Center of the Universe

Back in 270 BCE, an ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician named Aristarchus of Samos had the crazy idea that the sun was actually bigger than the earth... even though from where he was standing, it wasn't much bigger than his thumb. From this, he deduced that it was more likely that the earth revolved around the sun as opposed to the other way around. You know, crazy talk.

The biggest controversy, however, was that this also meant that the orbit of the earth must not be a perfect circle. In ancient Athens, them's fightin' words. You don't fuck with geometry. Most people at the time thought he was insane, sacrilegious, or a combination of the two, like the Ozzy Osbourne of classical Greece... except as far as I know, Aristarchus never bit the head off a live bat on stage (although records from this period are sparse).

In fact, most of Aristarchus’s writing has been lost, which could make for the single greatest library fine in human history... except that much of his life's work is thought to have burnt up when the Library of Alexandria was destroyed in 391 AD under the order of the city's bishop, Theophilus. You see, old Theo didn't like any newfangled 'science' that conflicted with his ideology.

Nonetheless, references to Aristarchus's work have survived in other books, including the work of Archimedes, who concluded that if Aristarchus’s model was indeed accurate, then since the stars do not appear to change position from one year to another, this would mean that they are much further away than anyone had ever suspected.

"That means that one tiny atom in my
fingernail could be... one tiny little universe."

In other words, because of this guy, human beings first started to develop a sense of just how much space there is in space. Granted, they were still way lowballing their estimates, but even then, his fellow members of the Toga Party decided that they were unwilling to let their minds be so thoroughly blown at this time. Instead, they wrote it off as nonsense in favor of Ptolemy’s geocentric model. I presume that Claudius Ptolemy must have sat down to urinate, which is why the P was silent. He was also a mathematician, geographer and poet, a Renaissance Man of sorts about sixteen centuries before the Renaissance.

Almost eighteen centuries later, Nicolaus Copernicus even referenced Aristarchus in an early draft of his manuscript Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of Heavenly Orbs (Swimsuit Edition), first published in 1543 and which is generally credited with introducing the idea of the heliocentric model of our solar system. However, there was one major caveat in Copernicus’s argument: the word “if,” which allowed the work to be read as a hypothesis instead of a theory or immutable law, thereby sparing him from persecution by the Catholic church. He also waited until he was dying before he dared publish it, at which point he presumably said, "Fuck it," then dropped the mic.

Galileo, on the other hand, either had too much foresight or not enough, depending on how you look at it. In 1632, he wrote and published Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World, Ptolemaic and Copernican, which takes Copernicus’s ideas further and was immediately put on the Catholic Church’s list of banned books. After his inquisition, followed by a light lunch, Galileo had to publicly denounce his findings and was forced to live out the rest of his life under house arrest. Hey, at least he had his telescope.

"You know, I probably should have brought a corkscrew, too..."

Galileo died in 1642, and it would be over a hundred years before a heavily censored version of Systems was permitted by the Church to be released.* It was not taken off the list of banned books until 1835, and this was only after another astronomer named Joseph Settle finally settled the issue, so to speak. Back in 1820, he had finally convinced the Pope to believe that the earth does in fact revolve around the sun... you know, less than a hundred and fifty years before human beings would walk on the goddamn moon.

Another 200 years or so, they might even come around on gay marriage.

And it all started with a wild-eyed stargazer in ancient Greece who had the audacity to suggest that maybe human beings aren’t the center of universe after all.

Imagine that.


* Fun Fact: Galileo's middle-finger is still on display in a museum in Florence, Italy, about a hundred and seventy miles from the Vatican.