Transcript

6.4.26 · Smithsonian Magazine

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Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Rebeccah Shore for RADIOI, and today I
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Speaker 1: would be reading from a special edition of Smithsonian Magazine
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Speaker 1: America at two fifty. As a reminder, RADIOI is a
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Speaker 1: reading service intended for people who are blind or have
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Speaker 1: other disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material.
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Speaker 1: Please join me now for the first article titled Editor's
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Speaker 1: Note The Revolutionary Spark by Gebra Rosenberg, Executive Editor. On
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Speaker 1: the morning of January eighth, seventeen ninety, the first President
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Speaker 1: of the United States strode into Federal Hall in New
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Speaker 1: York City to deliver a speech that would become known
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Speaker 1: as the State of the Union Address. Dressed in an
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Speaker 1: elegant dark suit, George Washington outlined his priorities for the
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Speaker 1: young nation, calling on Congress to establish a standing army,
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Speaker 1: a national currency, a post office, and an educational system,
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Speaker 1: and he urged lawmakers to reward Americans for their quote
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Speaker 1: exertions of skill and genius by adopting a system to
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Speaker 1: protect new inventions, a power entrusted to Congress by the
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Speaker 1: newly ratified Constitution. After Washington signed the Patent Act of
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Speaker 1: seventeen ninety, he personally affixed his signature to each of
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Speaker 1: the one hundred fifty six patents granted during his presidency,
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Speaker 1: sending a profound message innovation was so important to the
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Speaker 1: fledgling Republic that the President himself was invested in its success.
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Speaker 1: This special issue of Smithsonian, published on the two hundred
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Speaker 1: and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, celebrates that
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Speaker 1: revolutionary spark, the visionary impulse driving the dreamers and discoveries
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Speaker 1: that have shaped our nation from the start. Of course,
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Speaker 1: it's impossible to contain them all in one magazine. More
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Speaker 1: than ten million patents have been issued since those that
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Speaker 1: Washington signed, to say nothing of the inventive thinking that
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Speaker 1: birthed the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the poetry
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Speaker 1: of Emily Dickinson, or the music of Chuck Berry. We
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Speaker 1: approached a wide range of writers, historians, photographers, and artists
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Speaker 1: to share the breakthroughs they view as most significant. The
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Speaker 1: resulting collection is often celebratory, sometimes surprising, inevitably eclectic. Smithsonian
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Speaker 1: Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch the third considers what has made
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Speaker 1: America such fertile ground for experimentation. Historian H. W. Brand's
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Speaker 1: shines a light on Benjamin Franklin's greatest innovation. Novelist Geraldine
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Speaker 1: Brooks evaluates the extraordinary impact of a radical work of fiction.
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Speaker 1: Chef and culinary historian Michael Twiddy uncovers the birth of
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Speaker 1: American regional cuisine. Historian and Frederick Douglas biographer David Blight
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Speaker 1: explores the most potent speech of America's premi orator. Peter
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Speaker 1: Salk reflects on his father's determination to find a vaccine
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Speaker 1: for a devastating disease. We also examined lesser known insights, epiphanies,
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Speaker 1: and efforts that transformed life in America and beyond. How
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Speaker 1: did we learn to fly safely through thunderstorms? Who enabled
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Speaker 1: the first surgery under anesthesia? What inspired Georgia O'Keefe to
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Speaker 1: perfect the Great American painting? Where did Muddy Waters hear
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Speaker 1: his own voice recorded for the first time? Why are
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Speaker 1: so many cultural trends driven by teenagers? And who invented
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Speaker 1: the teenager? Anyway? You'll also learn about groundbreaking inventions housed
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Speaker 1: in the Smithsonian's collections. Additionally, the issue showcases strikingly original artwork.
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Speaker 1: Victoria Maxfield captures Franklin's alter egos. Tim O'Brien conjures the
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Speaker 1: genius of folklorist Alan Lomax Addison Green celebrates the allure
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Speaker 1: of the soap opera. Ibrahim Ryan Takoth evokes Thomas Paine's
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Speaker 1: celestial inspiration. In sections broadly organized according to the founding
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Speaker 1: American principles of life, liberty, and happiness, we explore many
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Speaker 1: other miraculous advances in science, medicine, conservation, space exploration, education, journalism,
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Speaker 1: civil rights, music, literature, technology, comics, film, sports, and so
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Speaker 1: much more. We hope you enjoy the issue next. The
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Speaker 1: American Revolutions overlooked influence physics, how common sense spelled out
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Speaker 1: astronomical expectations for a new nation. The Manifesto leaned heavily
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Speaker 1: on Isaac Newton's theories in making a case for independence,
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Speaker 1: and fellow founders drew on the notion to build a
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Speaker 1: new system of government by Joe Marchant. In politics, as
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Speaker 1: in nature, tensions can take years to build, but it
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Speaker 1: takes just one stone to unleash an avalanche, one spark
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Speaker 1: to ignite a wild fire. For many historians of the
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Speaker 1: American Revolution, that spark was a pamphlet of fewer than
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Speaker 1: one hundred pages written by a newly arrived English immigrant
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Speaker 1: named Thomas Paine. Throughout seventeen seventy five, violent clashes between
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Speaker 1: British troops and colonist rebels protesting onerous taxes inspired little
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Speaker 1: talk of outright revolution. Most rebels aimed to force better
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Speaker 1: terms with Britain, not sever the link. Then, in January
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Speaker 1: seventeen seventy six, Pain changed everything with Common Sense, a
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Speaker 1: manifesto so radical that at first he didn't even dare
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Speaker 1: to sign it. It was an immediate sensation, selling one
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Speaker 1: hundred twenty thousand copies in three months in Pain's estimation,
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Speaker 1: and a colonial population of just two and a half million,
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Speaker 1: and that was not counting handwritten copies and knock editions
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Speaker 1: that swept not only through America but all over Europe.
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Speaker 1: In his plea for American independence from Britain, Paine made
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Speaker 1: vivid appeals to nature. Strikingly, he envisioned global politics as
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Speaker 1: an astronomical system, arguing that America, rather than orbiting the
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Speaker 1: central sun of England, was large and mature enough to
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Speaker 1: provide its own center of gravity. In no instance hath
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Speaker 1: nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet, he wrote,
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Speaker 1: and as England and America with respect to each other,
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Speaker 1: reversed the common order of nature. It is evident that
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Speaker 1: they belonged to different systems. He described the gravitating force
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Speaker 1: binding Americans, urging them to work together to determine their
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Speaker 1: own fate. We have it in our power, he wrote,
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Speaker 1: to begin the world over again. Payne's astronomical vision was
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Speaker 1: taken further that April in a remarkable response published in
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Speaker 1: the weekly newspaper The Pennsylvania Ledger, The writer, whose identity
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Speaker 1: is lost to time, imagined taking a trip with pain
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Speaker 1: into outer space, leaving the Solar system and the dull,
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Speaker 1: beaten tracts of monarchy far behind. The space travelers discovered
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Speaker 1: a vast cosmos, not ruled by one dominant sun, but
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Speaker 1: studded with innumerable suns. The universe thus revealed the blueprint
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Speaker 1: for a different kind of nature. Quote a republic amidst
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Speaker 1: the stars. This was the first known expression of a
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Speaker 1: symbol now instantly recognizable around the world, the United States
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Speaker 1: of America as a constellation of equal stars. The imagery
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Speaker 1: has since become so ubiquitous as to be almost drained
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Speaker 1: of meaning, but it was borne from a radical and
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Speaker 1: unprecedented shift in cosmology, a revolutionary system of the universe
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Speaker 1: that Americans didn't just picture on their flag, but wove
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Speaker 1: deep into the framework of their republic. Many historical threads
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Speaker 1: contributed to the making of the United States, from the
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Speaker 1: democracies of ancient Greece to the religious rebels of the
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Speaker 1: Protestant Reformation. But one idea often overlooked to day, despite
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Speaker 1: hiding in plain sight, was completely new. In building their government,
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Speaker 1: the Founders aimed to mirror the equality, balance and unifying
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Speaker 1: laws that they saw in the heavens. Cosmology has always
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Speaker 1: shaped politics for millennia. From the dawn of written history,
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Speaker 1: and probably before, people looked up to the shining orbs
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Speaker 1: in the sky and saw an eternal realm populated by
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Speaker 1: spirits and powerful gods. Rulers consolidated their power by cloaking
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Speaker 1: themselves in celestial imagery. In Imperial China, the emperor was
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Speaker 1: the son of Heaven, responsible for keeping society and harmony
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Speaker 1: with the sky. The Babylonian king Nebekenezzer the Second styled
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Speaker 1: himself as the earthly representative of the planet Jupiter, known
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Speaker 1: as Marduk, King of the Gods. The Maya chief Lord
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Speaker 1: Schak identified himself with the planet Venus, whose appearance coincided
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Speaker 1: with the rainy season, thus crediting him with bringing the
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Speaker 1: reins that kept every one alive. Many rulers associated themselves
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Speaker 1: with our nearest star, in a practice dating at least
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Speaker 1: as far back as the Egyptian pharaohs, who were seen
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Speaker 1: as the Sun's embodiment on Earth. In ancient Rome, Nero
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Speaker 1: was portrayed wearing a crown that emanated sun rays. A
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Speaker 1: few centuries later, Constantine adopted a solar persona with a
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Speaker 1: new religious spin, the Sun as a channel for the
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Speaker 1: Christian God. The Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus began to write
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Speaker 1: The Principles that Ruled the Universe in fifteen forty three,
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Speaker 1: when he argued that the Earth, rather than being the
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Speaker 1: fixed center of the cosmos, hurdles perpetually around the Sun.
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Speaker 1: He used royal imagery to support this radical idea, as
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Speaker 1: though seated on a royal throne, he wrote, the Sun
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Speaker 1: governs the family of planets revolving around it. At first,
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Speaker 1: Europe's kings used this heliocentric revolution to boost their standing.
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Speaker 1: There is basically no European monarch during the sixteenth and
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Speaker 1: seventeenth century who was not seen as a Sun or
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Speaker 1: depicted in solar metaphors. Iran Shalev, a historian of ideas
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Speaker 1: at the University of Haifa in Israel and the author
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Speaker 1: of last year's The Star Spangled Republic, a cultural history
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Speaker 1: of Early America, told me recently that tradition continued into
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Speaker 1: the eighteenth century, with Britain's kings George the Second and
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Speaker 1: the Third described as shining sovereigns spread their superior rays.
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Speaker 1: Even after Copernicus, the heavens still seemed to support divinely
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Speaker 1: mandated rulers, but a revolution in understanding planetary motion would
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Speaker 1: blow this view apart. In sixteen eighty seven, Isaac Newton
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Speaker 1: and Principia, still perhaps the most influential scientific work ever written,
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Speaker 1: had used mathematics to show that everything in the universe,
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Speaker 1: from apples and planets to grains of sand and the
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Speaker 1: Sun itself, is governed by the attracting force of gravity. Yes,
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Speaker 1: the Sun is in the center, but every other body
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Speaker 1: attracts back on the Sun and on each other body
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Speaker 1: as well, explains Mordecai Feinegeld, a historian of science at
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Speaker 1: Caltech and the author of the Newtonian Moment. Newton revealed
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Speaker 1: the workings of the universe as a finely balanced and
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Speaker 1: interdependent system bound by rational, predictable laws. And he did
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Speaker 1: did it not by appealing to the authorities of the past,
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Speaker 1: ancient scholars, or the Church, but through his own observations
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Speaker 1: and ingenuity. The physicist's ideas swept through enlightenment Europe. He
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Speaker 1: was seen as an almost divine messenger, able to unlock
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Speaker 1: the mysteries of the natural world. Nature and Nature's laws
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Speaker 1: lay hid in the night. The poet Alexander Pope wrote
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Speaker 1: around seventeen thirty, God said, let Newton be, and all
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Speaker 1: was light. Newton's ideas transformed not only his scientific field,
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Speaker 1: but also society as a whole. His discovery of the
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Speaker 1: law of gravity meant everything is equal, everything operates according
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Speaker 1: to the same law. Nicholas Campion, a historian of cosmology
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Speaker 1: and culture at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David,
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Speaker 1: says philosophers and political theorists, considering what these natural laws
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Speaker 1: might mean for human affairs, began to act. Shouldn't people,
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Speaker 1: even kings be bound by common laws? Io As this
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Speaker 1: new unifying order in the universe was emerging, with it
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Speaker 1: came a new idea that through laws and logic, people
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Speaker 1: might glean the best way to govern themselves. In Europe,
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Speaker 1: this still largely meant tinkering with existing structures by defining
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Speaker 1: or limiting the monarch's power. It was thousands of miles
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Speaker 1: away in America that a new cosmic system would take flight.
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Speaker 1: Thomas Paine, the son of a corset maker in Norfolk, England,
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Speaker 1: had already failed at several careers tax collector, tobacconist, teacher
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Speaker 1: before he set sail for Philadelphia in November seventeen seventy four.
13:46
Speaker 1: When he arrived in December, he was carrying little more
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Speaker 1: than a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, whom he'd
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Speaker 1: met in London, and a bad case of typhoid fever.
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Speaker 1: He found work as editor of the new Pennsylvania magazine
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Speaker 1: With Common Sense. He soon became one of the best
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Speaker 1: selling authors the world had ever seen. Payne's ideas were
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Speaker 1: not wholly original. Franklin, John Adams, and Samuel Adams were
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Speaker 1: already discussing American independence in private, but pain brought revolution
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Speaker 1: to the masses, giving the idea a shape and precision
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Speaker 1: it had lacked. It made clear to people that a
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Speaker 1: choice was available to them, says Mark Philp, a historian
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Speaker 1: at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom and
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Speaker 1: a Pain biographer. In clear persuasive language, Payne told his
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Speaker 1: fellow colonists that they could control their own future. We
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Speaker 1: have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, he wrote,
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Speaker 1: to form the noblest, purest constitution on the face of
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Speaker 1: the earth. Most colonists had been reluctant to rebel. They
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Speaker 1: still saw themselves as English, regardless of which side of
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Speaker 1: the Atlantic they lived on. Pain reframed the conflict, working
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Speaker 1: a powerful change in the minds of many men. As
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Speaker 1: George Washington put it, the revolutionaries weren't traders or tax
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Speaker 1: of waiters. They were building a better kind of nation.
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Speaker 1: As the Boston minister Andrew Elliot wrote to an acquaintance
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Speaker 1: in London, independence a year ago could not have been
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Speaker 1: publicly mentioned with impunity. Now nothing else is talked of,
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Speaker 1: and I know not what can be done by Great
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Speaker 1: Britain to prevent it. Pain wasn't the type to cite
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Speaker 1: his sources, but biographers have seen Newtonian influences. He became
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Speaker 1: hooked on astronomy as a young man in London when
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Speaker 1: Newton's science and its political implications were widely discussed in
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Speaker 1: coffee houses and debating clubs. Paine later wrote that when
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Speaker 1: he returned from six months aboard a privateer in seventeen
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Speaker 1: fifty seven, he spent his earnings on a pair of
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Speaker 1: globes representing the Earth and the sky, and set about
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Speaker 1: mastering their use. He attended lectures on astronomy, and he
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Speaker 1: met Franklin, a fellow Newtonian, who encouraged him to sail
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Speaker 1: to America. In Philadelphia, Payne attended lectures at the American
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Speaker 1: Philosophical Society and drank and debated at an intellectual club
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Speaker 1: called the Indian Queen, and he began to write. He
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Speaker 1: would have had many influences, from John Locke's discussion of
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Speaker 1: natural rights to Martin Luther's rejection of papal authority. But
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Speaker 1: Philip says there's no doubt that he's aware of the
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Speaker 1: Newtonian picture and that it shapes the way he thinks
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Speaker 1: and writes. At the time, America was often described as
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Speaker 1: a planet or satellite orbiting the central Sun of England. Now,
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Speaker 1: Payne used that same Newtonian imagery to argue that America
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Speaker 1: was better understood as its own gravitational system. Americans announced
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Speaker 1: their independence that July, invoking the separate and equal station
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Speaker 1: to which the laws of Nature and of Nature's God
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Speaker 1: entitled them in the declaration, originally drafted by Thomas Jefferson.
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Speaker 1: Scholars endlessly debate the sources of the declaration's self evident truths,
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Speaker 1: equality and the universal right to life, liberty, and the
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Speaker 1: pursuit of happiness. In addition to Locke in England, the
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Speaker 1: founders certainly drew on French Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean
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Speaker 1: Jacques Rousseau, Baron de Matesquieu, and Voltaire, Classical authors including
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Speaker 1: Aristotle and Cicero, the thirteenth century Magna Carta, and England's
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Speaker 1: sixteen eighty nine Bill of Rights. Several historians have pointed
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Speaker 1: out that principles of limited government and citizens' rights were
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Speaker 1: compatible with Protestant Calvinism. Others that Franklin and the other
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Speaker 1: founders were keen observers of Native American self governance, as
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Speaker 1: demonstrated by the Iroquois Confederacy. But scholars familiar with Newton's
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Speaker 1: work say that Declaration's debt to physics is often overlooked.
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Speaker 1: The founders internalized the legacy of Newton into something much
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Speaker 1: more pragmatic and political. Fine Gold of Caltech argues every
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Speaker 1: Western philosopher of the time was working in Newton's shadow,
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Speaker 1: and many Founders were immersed in Newtonian thought. John Adams
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Speaker 1: had an education in celestial mechanics. Franklin and Jefferson were
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Speaker 1: prominent scientists in their own right. Franklin, who as a
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Speaker 1: young man frequented Newton's favorite London tavern in the hope
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Speaker 1: of meeting him, was famous for his investigations of electricity. Jefferson,
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Speaker 1: who pioneered everything from archaeological excavations to meteorurological studies, had
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Speaker 1: an evident and deep knowledge of principia, and he declared
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Speaker 1: Newton one of the greatest men that have ever lived.
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Speaker 1: Joyce Chaplin, a historian of early America at Harvard University,
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Speaker 1: says that while the founders may not have been divining
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Speaker 1: mathematical laws of motion, they saw themselves as continuing the
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Speaker 1: search for universal principles of nature. If you were arguing
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Speaker 1: from nature, she says, you were arguing truth after the
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Speaker 1: revolution had been won. The same Newtonian ingenuity that helped
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Speaker 1: the founders conceive of independence became woven into the new
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Speaker 1: American government. In the seventeen eighties, representatives to the Continental
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Speaker 1: Congress debated how the newly independent states should be bound together.
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Speaker 1: It was an unprecedented challenge for such a large, populous,
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Speaker 1: and regionally heterodox territory. Democracy had thrived in ancient Greece,
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Speaker 1: but only in small city states, and this is not
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Speaker 1: a country of small city states, Philip says. Instead, America's
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Speaker 1: founders imagined a new system combining a strong collective identity
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Speaker 1: with the autonomy of independent states. Seeking a balanced structure
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Speaker 1: that would prevent weak bonds and thus disintegration on the
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Speaker 1: one hand, and collapsed toward a tyrannical center on the other,
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Speaker 1: The delegates drew on the celestial mechanics seen in nature. Delawares.
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Speaker 1: John Dickinson argued that the states, like the planets, ought
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Speaker 1: to be left to move freely in their proper orbits,
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Speaker 1: whereas James Madison worried they would continually fly out of
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Speaker 1: those orbits without stronger ties. John Adams, commenting from London
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Speaker 1: as the U. S Ambassador to Britain, feared that without
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Speaker 1: a properly balanced government, America would resemble a chaotic sky
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Speaker 1: filled with fiery comets. Citing Newton's third law of motion,
20:44
Speaker 1: to every action there is always opposed an equal reaction,
20:48
Speaker 1: he argued that a firm constitution was needed to control
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Speaker 1: quote those attractions and repulsions by which the balance of
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Speaker 1: nature is preserved. For Adams, that meant dividing the government
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Speaker 1: into independent branches with executive, legislative, and judicial arms that
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Speaker 1: would prevent any single entity from dominating the whole. The
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Speaker 1: resulting separation of powers and legislature are still at the
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Speaker 1: heart of American governance, a model of democracy inspired in
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Speaker 1: no small part by scientific principles of equality and interconnectedness,
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Speaker 1: and the Founder's federal system, has since been implemented in
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Speaker 1: countries from Canada and Australia to Switzerland, Malaysia, India, and Brazil.
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Speaker 1: As the Australian constitutional historian Winston Mackinn once put it,
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Speaker 1: all modern federal polities, whether their people like to be
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Speaker 1: reminded of it or not, are the spiritual children of
21:47
Speaker 1: the founding fathers of the Philadelphia Convention. The new political
21:52
Speaker 1: cosmology wasn't yet complete, however, As Shalev writes in The
21:56
Speaker 1: Star Spangled Republic, the early Americans would alter transcend the
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Speaker 1: old celestial imagery of planets orbiting a massive sun, at last,
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Speaker 1: replacing it with the new symbolism. To do it, the
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Speaker 1: founders combined Newtonian principles with another astronomical innovation, the telescope.
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Speaker 1: Throughout the eighteenth century, as astronomers focused increasingly powerful lenses
22:21
Speaker 1: on the sky, more stars and galaxies kept coming into view.
22:25
Speaker 1: Space stretched deeper and farther than they had ever imagined,
22:30
Speaker 1: revealing that the Sun was not, in fact the center
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Speaker 1: of the universe. It was one star among many. This
22:36
Speaker 1: was the idea expressed by the anonymous correspondent who wrote
22:40
Speaker 1: to the Pennsylvania Ledger in seventeen seventy six. The writer
22:44
Speaker 1: mused that although the Sun might seem to mortals in
22:47
Speaker 1: its immediate orbit as quote the Grand Monarch of the
22:51
Speaker 1: heavenly Bodies, zooming out to a wider view revealed that
22:55
Speaker 1: the sky was filled with such stars forming constellations quote,
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Speaker 1: united upon the principles of perfect equality, instead of conceiving
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Speaker 1: the universe, and in microcosm, the nation as arranged around
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Speaker 1: a single gravitational center. This view showed a system governed
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Speaker 1: by laws that spread authority among balanced equal actors. For
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Speaker 1: shalev that symbolism represents a remarkable intellectual reconfiguration. This stellar
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Speaker 1: architecture was most strikingly expressed, of course, in the new
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Speaker 1: nation's flag. A resolution of the Continental Congress on June fourteenth,
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Speaker 1: seventeen seventy seven had to creed that the states were
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Speaker 1: to be known as quote thirteen stars white in a
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Speaker 1: blue field end quote. Today, around half of the world's
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Speaker 1: national flags include cosmic imagery, mostly five pointed stars. America
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Speaker 1: was the first. The very word revolution, long before it
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Speaker 1: was applied to human affairs, was an astronomical concept derived
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Speaker 1: from the cycles of stars. Newton's ideas traced the same journey,
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Speaker 1: first rewriting physics and astronomy and then helping reshape politics too.
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Speaker 1: And it was in the American Revolution that these ideas
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Speaker 1: came to fruition, cultivated on a new understanding of the
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Speaker 1: principles that should govern heaven and Earth, and inspiring a
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Speaker 1: model of democratic republicanism that has since been exported around
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Speaker 1: the world. A quarter of millennium on, our gaze has narrowed.
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Speaker 1: We see the stars on the flag, but perhaps forget
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Speaker 1: what they once meant for citizens of the eighteenth century living.
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Speaker 1: Before the harnessing of electric power, the starry sky would
24:58
Speaker 1: have been a magnificent nightly remar of the grander order
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Speaker 1: and harmony of existence. To day, earthly lights have dimmed
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Speaker 1: the sky, and science has moved on from the universal
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Speaker 1: truths of the Newtonian cosmos too. Charles Darwin transformed our
25:18
Speaker 1: conception of living beings from fixed creatures to mutable species.
25:24
Speaker 1: Albert Einstein showed that even space and time depend upon
25:28
Speaker 1: our perspective. Quantum physics has cast doubt on whether there
25:34
Speaker 1: is any solid landscape beyond us at all. These are
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Speaker 1: the cosmological currents that now surround us. We live in
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Speaker 1: a messier, more dynamic, and more unpredictable reality than Jefferson
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Speaker 1: and Franklin hoped for, and the consequences of these intellectual
25:54
Speaker 1: changes are still playing out. But the challenge for society
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Speaker 1: in America as elsewhere remains the same to maintain a
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Speaker 1: stable path without hurtling apart into anarchy or collapsing toward
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Speaker 1: a draconian center. How do we balance our creativity, our chaos,
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Speaker 1: our plurality of truths and realities, with our collective humanity
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Speaker 1: and a shared vision that makes us more than the
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Speaker 1: sum of our parts. The founders anticipated such a challenge,
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Speaker 1: and they crafted a government, with its checks and balances,
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Speaker 1: its safeguards and separations, that has so far proved uniquely
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Speaker 1: well prepared to face it. And accompanying this article, did
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Speaker 1: you know? A brief timeline of astronomical discovery leading to Newton. First,
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Speaker 1: in fifteen forty three, Nicholas Copernicus published six books on
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Speaker 1: the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, which established a comprehensive
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Speaker 1: heliocentric model of the universe. Then, in sixteen o nine
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Speaker 1: to sixteen nineteen, Johannes Kepler described major new laws of
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Speaker 1: planetary motion, including elliptical and varied orbits. In sixteen ten,
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Speaker 1: Galileo's Siderius Nuncius kicked off the era of telescopic discovery,
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Speaker 1: describing new observations such as Jupiter's moons and many stars
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Speaker 1: not visible to the naked eye. And finally, in sixteen
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Speaker 1: eighty seven, Isaac Newton published Principia, still perhaps the most
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Speaker 1: influential scientific work ever written. This concludes readings from the
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Speaker 1: Smithsonian Magazine for to day. Your reader has been Rebecca Shore.
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Speaker 1: Thank you for listening and have a great day.