Word: copernicus
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...winter meeting in San Antonio, Texas, where Marcy and Butler announced their findings two weeks ago, were no less excited. "What we are seeing," said Robert Brown, an astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute, after Marcy sat down, "is the culmination of intellectual history that began with Copernicus 500 years...
Scientists, meanwhile, were demystifying the universe. Strangely, no one knows for sure who invented the telescope, but by 1609 Galileo Galilei had built one of his own. With it he was able to confirm the heretical speculations of Copernicus, Kepler and Tycho Brahe that the sun, not the earth, was the center of our universe. The specific origins of the microscope are equally obscure. In the 17th century, Robert Hooke used it to describe accurately the anatomy of a flea and the design of a feather; Antonie de Leeuwenhoek discovered a world of wriggling organisms in a drop of water...
...mind, in order to explore and solve problems, must operate upon certain models, certain sets of assumptions. For 13 centuries, humankind assumed, as Ptolemy taught, that the sun revolved around the earth. It was a workable paradigm of the universe, in its way, but became the Old Paradigm when Copernicus propounded the New Paradigm that the earth revolved around...
Sigmund Freud once said that human self-esteem received three great blows from science. First, Copernicus proved that the earth is not the center of the universe. Then Darwin showed that man is not organically superior to animals; and finally, psychoanalysis asserted that man is not "master in his own house." The self-esteem of Soviet communism suffered all three blows at once but lumbered on for years in a dusk of denial. Despite the pretensions of Marx and Lenin, the system that bears their name is manifestly not the ordained ; design of history, not superior to all others...
Mikhail Gorbachev is the Copernicus, Darwin and Freud of communism all wrapped in one. He wants his fellow citizens -- and his comrades -- at last to absorb this trinity of disillusionments and reconcile themselves into a whole and modern society...