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August 21, 2018 - January 17, 2024
It’s always the case that history is a tale told by the victors. But the triumph of the scientific worldview has been so complete that we’ve lost more than the losing side’s version of history. We’ve lost the idea that a view different from ours is even possible. Today we take for granted that originality is a word of praise. New strikes us as nearly synonymous with improved. But for nearly all of human history, a new idea was a dangerous idea.
Mathematicians, the very emblem of head-in-the-clouds uselessness,
Astronomy stirred the most fear. Who needed it, when we already know the story of the heavens and the Earth, and on the best possible authority?
The skill that physics demanded was the ability to look past particulars to universals. Just as someone working on a geometry problem would not care whether a triangle was drawn in pencil or ink, so a scientist seeking to describe the world would dismiss countless details as true but irrelevant.
