OK, so I’m a little behind the times, but I just watched “Meet the Robinsons” on TV last night. Those of you more up-to-date with movies probably remember the motto of Cornelius Robinson, “Keep Moving Forward,” drawn from a quote from Walt Disney.
And so I got to wonder, what if we did not keep moving forward, as some members of our society would prefer? Where would be today?
The concept is the stuff of a myriad of science fiction novels, but let’s focus on just a few possibilities.
Nicolaus Copernicus, a Catholic cleric, on his own poked his nose into the organizations of the solar system. At the time, the prevailing belief (and church dogma) was that the Earth stood at the center of everything — Moon, Sun, planets, stars. This paradigm (there, I used Thomas Kuhn’s terminology) dictated that astrologers/astronomers had to undertake a frightening number of calculations to predict the locations of celestial objects in the sky.
By Copernicus’ time, those calculations were not all that accurate. Copernicus painstakingly measured the positions of celestial objects, and undertook to recalculate their motions. In the process, he apparently realized that life would be so much easier if the Sun was at the center, and not the Earth. While it did not make the calculations easier, at least it made them less exhausting.
