Ancient astronomy was practiced for thousands of years. For example, the Mayans used their eyes to track changes in the positions and relative brightness of the Sun, Moon, planets and stars for over 2,000 years. Mayan astronomers acquired the highest status in their society as priests who advised their rulers on major decisions about state events, marriages, and wars.
The human eye achieves an angular resolution of about an arcminute (1/60th of a degree) in the visible wavelength band between 380 and 720 nanometers. Given the limited collecting area of the pupil, 3–50 square millimeters, humans were able to see only relatively bright sources of visible light, as needed for their survival. Mayan astronomers with sharper eyes had the privilege of identifying fainter sources in the sky. Given the interest of Mayan rulers in their findings, they must have been celebrated and rewarded based on the quality of their eyesight.
Starting with Galileo Galilei in 1610, astronomers employed telescopes to observe the sky. 380 years after Galileo’s first observations, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was launched beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, to alleviate the compromising atmospheric glow and blur. HST features a primary mirror with a collecting area of 4.52 square meters, about 100,000 times bigger than a fully dilated human eye. Its angular resolution is 1,200 times sharper and it can detect sources that are 10 billion times fainter than what an unaided human eye can see.
Whereas early telescopes probed electromagnetic waves at the frequency range visible to the human eyes, their advanced successors probed other frequencies including the radio, infrared, ultraviolet, X-ray and gamma-ray bands. In addition, the detection of cosmic-rays, neutrinos, and gravitational waves offered new insights on otherwise invisible processes throughout the cosmos.
Are we witnessing an accelerated repeat of this history in the context of mathematics in the age of artificial superintelligence?
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