Pretty Cool Video; Terrible Conclusion

By -
These are great images for getting a feel for the relative sizes of celestial bodies, but... the ending is just dumb. No one ever thought humanity was important because of humans' size! Let's take, say, a medieval Christian. Do you think she wasn't aware of the existence of elephants and whales? That she didn't realize that she was pretty small compared to the Alps? Do you think she didn't know that the number of ants or grains of sand dwarfed the number of humans? Why would discovering even bigger things, or more numerous things, make any difference at all to her view about being "the center of the universe"?

Comments

  1. Bob Murphy1:32 PM

    I know, what a cool video, up until the end.

    I learned the point from you Gene--but did you invent it?--that Dante put hell in the center of the universe?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous6:13 PM

    Oh why ruin a perfectly good video with superstitious rabble?

    ReplyDelete
  3. gcallah2:02 AM

    I learned it from my history of science lecturer at King's College in London, who also said he had never found a single instance of anyone objecting to Copernicus at that time because it removed humanity from the center -- "The center was a horrible place to be!" he would add. Getting lifted into the heavens was quite a promotion for Earth!

    fasfasfasdsadsasdaasd:
    Did you mean "babble"?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Danny2:23 AM

    If I weren't at the center of the universe, then clearly I would be able to see the parallax of the fixed stars. This Copernican blasphemy gets more ridiculous every day. "That star isn't moving -- it must just be really far away and like a gajillion zillion miles across!"

    ReplyDelete
  5. gcallah3:13 AM

    It was a interesting falsification of Popper that Copernicus made an ad hoc adjustment of the stellar distances, and was correct to do so!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Wabulon4:30 PM

    Your example of the medieval she-Christian neglects her aura.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more