Word: copernicus
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...larger, visible star, it would draw gases from the star. As those gases spiraled toward the black hole, they would collide, compress and heat up to as high as 100 million degrees-enough to produce an intense flow of X rays. Recent findings by NASA'S new Copernicus earth satellite strongly support this scenario. Cygnus X-l shows a sharp decrease in X-ray emissions every 5.6 days. That, according to optical astronomers, seems to be the time it takes the bright star's unseen companion to make one trip around it. In other words, every 5.6 days...
That statement comes at a curious juncture in Western history -the 500th anniversary of the birth of the Polish churchman and scholar Nicholas Copernicus. It was his dryly mathematical, yet brash book On the Revolution of the Heavenly Bodies that dislodged the earth-and man along with it-from the center of the universe, moving the sun into that place. The Copernican theory shook the most basic theological and philosophical canons of the day. Even more important, it provided the intellectual spark for the tremendous acceleration of knowledge that Western culture has since come to call science...
Under the stubborn prodding of Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Sir Isaac Newton and Copernicus' other intellectual heirs, questions of nature were thrust directly into the combative, public arena of empirical inquiry. For the first time, experiments became crucial. Theories were supported by close observation. The new scientific method, stressing reason and logic, was born. Individual scientists might still occasionally be wrong-sometimes outrageously so, as when Newton believed that the sun was inhabited. Yet it was the testing of such hypotheses, however farfetched, that caused a new intellectual excitement to sweep the Western world, a determination to explore, understand...
...Structure of Scientific Revolutions that science is not cumulative, but that it collapses and is rebuilt after each major conceptual shift. Paradigms is the word he uses for those overreaching models and theories according to which each new era of science conducts its normal, day-to-day operations. Copernicus, for example, established a new paradigm of science with his heliocentric universe, overthrowing the old. Newton did likewise, and so did Einstein. Following such fundamental changes, "normal" scientists go back to work again, but with a different set of assumptions. Maslow pointed out that it is these "normal" technicians who created...
...hard to refute definitively, especially in view of the proliferation of weird subatomic particles discovered by physics (more than 15 at last count). At least so says Arthur Koestler, the novelist and interpreter of science who once compared Rhine's work favorably with that of Copernicus. In his recent book The Roots of Coincidence, Koestler calls on his considerable skills as a popularizer of modern quantum physics to buttress his beliefs. Matter, he notes, quoting Bertrand Russell, is "a convenient formula for describing what happens where it isn't." An absurdity? Not to the new generation of quantum...