Hmmmm...
Posted on 11/03/2005 11:46:26 AM PST by lizol
"Will they be able to tell from his DNA if he was an ethnic Pole or a German (as the Germans claim)?"
Maybe, but I doubt it --- you can get some amazing racial history from DNA, but Europeans are pretty much genetically Europeans, with some notable exceptions in the East.
I suppose they could stumble upon some ancestors/family lines ala "Cheddar Man" (the caveman in England who they tested and found living descendants about 20 miles away!) and resolve the issue, but otherwise no.
Copernicus was smart to wait it seems!
No surprise about Luther and Calvin. They are just fallible men --- that is the whole point of protestatism -- faith in God/Jesus/Holy Spirt alone and not man or works of man.
Tell that to Jeremy Bentham. His will specified that his corpse should be mounted and displayed for student edification at University College of London (formerly University of London). For some time, the body was wheeled in to College board meetings and recorded in the minutes as "present but not voting." UCL college students apparently used to steal his head on a regular basis.
Sounds like you went to public school,but I can help.
By the time of Aristotle (384-322 BC), the Greeks were aware that the earth was spherical. There is a record of Eratosthenes performing the calculation about 250 BC.
Columbus was actually horribly confused and got lucky. He had trouble getting financing for his trip west because he persisted in believing that the earth was smaller than what everyone else thought.
The Spanish Monarchs came through with a little loose change in the hope Columbus would come up with something that would help them catch up with the Portugese (eg.,Henry the Navigator).
Columbus bumped into the unremembered (the Vikings apparently weren't big on writing books for export) American continent and populated Central and South America with Colons (he's Cristobal Colon in Spanish).
Columbus' log from the first voyage has finally been translated into English and you can get a copy for $50 or so.
That's him all right!!!!!
Oh, I know Galileo was a complete ass. (As was everyone involved, really.)
I just wanted to know the if the same issue occured with Copernicus, too.
Timely article:
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/11/03/D8DL5LTO4.html
And Colon managed to get his sailors to get there even without benefit of Sir Isaac's Lessons on The Pushinge of Ropes yet to be developed a century later.
Who founded the Society for the Preservation of Gravity? These fellows are not "on", but "on the" target.
Hmmmm...
I tried to search for your society and this is what came up.
He invented the internet, you know.
1 x 10 -6 : I like that! Ben Franklin said beer was proof God loves us and wants us to enjoy life.
That's his actual head between his feet. The preserving process went horribly wrong, and a wax head was substituted.
St. Bernadette looks a lot better . . .
Amen to that!
It's sort of a myth that Columbus discovered that the Earth was round. I was taught it in elementary school too, but I really don't know why they teach it. Maybe it's supposed to instill admiration for Columbus as a great discoverer, but frankly he wasn't all that special. I believe that a few years after Columbus, another explorer--I don't remember who--discovered American seperately, in trying sail around Africa and bumping into Brazil.
The predominant view of the Universe by Columbus's time was the Ptolemaic view, which (as far as I can remember) held the Earth to by stationary, spherical, and at the center of the Universe, with the nine Ptolemaic planets (Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) revolving around it in circular orbits, with the sphere of the stationary stars surrounding that and the Primum Mobile (Prime Mover) surrounding all of them and driving their movements. This view is illustrated quite explicitly in Dante's Divine Comedy, which was written almost 300 years before Columbus. For that matter, Dante also knew about Earth's gravity, sort of: in the Inferno as Dante the pilgrim and Virgil are climbing down the flank of Satan (who is embedded in the center of the Earth) as they pass through the center their sense of orientation flips so that they are now climbing up.
So was he spinning in his grave, or was the grave spinning around him?
If I'm wrong on any of this, don't hestitate to correct me. I'm not an expert; I'm just regurgitating stuff I learned in college history classes.
I don't remember the exact details. He wrote his treatise, but did not publish it until very late in life (or maybe even after his death, if I remember correctly). He knew what to expect from the clergy, so he did not give them the opportunity to get even with him. The interesting thing is that this very unassuming man, with absolutely no prior scientists to lay the ground work for his ideas, came up with the thought that served as the turning point from nearly 2,000 years of philosophical mire, dating all the way back to Aristotle.
I suppose one could say Columbus proved Corpernicus correct, but that credit should really be given to Ferdinand Magellan, or at least the expedition he started.
-A8
I beg your pardon, Gravity is to be conserved, not preserved. I stand corrected: it is Conservation of Gravity. Being in a profession of holding things up, I am sensitive to this promulgation of levity.
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