PSTM: Circles, Keppler, and Sharing

The Idea: We take for granted the assumptions we make about the world. I want to tell you a mini story about what I mean.

Let’s look at the Heavens. We take for granted our view of the Cosmos. The Earth rotating around the sun (well, except for a very small but vocal portion of the internet).

It’s hard to remember how baffling the heavens were to humanity for so long.

Imagine being someone in antiquity. We’ll make you a goat herder in Greece for this mental time travel. You watch the sky every night and see the progression of constellations every night move on. All perfectly uniform, beautiful circles in the sky…except for some very specific things that aren’t uniform. Eclipses, planets (named after their tendency to go back and forth…we get the word from Greek πλανήται planetai AKA the wanderers). Weird, inexplicable aberrations in a perfect system.

But then we have people come along and use this idea of circular motion to fix even this aberrant phenomena.

The movement of the heavens could be almost perfectly explained with circular motion, or compound circular motion. The idea was considered so central that it was nearly unquestionable. The heavens are perfect, godly, sacred. Circular motion is assumed.

Until Keppler.

I’ve been thinking about this, because I think the biggest things we miss aren’t our mistakes, but the untested assumptions. The things that are so deep that we don’t even think to question them.

Keppler presented a new system that matched the phenomena, but couldn’t explain the why, just the how. And then Newton came along and provided the why and blew up the cosmology, science, math, and physics of antiquity.

What’s central, what’s deep, what’s down there that you don’t question, but maybe you should?

The quote:

The advice: Tell a friend about the podcast. I’d mean the world to me. Here’s a link to the show.