Of course, ancient man and ancient civilizations (Greeks and Romans, etc.) knew of the sun, moon, maybe 5 planets, and, stars. Collectively, they may have described their domain as “the heavens”. But, I would like to know, if it can be approximated, do we know about when the concept of a “universe” came about? Even if not as sophisticated as what we know about the universe today, perhaps I am asking when the concept of a “heavens” translated into a concept of a “universe”? Any SDoper history or philosophy buffs have some info to share, perhaps?
I disagree with the premise. In my view, Heavens is the which is above the Earth, and Universe includes both.
Theres no specific date, of course, but it seems to me that one major milestone would be Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity.
Before then, it was natural for even sophisticated thinkers to assume the whatever forces moved the heavenly bodies had to be vastly stronger, and very different, from any forces we encounter in our daily life. Kepler and Copernicus used sophisticated mathematics, but they were not modern scientists. They still assumed that God was causing the movements of the stars. They just wanted to understand how to calculate it all, not find the cause.
Newton proved that we can understand the cause. When he showed that the forces moving the stars in the sky are the same laws that let you calculate how far you can move a cannonball on earth, it was the start of scientific thinking about the subject. And thus the end of “heavenly bodies” and the beginning of the modern, scientific “universe”. Then it took another century or so for that thinking to move from academia to popular culture
I’m not sure if this sheds any light on the topic but Neil deGrasse Tyson recently pointed out that prior to Copernicus, everyone thought “the planets move but only God knows how they move”. Then we figured out how they move. So everyone said “Only God knows what forces keep them moving.” until Newton figured out the forces. But even Newton would likely have said something like “I know what forces keep them moving, but only God knows how they got there in the first place.” And now centuries later we have figured out pretty good explanations for what’s in the sky, how it moves, why it moves, where it came from, how it all started, all the way back to the Big Bang. And still, people say “yeah, but only God knows what caused the Big Bang.”
My point is, it’s a gradual process, not like you could say here in this decade everyone stopped believing in magical chariots that carried the sun across the sky and started studying physics.
I would think that, as a colloquialism in general usage, “the heavens” had it’s last hurrah during the Victorian Period.
Staring with the early 20th century as scientific concepts were accepted and integrated into general consiousness, terms like “the atmosphere” and “outer space” supplanted “the heavens”.
A very key development was Galileo’s Doctrine of Uniformity, that “heaven” and earth were ruled by the same laws. I think this, even more than the detail of sun/earth orbit, may have offended the Church.
The extreme influence of Galileo has twisted into him becoming a cliché! He ranked only #56 in SDMB’s ranking of the most influential persons, a travesty IMO compared with a #12 rank on a better-reasoned list.
Funny you should say that, as I always bring up how under-appreciated Galileo is today, among the general populace.
As for the OP, there is wonderful PBS program that I’m too lazy to look up right now but it was a 2 hour program (maybe an episode of NOVA) detailing the history of the telescope. (You’ll learn to appreciate Galileo from that.) But there was a key development (I think in the early 20th century) when astronomers were able to determine that there were other galaxies outside our own. Until then, those galaxies weren’t understood to be other galaxies outside the Milky Way-- it was more or less assumed that our galaxy was it.
I was going to say that John Mace had it, but I figured I would do an Ngrams search on universe and heavens. Turns out universe passed heavens as early as 1850.
Checking the individual cites shows that universe was being used in the modern sense of everything throughout the 19th century. The word itself dates from the 1580s.
The OED has cites for “universe” in the sense of “all existing matter, space, time, energy, etc., regarded collectively, esp. as constituting a systematic or ordered whole; the whole of creation, the cosmos” going back to 1589. And it comes via French from classical Latin universum; the whole, the sum of existing things.
“The heavens”, by contrast, were always distinguished from “the earth” (“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”) and so Keeve is correct to say that “the heavens” never became “the universe”. If there is a transition from a religious to a non-religious perspective on this, I suggest it’s represented by the term “creation” (in the sense of that which is created rather than the act of creating) being supplanted by the term “the universe”.
FWIW ‘The Universe’ has made it’s way into a spiritual term as well
And I know at least one person who prays to It/Her/(Him).
Also the concept of the stars and the heavenly beings, one physical, one spiritual is expressed in the Book of Revelation:
[QUOTE=Revelation 1:20]
The mystery of the seven stars that you saw in my right hand and of the seven golden lampstands is this: The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands are the seven churches.
[/QUOTE]
So even though they did not have the concept of ‘universe’ or ‘galaxy’ there was a concept of a realm, a physical form separate from but related to the concept that is commonly thought of as heaven.
The concept of universe just took time to figure out what that form was, but the divide physical/spiritual and the relationship between them seem to exist from quite a while back and remains today.
Nitpick: Newton didn’t have a clue what the cause was, he just described how the forces work. He was severely criticized for that at the time, as they preferred having mechanistic explanations for things.
We still don’t have a cause for gravity, really. we just know a lot more about how it works.