astro picture for the day

Image Credit: ESA/NASA Hubble Space Telescope

- There's ideas that are about defining things clearly and openly - like mathematics.  Then, there's ideas that try to evade thinking. If you confront someone about something, if you try to show logic and facts that reveal things, most people(in my experience) use all kinds of evasive language. I've posted before about a remarkable historical piece of evidence for this in Bishop of Constantinople Gregorius of Nyssa noticed this type of thinking and complained,

"People swarm everywhere, talking of incomprehensible matters, in hovels, streets and square, marketplaces, and crossroads. When I ask how many oboloi I have to pay, they answer with hairsplitting arguments about the born and the unborn. If I inquire the price of bread, I am told that the father is greater than the son. I call a servant to tell me whether my bath is ready; he rejoins that the son was created out of nothing."

And I've pointed out some evidences using the movie "The Da Vinci Code."  I could point out some personal examples(from my family), but I've recently found some more interesting historical evidences for this . . .

- One is in Copernicus's "On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres" book.  It's noted many times that a person, not so close to Copernicus, put in a preface to his work(Copernicus saw his book on his deathbed) that the ideas of the sun centered solar system(they thought it was the universe at the time) is "just" a mathematical fiction.

People who play these 'acting up' games often use this dismissive "just" language.  Oh, it's just this or that; don't mind it.

- More historical evidences - John Milton in his "Paradise Lost", book VIII,

"Sollicit not thy thoughts with matters hid,
Leave them to God above, him serve and feare;
Of other creatures, as him pleases best,
Whatever plac't, let him dispose: joy thou
In what he gives to thee, this Paradise
And thy fair Eve: Heav'n is for thee too high
To know what passes there; be lowlie wise:
Think onely what concernes thee and they being;
Dream not of other Worlds."

I put the last statement in bold.  Not that there's plenty of Nazi "only think what I tell you to think" before that last statement; but, it is the most clear statement

Milton visited Galileo, when under house arrest - to experience, to see, and to gloat over him.

- As stated, I've posted about this before in my "Sophie and Silas" and later the "Agnostic and Irreligious" post.