Stephen Hawking's Universe: Seeing Is Believing

Today we have the first episode of a 1997 PBS documentary series exploring the historical development of astronomy and related scientific disciplines, as well as the intellectual revolutions to which they led, ending with the work of famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking.

In this first episode you'll learn all about Eratosthenes, the Greek who proved the Earth is not flat but round (and managed to calculate its circumference to an extraordinary degree of accuracy using only sticks and shadows); Ptolemy and his circular spheres; Copernicus's mathematical proof that we are not at the center of the universe; Kepler's study of elliptical orbits; Galileo's observations of the moons of Jupiter; Newton's mathematical formulations of the laws of motion; the birth of spectroscopy; Doppler and the Doppler effect (red and blue shift); Hubble's observation of an expanding universe; and Einstein's formulation of the general theory of relativity.

Stay tuned for more episodes.

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