Posted on 10/25/2006 10:22:04 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Woulda better illustrated the story if they'd taken a profile shot! ;)
"You've heard of Socrates? Plato? Aristotle?"
"Of course."
"Morons."
He also claimed that stones don't fall from the sky, a claim that was enshrined for nearly 2000 years. :')
LOL! Yeah, maybe "one like this, and one like this" would have been better.
Mainstream science, which was a handful of members of the Royal Society and the French equivalent, denied until the end of the 1800s the meteorites came from the sky, even though the ancient Greek metallurgists knew that quite well and called iron sideros because it was all meteoric at first. The ancient Egyptians also knew this and their symbol for iron was a crucible and a couple of shooting stars. Give Aristotle credit for having the best collection of constitutions: he seemed to be up to speed on the gov'ts of the many various city-states and his comments on oligarchy and democracy would probably raise some hackles here if anybody bothered to read his book.
A meteorite strike in the presence of the Holy Roman Emperor (which obviously took place a while back) in, hmm, I think it was in Burgundy / Arelate, wasn't enough to convince most experts. And large impacts weren't accepted by most (except hypothetically, or in the remote past, such as the "Late Heavy Bombardment") until 1994 when SL-9's fragments smashed into Jupiter and left scars. :')
Yes, the experts denied the rants of peasants and blacksmiths. A French farmer saw the meteor fall about 1890 and found the meteorite on his farm, but the learned men rejected his eyewitness account.
Not a bad-looking sexagenerian:)
Since he has a bust, he must have been a cross-dresser.
[rimshot!]
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