EARTH SCIENCE

Earth has witnessed 4.5 billion years' worth

of sunrises and sunsets. Every time we see
this spectacular view, we begin to ask:

CHAPTER 1:
• Where did the sun come from?
• Where did Earth come from?
• How did life begin?

EARTH’S Learning Objectives

ORIGIN •

•
Describe the historical development of
theories that explain the origin of the universe
Compare the different hypotheses explaining
the origin of the Solar System
• Describe the characteristics of Earth that are
necessary to support lite
• Explain that Earth consists of four
subsystems across whose boundaries matter
and energy flow 2
3
 LESSON 1.1
THEORIES ON THE
ORIGIN OF THE
UNIVERSE
 In an effort to make sense of the
universe, humans used religion,
traditions, philosophy, and science to
describe its origin and structure.
 There are stories and beliefs passed on
from one generation to another and there
are hypotheses and theories continuously
being tested and challenged through the
scientific method.
 Humankind's most recent understanding
of the universe is built upon previous
knowledge and enhanced by integrating
data acquired from the latest technology.
 The following shows how the
understanding of the universe has
evolved through the years.
5
• The narrative from Genesis, one of the books
of the Hebrew bible and Christian Old
Testament, described how God separated
light from darkness, created the sky, land,
sea, moon, stars, and every living creature in
a span of six days.
• The Hindu text Rigveda describes the
universe as an oscillating universe in which a
"cosmic egg" or Brahmanda, containing the
whole universe, including the sun, moon,
planets, and space, expands out of a single
concentrated point called Bindu, and will
eventually collapse again. 6
7
• From the fifth to third century BCE, the Greek
philosophers would present their own
description of the universe.
• The Greek philosopher Anaxagoras
believed in a primordial universe, that the
original state of the cosmos was a primordial
mixture of all its ingredients, which existed in
infinitesimally small fragments of themselves.
• This mixture was not entirely uniform; some
ingredients were present in higher
concentrations than others, as well as
varying from place to place.
• At some point in time, this mixture was set in
motion by the action of the "nous" or mind.
• A whirling motion was produced, which sifted
and separated the ingredients, ultimately
producing the cosmos of separate material
objects, all with different properties that we
see today. 8
• The Greek philosophers
Leucippus and Democritus
believed in an atomic universe.
They held that the universe was
composed of very small,
indivisible and indestructible
atoms.
• All of reality and all the objects in
the universe are composed of
different arrangements of these
eternal atoms and an infinite void
in which they form different
combinations and shapes.
9
The Stoic
philosophers of
ancient Greece
believed that the
universe is like a giant
living body, with the
sun and the stars as
the most important
parts to which all the
other parts are
interconnected.
What happens in one
place affects what 10
• French philosopher René Descartes
outlined a model of the universe with
many of the characteristics of Newton's
static, infinite universe.
• According to Descartes, the vacuum of
space was not empty at all but was filled
with matter that swirled around in large
and small vortices.
• His model involved a system of huge
swirling whirlpools of fine matter
producing what would later be called
gravitational effects.

11
• Sir Isaac Newton
published his Principia,
which described a static,
steady-state infinite
universe.
• In Newton's universe,
matter on the large
scale is uniformly
distributed and the
universe is
gravitationally balanced
but essentially unstable.
12
• A model of the universe assumed by
Albert Einstein in his theory of
relativity was no different from
Newton's in that it was a static,
dynamically stable universe, which
was neither expanding nor
contracting.
• He added a cosmological constant to
his general theory of relativity
equations to counteract the dynamical
effects of gravity, which would have
caused the universe to collapse.
• He later abandoned this part of the
theory when Edwin Hubble in 1929
showed that the universe was not
static. 13
• After Hubble's demonstration of the
continuously expanding universe
and after the discovery of cosmic
microwave background radiation by
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in
1965, the big bang theory has been
the mainstream scientific view.
• The big bang theory describes the
universe as originating from an
infinitely tiny, infinitely dense point
or singularity between 13 to 14
billion years ago (or Gya or
gigayears ago).
• The essential statement of the
theory is usually attributed to the
Belgian Roman catholic priest
Georges Henri Joseph Edouard
Lemaitre in 1927 even before
Hubble's corroborating evidence. 14
• An oscillating universe was Einstein's favored model after he rejected
his own original model.

15
• The oscillating universe followed the general theory of relativity equations of the universe with positive
curvature.
• This curvature results in the universe expanding for a time and then contracting due to the pull of its gravity
in a perpetual cycle of big bang followed, in time, by big crunch.

• Proposed by the English astronomer Fred Hoyle and the Austrians Thomas Gold and Herman Bondi, the
steady state theory predicted a universe that expanded but did not change its density; matter was inserted
into the universe as it expanded in order to maintain a constant density.

16
• American physicist Alan Guth proposed a
model of the universe based on the big bang
theory.
• He incorporated a short, early period of
exponential cosmic inflation in order to solve
the horizon and flatness problems of the
standard big bang model.
• This became known as the inflationary model.

17