Word: copernicus
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...reply to one question. Asked what happens when scientific truth conflicts with "religious truth," he replied in effect that there can be no conflict - truth is truth. Galileo, Copernicus and a host of others, from bitter personal experience, could testify to the contrary...
...other white sea monkeys came to Jogjakarta and read what the first one had carved on the rock. In Latin he had written : "Laugh at your own stupidity, but do not laugh at the misfortunes of a poor man." In French, Italian and Dutch he had repeated (soon after Copernicus and before Galileo) a sentence so as to form a circle: "So moves the world...
Neither Luini nor Baldovinetti was aware of the fact, but while they painted, the astronomer Copernicus was calmly pulling the earth out from under their studios. Even in the Renaissance, a scattering of prophets such as Savonarola kept repeating that man is mere dust; but never before Copernicus did anyone suspect what out-of-the-way dust man was. When Copernicus squeezed the world into a ball and set it spinning through the blackness of outer space, he did much to destroy the importance of man in art as well as in the universe...
...Since Copernicus, scientists, in trying to explain away the miracle of Christmas, have only increased the mystery. So most modern painters-the expressionists who try to satisfy themselves with flaunting their own fragile tatters of personal experience, and the abstractionists who take refuge in a pseudo-scientific picture of life as a composition of light rays and whirling particles-necessarily hide their gifts at Christmas. The only truth that many of them recognize is in the atom, which gives off not radiance but radioactivity...
Oceans apart (one man was in Berlin, the other in Buenos Aires), two amateur astronomers last week had independently decided that Copernicus had everything inside out and backwards. The earth, Germany's Valentin Herz explained, does not revolve from west to east; it spins in the opposite direction. Argentina's Antonio Duran Navarro had an even more novel idea. Says Navarro: "The universe, 8,000 miles in diameter, is contained within the earth...