Word: galileo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Indies, and in 1490 came up with six good reasons why it was impossible. So many centuries after the creation, they concluded triumphantly, it was unlikely that anyone could find hitherto unknown lands of any value. This negative reaction was similar to the learned argument that greeted Galileo when he reported that Jupiter had moons. "Jupiter's moons are invisible to the naked eye," said a group of Aristotelian professors, "and therefore can have no influence on the earth, and therefore would be useless, and therefore do not exist...
Obsessed by the Sun. Mumford traces the origin of such urges to the 16th century astronomer Galileo, whose unwitting crime was that he left man out of his reckoning. Preoccupied with the orderly behavior of the planets in the heavens, Galileo, and the scientists who followed him, says Mumford, assumed that life on earth could be reduced to neat, predictable patterns. With his customary prophetic fervor, Mumford accuses Galileo of "driving man out of living nature into a cosmic desert even more peremptorily than Jehovah drove Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden...
...fervent science of Galileo and his followers, says Mumford, was in part a revival of the sun worship of the ancient Egyptians. Other Egyptian parallels strike Mumford's fancy. Just as the Egyptians erected vast sterile pyramids at great cost, so did the industrial age begin to mass-produce valueless goods. A far-fetched analogy? Mumford finds pyramids lurking everywhere in modern life. He includes an illustration of a supercity proposed by Buckminster Fuller that looks like a pyramid but lacks any perceptible improvement in living conditions. Even the manned space capsule "corresponds exactly to the innermost chamber...