumstances. He alone among his gifted contemporaries fully recognized the implications of recent scientific discoveries. With these as a point of departure, he developed a unified mathematical interpretation of the cosmos, in the expounding of which he demonstrated method and direction for future elaboration. In shifting the emphasis from “quality” to “quantity,” from pursuit of answers to the question “Why?” to focus upon “What?” and “How?,” he effectively prepared the way for the age of technology and modern science.

On the other hand, I do believe that it is indeed very demostrable that all thinking and all action are compromised by ignorance of what has gone before. Most of us love to believe that we live in a kind of timeless innocence, until something not good or ugly or, worst, lethal, happens to us. Then, I assume and believe these three social determinants are the guideposts or guiding principles in our age: (1) democracy—the search for the goverment from and through the people, (2) equality before the law—we’re all human beings, (3) the unity of the peoples of the world—e pluribus unum.

The universe would most resemble a sponge built of light. A three-dimensional mesh of fine strands of light, with empty spaces in between. The curving lines and sheets of light are built up of about 100 billion dots of light, some considerably brighter than others. Each of these dots is a galaxy.

One of the most remarkable features of the universe is its stillness. Though visible light and all the other electromagnetic waves or radiation, such as radio waves, microwaves, infrared light, ultraviolet light, X rays, and gamma rays (the electromagnetic spectrum), travel at the astonishing speed of 300 000 km per second or 186.281 miles every second, all of them seem virtually motionless at the scale of the universe.

This awesome feature of the speed of light may make us to conclude that there is not such a thing as the universe “now”, because there are events on it that occurred in the long past (in time and space). Just for giving an example, an event that has occurred about 2.000.000 light years ago (this is the distance between our galaxy and our next bigger neighbor, the great spiral galaxy of Andromeda), is reaching us just now. We do not know how it is Andromeda now because through this average distance the light that is leaving Andromeda now will reach us until the next 2.000.000 years from now.

This much history from the last two hundred years has taught us that the great revolutions which have occurred in such fields as physics, politics, medicine, astronomy and other arenas from the human endeavor were due in huge part to new quantificable data. Asorted by new and more powerful instruments and our ability to interpret the data, scientists and seminal thinkers were able to see beyond the ordinary and made the extraordinary common to all.

To create a much better world and continue in our task of understanding our reality, we must procure in our societies a vigorous abet for the expression of unpopular views, widespread literacy, sustain substantive debate, insert a common familiarity with critical thinking, feed skepticism from matters of opinion, establish real political action and a soaring curiosity among their younger generations.

Unde dicit; Primum oportet constituere, idest definire quid sit nomen et quid sit verbum. In greaco habetur, Primum oportet poni et idem significat. Quia enim demostrationes definitiones praesupponunt, ex quibus concludunt, merito dicuntur positiones. Et ideo praemittuntur hic solae defiitiones eorum, de quibus agendum est: quia ex definitionibus alia cognoscuntur.

She had become especially expert in the characteristics of these variable stars, whose luminosity dims and flares up in cycles, and eventually cataloged about twenty four hundred of them. Most important for Edwin Hubble’s research, she was very able to time the cycles of the Cepheids, By showing that the length of their cycles of luminosity varies in close relation to their brightness, Leavitt provided astronomers with a hitherto unknown celestial yardstick, a method of measuring the distance of stellar objects. If a nearby Cepheid with a certain cycle has a certain degree of luminosity, a remote Cepheid with the same cycle should have the same luminosity. The degree of its relative dimness, from our point of view on Earth, shows how far away it is.

As you can imagine, in this age when very few women were given opportunities in science, these women of the Harvard College Observatory were restricted to classifying celestial phenomena in photographic plates taken by male astronomers. It’s remarkable to notice that in this group of women were to seminal and original thinkers, such as Henrietta Leavitt and Antonia C. Maury. The latter classified stars by the width of the lines they produced on a spectrograph. All of these helped others to nail down the exact dimensions of the Milky Way.

Some examples about open star clusters are; NGC 752, the double star cluster (NGC 869 and NGC 884), M34, alpha persei cluster, the pleiades (M45), NGC 1502, the hyades, collinder 464, M38, M36, M37, M35, NGC 21258, NGC 2232, NGC 2244, NGC 2264, M41, M50, M47, M46, M47, M93, NGC 2451, NGC 2477, NGC 2516, NGC 2547, M48, M44, M67, NGC 3532, NGC 3766, the coma star cluster, the kappa crucis star cluster, NGC 6025, NGC 6193, NGC 6231, M6, M7, IC 4665, M23, M21, NGC 6530, M24, M16, NGC 6633, M25, M11, the coathanger (brocchi’s cluster), M39 and M52.