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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gordon A. Langston who wrote (19113)	5/18/2000 5:37:00 AM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Thank you, Gordon, one never knows when such things will come in handy. Now, let me give you examples of more obviously culturally significant misconceptions: It is assumed that the conception of the earth as the center of the universe was an example of hubris. Actually, in the prevailing Aristotelian system, the earth was inferior to the successive order of planets and stars, and the further away one got, the closer to perfection. Even among the uneducated, heaven was above the earth, and the realm of the gods or God. It is assumed that everyone at the time of Columbus thought the earth was flat, but actually it was widely believed, among the educated, that the earth was round. Of course, there was anxiety about what one might find at the antipodes, and, according to Dante, the Mount of Purgatory was located there. One of the most significant impacts of the invention of the telescope was that it allowed a closer scrutiny of the surface of the moon. Once it was discovered how pockmarked it was, a deep blow was struck against Ptolemy, who had relied on Aristotle's metaphysics to support geocentricism. According to Aristotle, the moon's surface should have been more perfect, and free of contingent events. Ptolemy took care of anomalies by means of epicycles, where the celestial body has a small orbit around a moving point in the main orbit. The application of Occam's razor might have been enough to establish heliocentrism, although more accurate data helped to confirm it. That data was gotten through the telescope, thus showing the importance of improved instrumentation to the development of science. Ironically, the astrolabe, a model of the planetary system based on Ptolemy, remained the most effective way of navigating..........