Galileo, why’d you have to do it?

How heliocentrism radically “rocked the world” as we knew it...

Imagine yourself as living when the Earth was the center of it all. It is a time before telescopes and the preciseness demanded by empirical science. A time when explanation was ruled by theory and philosophy, and when we truly believed in a rising and setting sun. Our senses, after all, confirm a geocentric design – we can see the stars moving about us, and it certainly doesn’t feel as if the Earth is moving. For those who desired more than just senses and observation, we have Ptolemy’s complex system of circles that explain the motion of the planets and stars, while still beautifully keeping us in the middle of everything, and he did so using more than theory, but with the meticulous, objective disciplines of math, physics, and astronomy.

How comforting is it to think that the Resplendent Heavens circle about and surround my planet! What purpose and significance it gives for humanity and my individual existence, too! We see that from that perspective, the movements and changes in the ethos would be scrutinized in a way that is most alien to us. For them, the planets and stars directly concern themselves with humanity, perhaps even they are the forces or gods which impact my life – studying the movements of the cosmos could be of life-or-death significance, showing the favor or displeasure of the Fates. I may see the stars and planets as heavenly bodies, or as mysterious beacons of ethereal light, constant and glorious. Even if I don’t think they have a supernatural power over my life, and it’s all I can do to stare and say, “How I wonder what you are…”, I know that they are there, every night, moving about my planet far away in a celestial sphere. The stars are something permanent and enduring even if I’m cursed to a temporal existence; at least there is something that will last. Maybe they are simply there to be admired, here for no other purpose than to exist and to be something beautiful to look up at; perhaps they are just here for pleasure – humanity’s pleasure and my pleasure. Doesn’t that make me feel important!

Then enters Copernicus to knock the first hole in this view and Galileo with his telescope after him to perfect the heliocentric conjectures, and eureka! Goodbye to the Earth-centered universe. Did the cosmos suddenly become less or more knowable? The inscrutable galaxy can now be explained scientifically rather than philosophically. It is more comforting perhaps for some to have a more rational universe, one not just about superstitions or myths. For others, however, like the hypothetical person we imagined ourselves to be at the outset of this post, it destroyed long-held, comforting assurances, leaving in its wake a more mechanized, huge, impersonal galaxy, one that neither needs nor notices the human race. And so too the deistic view of God was popularized. Now we realize that Earth’s place in the galaxy is rather irrelevant. As we knocked it from its throne in the middle of all, so too demotes the value of the human race; so ends the Ancient and Romantic ages of thoughts, and our infatuatory love affair with ourselves; there is no more “sunny” picture of individual worth. Galileo brought to some a caustic, acerbically sobering explanation for a galaxy that is now vast and dark, and empty and scary. The stars do not “look down upon us”; they do not care in any singular way about humanity, and they certainly are not meant to be wished upon – a truly “stellar” poem with this theme is Robert Frost’s “Choose Something Like a Star.”

Isn’t it a funny coincidence that “geocentrism” can easily be misspelled to get “egocentrism”?