The myth that Copernicus's model of the universe "dethroned" humans is a vampire that refuses to die. In Physics Today, Mano Singham tries yet again! to
drive a nail through the monster's heart. Singham writes (December 2007, page 48) about the promoters of the myth:
Let us start with the myth that the Copernican model was opposed because it was a blow to human pride, dethroning Earth from its privileged position as the center of the universe. Dennis Danielson, in his fine article on the subject, shows how widespread that view is by quoting the eminent geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky. With Copernicus, Dobzhansky contends, "Earth was dethroned from its presumed centrality and preeminence." Carl Sagan described Copernicanism as the first of a series of "Great Demotions . . . delivered to human pride." Astronomer Martin Rees has written, "It is over 400 years since Copernicus dethroned the Earth from the privileged position that Ptolemy's cosmology accorded it." And Sigmund Freud remarked that Copernicus provoked outrage by his slight against humankind's "naive self-love."
But - contrary to these important pundits whom everybody was - or is - supposed to believe (the stock in individual pundits rises and falls, so check your ticker), what was the reality? Singham explains,
In fact, ancient and medieval Arabic, Jewish, and Christian scholars believed that the center was the worst part of the universe, a kind of squalid basement where all the muck collected. One medieval writer described Earth's location as "the excrementary and filthy parts of the lower world." We humans, another asserted, are "lodged here in the dirt and filth of the world, nailed and rivetted to the worst and deadest part of the universe, in the lowest story of the house, and most remote from the heavenly arch." In 1615 Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, a prominent persecutor of Galileo, said that "the Earth is very far from heaven and sits motionless at the center of the world." [ ... ] By contrast, heaven was up, and the further up you went, away from the center, the better it was. So Copernicus, by putting the Sun at the center and Earth in orbit around it, was really giving its inhabitants a promotion by taking them closer to the heavens.
Singham quotes Dennis Danielson, writing in the American Journal of Physics in 2001 - after which the Copernican myth should have been dismissed as
bunk:
For more than three centuries scientists, historians, and popularizers of science have been repeating the claim that Copernicus "dethroned" earth from its "privileged" central position in the universe. However, a survey of pre-Copernican natural philosophy (which viewed the earth as located in a cosmic sump) and of Copernicans' own account of the axiological meaning of the new heliocentric astronomy (which exalted earth to the dance of the stars) demonstrates that the cliche about earth's "demotion" is unwarranted and fit to be discarded.
But you would never know that from the New York Times. On March 11, 2007, reporter Richard Panek got the
scoop from an anti-ID physicist:
“We’re just a bit of pollution,” Lawrence M. Krauss, a theorist at Case Western Reserve, said not long ago at a public panel on cosmology in Chicago. “If you got rid of us, and all the stars and all the galaxies and all the planets and all the aliens and everybody, then the universe would be largely the same. We’re completely irrelevant.”
Panek, taking this in, thinks that "the ultimate Copernican Revolution" may be that we will never understand the universe. He explains,
Science is full of homo sapiens-humbling insights. But the trade-off for these lessons in insignificance has always been that at least now we would have a deeper — simpler — understanding of the universe. That the more we could observe, the more we would know. But what about the less we could observe? What happens to new knowledge then? It’s a question cosmologists have been asking themselves lately, and it might well be a question we’ll all be asking ourselves soon, because if they’re right, then the time has come to rethink a fundamental assumption: When we look up at the night sky, we’re seeing the universe. Not so. Not even close.
Ultimate Copernican Revolution? Poor old Copernicus thought he was advancing understanding, but then he wasn't a materialist. In reality, the Copernican myth doesn't die because too many people are invested in keeping it alive, to prop up a materialist view of the universe. The evidence is dead against materialism, so myths are increasingly relied on. You may find some of them in your science texts. While we are here, a short list of other myths follows - by NO means all the myths fit to debunk - that help prop up Darwinism and materialism:
- Humans and chimps are 99% genetically identical?
- Christian Europe believed and promoted the idea that the Earth is flat? Debunked here. In reality, the old cosmology pictured Earth as a sphere.
- The US government denies the age of the Grand Canyon? Believe it or not, someone at TIME Magazine was promoting that one. Remember that when you get the subscription renewal notice.
- Oh, and here's a good one: Religious folk opposed anesthesia in childbirth?
- Isaac Newton was the soul of materialism? Wait till you hear what he had to say about the end of the world ...
- And lastly, Charles Darwin invented the idea of evolution? What he invented was unguided materialist evolution. We explain that clearly in The Design of Life. (Prediction: You will soon be awash in nonsense because of the bicentenary of Darwin's birth.)
-Darwin myths also slammed here And here, why it matters. Sigh.
So many myths, so little time. If I spend all my time blogging on this, I will never get back to the news ... But it's kind of like cleaning out the shed. One can always think of more urgent tasks - but takin' out the trash feels so darn GOOD!