| Would science have ever been born, wondered Henri Poincaré, if man had not been able to contemplate the stars’ peaceful and ordered parade through the skies? Wouldn’t eternal clouds, such as those covering the sky of Venus, have darkened the mind as well as the heart? As for sunshine, who knows what craving for purity and brightness it can inspire? Babylonians, Chinese, Indians, Egyptians, and Incas kept records of the heavens; and the northern peoples too, from Stonehenge to the Mongolians, those worshippers of the eternal blue, tracked the constellations and their swaying across the sky at the beat of the seasons. Mathematics’ first stammerings appear to have been related to the observation of the sky. The prevailing regularity of the celestial bodies was perhaps an invitation to confirm it, to make it explicit, and to predict it by means of numbers. Among the western civilizations, the Babylonians did it, and the Greek intellectuals will do it too, once equipped with real mathematics. It took a shrewd mind to discover, early on, that the earth is round, as its shadow on the moon indicates (Parmenides is credited with being the first), and later measure quite accurately its circumference (Eratosthenes, 284–192 B.C.). A few years earlier Aristarchus of Samos had already estimated the distance from the earth to the sun and the moon. All these discoveries were not exclusively motivated by a yearning for knowledge and understanding. They were rooted in a preexisting representation of the world. The desire to predict the march of the planets was intimately connected to a very ancient belief in their influence on the life of men and empires. In Pythagorean intellectualism, among other schools, the celestial world was inexorably coupled with an idea of perfection. This association will push Aristotle to conceive principles that are purely mystic: the paths of the celestial bodies must be perfect, hence they can only follow the sole perfect curve, the circle (the circle’s perfection was justified by its being the only curve equal to itself at every point). Aristarchus provides another example of this difficulty in abandoning the traditional representation of the world. Hadn’t he proposed that the celestial phenomena could be more easily understood by assuming the earth to be simply a heavenly body moving around the sun? But then the earth would be carrying along with it the Olympus, the abode of the gods. What a sacrilege! This impiety would cost Aristarchus dearly. He was condemned and had to renounce his idea, or at least keep it to himself… ... Shortly before his death, he [Copernicus (1473–1543)] published a work summarizing his calculations of the celestial motions over many years. These calculations are based on Aristarchus’ hypothesis, by then forgotten or simply ignored: the sun, not the earth, is the center of the world, and the latter rotates around the former... humankind has changed its representation of the world in a space of one generation. | — Roland Omnes, Quantum Philosophy - Understanding and Interpreting Contemporary Science. Tr. Arturo Sangalli. Chapter II, Classical Physics | Indexes/04 |
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It took a smart attitude is found in the initial stage, that the earth is round, because its shadow on the moon display (Parmenides is credited as the first), then it is accurate, and its perimeter (Eratosthenes , 284-192 BC).
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