By Dr Kwesi Atta Sakyi
21st July 2015

As NASA and Johns Hopkins University Team celebrate their success of the New Horizons Spaceship mission of flying past the planet Pluto on July 14, 2015, we cast our minds back into history.

Galiliel Galileo demonstrated the effects of gravity on two different weighted objects from the Leaning Tower at Pisa, Italy. He proved that gravity has equal effect on all objects irrespective of their weight or mass. Long before that, Archimedes of Syracuse had by chance stumbled upon the idea of a body displacing an equal amount of water as itself when immersed, as he lay in his bath tub and pondered on the assignment his king had given him to unravel the gold theft committed by the royal goldsmith. On chancing on the solution, Archimedes ran out naked shouting, ‘Eureka, Eureka’, meaning ‘I have found out, I have found out’.
Sir Isaac Newton derived the gravity model equation showing the force of attraction between two bodies as

F= gM1M2/d2

If we make ‘d’, distance, the subject, we obtain
d = square root of gM1M2/F = k, a constant

When we take Einstein’s E=mc2 into consideration, and consider the Time, Distance, and Speed trilogy, we know that D/S=T
If we substitute D with k, we obtain k/S=T
If we further substitute S with Einstein’s c2, we obtain
k/c2 =T

We can recall in Part 1 of these series that the speed of light is 144,000 kilometres per second. This translates into 2.73824 trillion kilometres per light year. If we make c=2.73824 trillion kilometres squared, then in the Speed, Time, and Distance trilogy, as c tends to infinity, k and T decay, dissolve, deform, disappear and they become inconsequential or they cease to exist. In this sense, as speed or velocity approaches the speed of light, only velocity exists and there is no distance or time dimension. We could say that D and T disappear into terrestrial zeroes while c approaches astronomical, supersonic celestial speed. According to Einstein, if a body accelerates at the speed of light, we approach what I term an instantaneous instant. The angels of God Almighty manifest in this form as they travel at such speeds. Does this ring a bell about the alleged observed supersonic speeds of UFOs or Unidentified Flying Objects?
In Einstein’s theory, it also gave us the ability to relate to the enormous amount of energy released if a small mass of radioactive material such as uranium or plutonium is enriched and bombarded in nuclear fusion and fission. There is an enormous amount of energy released in E=mc2. mc2 then assumes an abnormally exponential, gargantuan, and astronomical value of unimaginable proportions.
If Galiliel Galileo had conceived the idea of a rocket train, then it was Isaac Newton who built it, and Albert Einstein was the one who put motion to that train to give it motion power and ability, while we in modern times have also captured with our photographic devices, both slow and rapid motions of those motions in 3D. We can see that knowledge is progressive, time sequential, cumulative, and aggregative
Before Galileo, Newton, and Einstein, we had the Greek philosophers and mathematicians such as Pythagoras, Archimedes, Euclid, Erastothenes, Thales, Anaximander, Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle, among many others. Many of these had studied at Alexandria in Egypt, from where most Africans of today dispersed in all cardinal directions to West Africa, East and Central Africa, Southern Africa, and the North-west. Some even went as far afield as Yemen, Saudi Arabia, India, Papua New Guinea, and the Pacific Islands.
Thus, we can feel proud that we have Ghanaian and African connections to the origins of knowledge, and to what NASA is doing to advance the frontiers of knowledge for the benefit of all mankind.
By Dr Kwesi Atta Sakyi
Email: kwesiattasakyi449@gmail.com