Copernicus: adapting to infinity one star at a time

Dissenting from the truth of the Bible was a leap of faith for Copernicus. Tossing the earth into orbit and out of the center of the universe was to have its consequences…

…Too much can be made of the reaction of poets and literary men, often speaking from hearsay. These frequently reacted like Luther, or like Du Bartas, who expressed the view in his didactic poem of 1578, La Semaine, that Copernicus represented the “brainsick” generation overblown with novelty- “how absurd a jest” to suppose the earth moves, as if a passenger on a ship should think he was at rest while the shore moved away.

In England Robert Recorde in his Castle of Knowledge of 1556 expressed a view that must have been common among teachers of astronomy- that the Copernican system was an important one but not suitable for beginning students. For the rest of the century even Copernicans taught the old system to elementary students and the Copernican system only to advanced students. Yet one of the few vernacular translations of Book I of De revolutionibus was presented to the layman- by Thomas Digges, a competent mathematician and astronomer, who in revising his father’s Prognostication Everlasting ( a perpetual almanac) in 1576, added an appendix entitled A Perfect Description of the Coelestiall Orbes.

---    During the British occupation of India, were the British imperialists right to condemn sati (the practise of burning widows alive on their husbands pyres)?  Were they right to want to eliminate it?  Were the women wrong if they assented to their own deaths? No fair sidestepping to fight about how the British went about uprooting the tradition.  That’s an admittedly tough problem, but it comes after you evaluate the status quo and decide you have a duty to stand athwart it yelling “Stop!” You may be powerless to act effectively, but once you’ve decided that a cultural practise has to be destroyed, you’ll always be searching for a way to help.---Read More:http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2012/04/morality-in-multiple-dimensions.html

— During the British occupation of India, were the British imperialists right to condemn sati (the practise of burning widows alive on their husbands pyres)? Were they right to want to eliminate it? Were the women wrong if they assented to their own deaths?
No fair sidestepping to fight about how the British went about uprooting the tradition. That’s an admittedly tough problem, but it comes after you evaluate the status quo and decide you have a duty to stand athwart it yelling “Stop!” You may be powerless to act effectively, but once you’ve decided that a cultural practise has to be destroyed, you’ll always be searching for a way to help.—Read More:http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2012/04/morality-in-multiple-dimensions.html

Digges’s appendix differs from Copernicus only in extending the sphere of fixed stars to “the palace of felicity… the very court of celestial angels,” the theological heaven, so that the stars are no longer hung on a crystalline sphere but are scattered through an immensity of space. It is perhaps not fortuitous that it was in England that the heretical runaway monk and pantheistic philosopher Giordano Bruno expanded his dithyramb of oneness to include the infinity of the universe and espoused Copernicanism because it was easier to adapt to infinity than the Ptolemaic universe was.

Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600, though not for accepting Copernicanism… ( to be continued)…

Samuel Bak. Read More:http://chgs.umn.edu/museum/responses/bak/gallery2.html

Samuel Bak. Read More:http://chgs.umn.edu/museum/responses/bak/gallery2.html

ADDENDUM:

(see link at end)…Yet there are other moral degeneracy effects involving heliocentrism. Take the occult practice of astrology, for example.
Heliocentrists believe that the sun, moon, and planets all affect the earth in one way or another. Most particularly, it is held that the
gravity of the sun, moon, and planets to varying degrees perturbs the earth and its creatures. A geocentric worldview will not permit the gravity of other celestial bodies to directly affect the earth.

Thus it is that geocentricity provides even less “scientific” grounds for astrology than does heliocentrism; for if gravity is allowed to affect the earth, then one could postulate all sorts of subtle, hitherto unsuspected effects of the astral bodies upon the human soul. Indeed, astrologers do exactly that. In geocentricity, the only physical effect that heavenly bodies can have upon the earth and its inhabitants are influx (that is, shooting stars, incident radiation, cosmic rays, etc.) plus those effects due to the knowledge of their existence.

As further support for the link between heliocentrism and astrology, let it be noted that in the several Mideast locations where mosaic floors of the zodiac have been found, every one of them pictures the sun (in the form of Apollo riding a flaming chariot) and not the earth at the center of the zodiac. Thus they place the sun at the very center of the starry sky. All these factors point to a link between heliocentrism and astrology. Read More:http://www.geocentricity.com/geocentricity/primer.pdf

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