Rearranging Solar Systems
And Other To-Do’s
I can only imagine how people first reacted to Copernicus when he claimed the Earth revolves around the sun. Heliocentric? Pff! What’s with this guy?
It turns out that assimilating new evidence and realigning one’s fundamental beliefs is difficult for most people. Yet it’s becoming apparent to me that our ability to shift worldviews when presented with new data is essential to solving society’s biggest challenges.
I find it both helpful and disturbing to note that long before Copernicus tried to hack through the briar patch of firmly held beliefs seeded in flatly wrong ideas, the Greeks — as early as 300BC — had already surmised that the Earth revolved around the sun. It took almost two millennia for the idea to come back around, and even then it was slow to dawn on wider society (i.e. 100 years slow). Even with the plain and simple facts in hand, Copernicus, and then Galileo about a century later, both suffered serious negative consequences for promoting this idea before it finally came to be understood, to be believed. Squint into this reality for just a moment: respected scholars had the facts of heliocentricity — an observable natural phenomenon — for almost two thousand years before this concept was “accepted”.
Recently, two of my own interconnected “personal solar systems” have been given…
