I was reading about Galileo yesterday… Like almost any historical figure, posterity tends to paint him in a series of fairly broad strokes. The specific issue I was reading about was his insistence that Aristotle’s geocentric model of the universe was total bunk. Galileo built himself a telescope – though, much like Freud and his cocaine, he was not the one to get a patent for it – and located about four of Jupiter’s moons having the temerity to orbit a celestial body other than Earth. He noticed something very similar about Venus, in fact, but on a slightly larger scale.
On second thought, it really resembled Freud’s amazing medical discovery of cocaine in pretty much no way at all. But I like throwing that in there. Freud was a crackpot.
Famously, of course, Galileo elected to recant his brilliant discovery when the Catholic Church threatened to atomize him where he stood. After about 1700 Hail Mary’s and a pitcher of Jack, he locked the secret opinion that the Earth freakin’ revolved around the Sun into the recesses of his brain and let it party in solitary for a the next 30 or 40 years. The Catholic Church finally got around to admitting that Galileo was right in 1972. Apparently, modern science was getting hard to ignore.
I can’t figure out why the hell they have such an easy time ignoring it now.
Excuse that crack… I live in Kansas.
I think it’s worth considering that we all have to face a very similar reorganization at some point in our lives. Er… well… the insightful we. You know who you are. Eventually, some time after high school and before death – if you’re lucky – it suddenly hits you like a drunken squirrel that you’re not the center of the universe. That you actually move through the system of terrestrial life forms in a manner remarkably similar to everyone else. Like I said… if you’re lucky.
Saw Riddick this weekend, by the way. Not too bad, really. The funny thing is… I think I liked the first 25 minutes of the movie the best. You know… when he’s bangin’ around the desert communing with the local wildlife. It was surprisingly charming. Then, much like in everyday life, the bounty hunters showed up and fucked it all up.
Figures.