World (Universe)
- The world refers to the material , the space and events available to us by the way , the experience or reason. The most common meaning refers to our planet, the Earth , its people and its environment more or less natural. The broad sense means the universe as a whole.
- A world (syn. environment, environment ) means the space in which is the person or object which we speak and all that this area contains. For example: the world of someone (habitat or the world of his mind), the world of work etc.. In that sense, we do not all live in the same world.
The representation of the world is the set of data geodetic , astronomical , geographical , natural , historical , symbolic or monumental , and of course language , which participate in the life of a human group.
For the geodesic representation:
The representation of the world has evolved in history, as a result of trade between civilizations.
During antiquity already changing representations
In the earliest times of history , the world was understood as all land areas and waterways known (named Ecumene). We never imagined then that the world could be other than flat. Indeed, the horizon appears to be human as a straight line.
In the beginnings of civilization Greek thought, especially in the Ionian school of Miletus , that the earth was flat. The geographer Anaximander imagined as a drum, and even gave an estimate of its thickness.
Then, from Pythagoras and Parmenides ( philosopher Greek Presocratic of the Eleatic school ), we realized that the Earth was spherical.
Herodotus remained in a performance platform.
Plato and Aristotle , and most of the great Greek philosophers from the classical period and future periods, rallied to the representation of the spherical Earth , and, of course, that astronomers ( Eudoxus , Eratosthenes , Hipparchus , Ptolemy ... ), who founded on more scientific than philosophical.
Aristarchus of Samos was the only one to suggest that the Earth could rotate around the Sun ( heliocentric ).
Early Middle Ages : a return to representation flat
With the great invasions , the lives of men of the early Middle Ages became difficult, and did little to worry about speculative science.
The model of the spherical Earth had finally been accepted in educated circles and especially among Christian theologians of Alexandria. But other Christians, such as the traveler Cosmas Indicopleustes the sixth century , believed that the earth was flat.
With the representation of the World called TO which incorporated data from Genesis to the dispersion of peoples after Noah , we returned to the representation of Hecataeus S. 6th av. JC, a world shaped cake, surrounded by an ocean-like band. Instead of being arranged around the Sea "Mediterranean" where Greek civilization had taken off, the three continents of the world were refocused instead of joining in Asia Minor, to the supposed location of the former Eden where the world began, that of the grounding of the Ark of Noah , in areas of biblical history and life of Jesus.
In fact, nothing in Genesis does not preclude a design spherical Earth, and Jesus never addressed such considerations.
In the East, Byzantium, and perhaps also Armenia, remained a focus of conservation of ancient Greek manuscripts, taking part in the relay of Alexandria. The educated community Jewish established in Mesopotamia , may have continued to practice the art of the ancient astronomical calculations Chaldeans had carried so far.
With the Venerable Bede ( ninth century ), the West began to take in Latin the study of science (see Science of Middle Age ) with the liberal arts and calculating the time ( computation ).
Meanwhile, the Persians , who were at the crossroads of Greece , of India , of Egypt , and Mesopotamia , preserved perhaps the model of a spherical earth to reconcile the astronomical observations, the computation and ancient geographical knowledge.
With the conquest of Iran by the Muslims , there was from the tenth century , the Arab-Muslim astronomers , mostly Persians, who translated and adapted it into Arabic and treaties of the ancient writers who developed their knowledge of more thoroughly.
This situation lasted until the twelfth century or so, then exchange cultural fruitful.
Lower Middle Age : representation spherical simplified
Contacts with Arab-Muslims did take consciousness to Western delays in their science. Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon , who introduced the thirteenth century the knowledge outcome of Greek and Arabic Sciences in Universities Western had awareness that the earth was spherical. They came to develop lessons philosophical much more elaborate, incorporating the philosophy of Aristotle in particular. Ptolemy became the standard geographical and astronomical. However, geography was not really taught.
The consciousness of the form spherical the Earth was accompanied by a representation of simplified land: Before traveling to Columbus , for example, it was generally thought that the land area occupied only the northern hemisphere , and ranged in an area of approximately 180.
This representation was the result of stories missions Franciscans ( William of Rubruck ...) and Dominicans in Asia ( Mongol empire in particular, which sought to renew contact with Nestorians ), but also China , and especially the return trip by Wed of Marco Polo , which proved that they could circumvent the Asian from the south. The southern Africa was largely ignored.
It took consciousness that Caspian did not extend to northern globe.
Renaissance of the fifteenthcenturyXVI : A new world
From the fourteenth century , we felt that he was theoretically possible to circumnavigate the Earth.
The Book of Wonders of the World written between (1355-1357) by the explorer John Mandeville after a journey of 34 years in the Far East, suggested the possibility of a circumnavigation. Even if John Mandeville was as an English knight, and beyond her "imposture," drawing up its work in three versions and in 250 copies and its distribution in a set of vernacular languages , spread throughout the company less cultivated in the West these possibilities of circumnavigation, and were not without some influence Christopher Columbus during his youth.
Other references to this time were Marin of Tyre , Toscanelli , the Imago Mundi of Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly. However, we did not know the exact value of the radius of the Earth ( Ptolemy and Eratosthenes differed on this point) and, of course, we did not imagine the existence of other continents that Europe , the Africa and asia. Columbus had a copy of the Imago Mundi.
In 1491 , Martin Behaim developed the first terrestrial globe.
The voyages of Vasco da Gama (Bypass Africa), Columbus ( Central America ), the Magellan ( world tour ), of Jacques Cartier ( Canada ) brought a significant change of representation :
- a new continent , the America. We know that Columbus was probably not conscious of having discovered a new continent ( Leif Ericson had reached around the year one thousand ), but soon realized that there were new lands, the Gymnasium Vosges called at Saint-Die , America , in honor of navigator Amerigo Vespucci (1507) (so that the city of Saint-Die is godmother of America , and regularly hosts conferences of international geography ).
- we begin to glimpse the Pacific by the early laps of the World,
- clarification on the contours of the land surface, from records Cartographic ,
- a renewal of methods and techniques of mapping , with for example the Mercator projection , which appeared in the sixteenth century.
Thus the great travelers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Marco Polo , Vasco da Gama , Christopher Columbus , showed that the world was wider than previously thought, with the discovery of this " new world ".
Classical Period: heliocentrism
In the West (after astronomers Chinese), the Copernican revolution showed that the earth was not the center of the universe , meaning the forces of physics.
- Copernicus thought that the earth describes a path around the circular sun.
- Based on observations, we saw that the trajectory of the Earth was an ellipse with a small orbital eccentricity : the earth follows a movement orbit around the Sun. Johannes Kepler described the rules governing its movement.
- Galileo described the uniformly accelerated motion , and made with his telescope many observations in the solar system ( Moon , Jupiter , Saturn , sunspots ...).
- After the condemnation of Galileo in 1633 (for his book, Dialogo sopra i due Massimi Sistemi del mondo ( Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems ), Descartes gave up her post dealt with the world of light , and developed his philosophical system ( speech method in 1637 , Meditations on First Philosophy in 1641 ...).
- Isaac Newton discovered the mathematical rules that govern the gravitational charge (broadly) the movement of planets in the Solar System (1687).
One could imagine other planets hosting a life similar to that which exists on earth.
Such a change of representation was not without creating some difficulties in the relationship between science and faith. It is certain that the interpretation is too literal passages cosmological the Old Testament (or the metaphysics of Aristotle ) has led to some misunderstandings.
Period contemporary issues across the world
With the advent of the means of transport and communication modern, the perception on the world size is reduced: any part of the world is reached in a time short in the scale of a human life.
- You can go to China (for example) from the Europe by plane in fifteen hours. Go around the world seemingly comes down to a problem of logistics.
- On the other hand, the network Internet allows a person to interact with the opposite of the ground almost instantaneously.
Meanwhile, the size of the universe by means observable astronomical Contemporary ( radio telescopes , space telescopes ) seems much greater than at the time of the Enlightenment : The Sun is a star among billions in the Milky Way. However, no direct evidence that there is a star system as advanced as the solar system with eight planets. We did not find a planet where there is the life. Even if we were able to detect planets outside the solar system (and thus orbiting another star than the Sun in May 2009 , we counted over 340), it is unclear whether the life exists on these " exoplanets ", and the chance that humanity will one day appear anywhere access.
On the other hand, the world's population is over 6 billion people, instead of 700 million around the time of the Enlightenment.
So there are serious issues of access to natural resources ( oil , energy , raw materials , water ), and distribution of wealth on earth, with the problems social as it raises and the stakes geopolitical it represents.
The United States took consciousness in the late 1980's that their supremacy over the world was threatened by the rise of China. The book The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman, Lawrence Bury, said the American people aware of the need to rally around a unifying project. Such work illustrates the power symbol of representations of the world on social phenomena.
Languages
There is a great diversity of languages in the world (see dictionary of languages ). Among the 6,000 known languages, about 2,000 are spoken on the continent Africa.
Languages are part of language families , within which there are certain affinities that correspond to the cultures of these countries.
In many countries, there is not only an official language , the government and the law Citation "Today we have three different or contrary educations, those of our ancestors and those of our masters, one of the world. What we said in the last knock down all the ideas first. " Montesquieu See also
Our world
Globalization
Geography and Exploration
Universe according to astronomy and astrophysics
In fiction
References
External Links
Loading ...