Word: copernicus
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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...
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...
...sins that beset Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West-"baffling immensity and enigmatic gloom"-had met the German philosopher's requirement for the writing of 20th Century history: Toynbee had found history Ptolemaic and left it Copernican. He had found historical thinking nation-centered, as before Copernicus astronomical thinking had been geocentric. The nation (Greece, Rome, Japan, the U.S.) was the common unit of history. Toynbee believed that not nations but civilizations were the "intelligible fields of study...
Shapley, whose work in determining the distances of globular star clusters as a means to estimate the shape and dimensions of the Milky Way system is regarded by some scientists as equal to Copernicus' Astronomical discoveries, is Paine Professor of Practical Astronomy and a tutor in the Department of Astronomy...
Among the new determinations of distances is that of the great globular cluster in Hercules, which is 31 light years away. The address was made at the presentation of a painting of Nicholas Copernicus to the observatory...