The history of little things that changed our lives

Abstract

Being the president of an organization such as International Society for Pediatric Neurosurgery (ISPN) was truly an honor and a thoroughly thrilling experience. This is the point where I had dreamt of reaching in my professional career and this is the position of my teachers who deserved wearing this poncho. I would also like to thank everyone who supported me during this presidency. One of the last assignments of an ISPN president is the presidential address. During the first session of this congress, we have watched the history of pediatric neurosurgery with a keen interest. Now, I would like to tell you about a different history, regarding the little things that changed our lives and our points of views. Actually, I will tell you what you already know in a chronological order. In 1923, Edwin Hubble discovered the Andromeda Galaxy and the presence of other galaxies beyond it. Until that time, it was thought that the whole universe comprised of our Milky Way Galaxy. He discovered one more thing: that the universe is expanding because of the drifting of the spectrum in the color red. According to Hubble's finding, Russian cosmologist and mathematician Alexander Friedmann and the Belgian physicist priest Georges Lemaitre founded a theory concerning the formation of the universe. In the beginning, there was nothing. Some 3.8 billion years ago, one day! Big Bang! There are many arguments and many things to tell on Big Bang. If we fast forward, one of the galaxies that was formed in spacetime is our Milky Way. The sun, which is one of the thousands of stars in this galaxy, is 26,000 light years away from the center. Some 4.5 billion years ago, our planet, which was a fireball back then, slowly cooled down, and the supercontinent that is called Pangea, broke up into smaller continents that exist today 65,000 years ago. Two million years ago, the first mammals appeared. Two hundred thousand years ago, the hominids, that are genetically 99% similar to us, learned to use tools. Let us all watch a small fragment from Stanley Kubrick's “A Space Odyssey 2001”, which is one of the most important movie in the world's history of films, listening along to the famous opus from Strauss. In this poetically shot scene, the ape man learns how to use the animal bone as a tool, for the first time. While he is breaking the other bones in front of him with this bone, the bone he throws spinning to the air metamorphs into a spaceship. Today, the Hubble telescope symbolizes this spaceship, and it helps us see the boundaries of our universe. The primitive man's learning of how to use his hands and tools marks the milestone in increasing of our knowledge. Of course, we did not reach the invention of the Hubble telescope with hominids' first use of the tools. The spread of information took a long while.