Happy birthday to a pioneer of science, Copernicus! Just 540 years ago Nicolaus Copernicus entered this world, and he left it with a revolutionary concept: The earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around.
Perhaps it was the consistency of the apparent movement of the stars that first struck Mr. Copernicus. How much more reasonable to consider thousands of extremely distant stars and a rotating earth than a fixed earth and thousands of stars maintaining consistent positions to each other as they all flew around the earth!
Of course it’s easy for us now; it’s obvious that the earth revolves around the sun. We see photos beamed back to us from the surface of Mars, from a spacecraft that arrived on that planet because of scientific work; but that spacecraft was also powered by faith in that concept given to us by Copernicus. For common thinkers, a sun-centered system was not always obvious, however.
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)
The Short-Sighted Obvious
Step back through the calendars to before the telescope of Galileo. Look up at the sky. Like our 21st century sky, the heavens at the time of Copernicus were dominated by two apparently similar-sized objects: sun and moon.
Now consider the movements of sun and moon. How much alike they seem to circle us! The sun is faster, over a period of days, but that might be explained by its much greater brilliance: With more power, it can move faster. How strange it may seem to think that one of them circles round the earth while the earth circles round the other!
Now consider the size of sun and moon. How much alike, in size, they appear to us! During a total solar eclipse this is obvious, for the moon just barely covers the sun. How strange it may seem to think that they differ greatly in actual size!
It probably took much thought by Copernicus to realize the true nature of our solar system in this basic pattern: The earth revolves around the sun and the moon revolves around the earth. The obvious appearance, that ancient mistake, the short-sighted obvious, held tight to the curriculum of old universities, until the invention of the telescope and the work of Galileo and those who followed in the meteoric trail of those two pioneers.
Unmanned launch for lunar orbit in 2009
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The new hypothesis, outlined in the news release “Unmasking a Flying Predator in Texas,” has received little support from most scientists who have recently become aware of the idea. It involves a group of intelligent flying creatures that glow brightly with intrinsic bioluminescence.
Objectiveness in the Investigations
How easy it is to snatch at anything that seems to support ones view! Galileo snatched hold of a tidal hypothesis that he hoped would be evidence for the Copernican model (sun-centered solar system); it was wrong. . . . [But] Galileo’s mistake about tides does not mean that the sun revolves around the earth.