Is sensuouscurmudgeon a screed against religion?
I didn’t think so (I did not read the whole thing). There actually was a debate about whether the craters we see were caused by rocks falling from the sky. Barringer Crater in Arizona was thought to be of volcanic origin because it was silly to think that a rock the size of a soccer field could fall from thin air.
There was a published paper in 1912 that repeated the settled science that meteorites were the result of lightning fusing atmospheric dust.
Another long-running debate was whether finding a large boulder perched on a hill was a proof of the biblical Flood or the result of a ludicrous new theory that sheets of ice a mile thick pushed the boulder there.
“Thomas Jefferson and the Yankees
In the early 1800s news traveled relatively slowly. People did not get frustrated waiting 15 seconds for a page to load from 3,000 miles away. New information could take months or years to be collected, analyzed, published and distributed.
In the cold chill of a December morning in 1807, Judge Wheeler walked from his home in Weston, Connecticut, USA, and was surprised to see a ball of fire moving across the northern horizon. He watched as it passed to a point almost overhead where it flashed several times and disappeared.
A few moments later he heard a great noise. Thunderous and roaring, the noise grew to a frightening level. He then heard the whizzing sound of something falling. As the judge looked up, he observed a small stone strike a nearby building, bounce off, and roll onto the grass. The judge decided to contact nearby Yale University and ask that the event be investigated.
Two very skeptical professors came out to look into the matter, fully prepared to dispel the story of stones falling from the sky. The two professors conducted a lengthy investigation. They knew these stones were different from any they had ever seen and they witnessed local townspeople extracting them from holes in yards and nearby fields. Finally, the two wise professors from Yale concluded the stones must have fallen from the sky.
Eventually the story found its way to the White House in Washington, D.C. President Thomas Jefferson was a scientist as well as statesman. When he heard this peculiar story he declared it could not be true, but his advisors insisted that the stones were observed falling from the sky and that two Yale professors investigating the incident vouched for its truth.
Thomas Jefferson, President of the United states, responded with great skepticism: “Gentlemen, I would rather believe that two Yankee professors would lie than believe that stones fall from heaven.”
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To Jefferson, it was Settled Science that stones could not fall from the sky.
Source: http://www.meteorlab.com/METEORLAB2001dev/metics.htm