Sticky threads of the webs of belief.

I watched the space shuttle punch a hole in the atmosphere last week. A shimmering orange glo-pop whizzing up into a beach blue sky. I tried to imagine people in it, but the shuttle didn't even seem to be man-made, much less man-containing. It just looked like a meteor headed in the wrong direction. After it was out of sight, leaving only an ever-widening strip of white puff in its wake, the sound waves finally reached me where I lay by a pool filled with inflatable ducks and frogs. The noise shook the air, buffeting the peace and relative quiet, forcing us all to look upward, eyes shielded, in anticipation of metallic chunks plummeting seaward and tiny waving astronauts, sommersaulting through pale space.

I couldn't help thinking of Ptolemy and Copernicus. Ptolemy, of course, propounded the geocentric model of the universe. And eveyone was really happy to go along with that. His ideas not only adequately answered any backwards scientific ideas of the time, but they also fit into relgious philosophies that put man at the center of God's world. Obviously if we were the centerpiece of his creation, then our planet would logically be the center of the universe.

When Copernicus found astronomical anomalies that couldn't be explained within the scope of a geocentric model of the universe, he led the campaign for a new view with the sun at the center of the picture. Obviously this sort of thinking just didn't fly.

Promoting a new scientific theory or any sort of theory that has bearing on our ideas about reality and our world is not as simple as promoting the next boy band. (For that matter, I'm sure promoting boy bands is no picnic either. Just look at all the boy band scraps lying lifeless on the MTV cutting room floor.)

My favorite professor in college said that history is the opposite of science because history is the study of the known and science is the study of the unknown.

Herbert Butterfield said that science is "a history of errors."

In philosophy of science, you learn that the honest scientist, in order to prove his proposed theory, must attempt to disprove it.

Attempting to remove one little string in a web of beliefs is precarious because each string touches and impacts the next. Ptolemy was in error about the universe, but his erroneous belief supported dozens of other beliefs taken for granted by his contemporaries. For Copernicus to just expect everyone to abandon geocentric views for the more correct sun-centered views, he must have been as hard-headed as that Egyptian pharoah who wanted to completely switch up the panthology of the day in favor of his preferred sun god worship. And that guy didn't fare too well either.

I guess I was thinking about all of this because I was contemplating how difficult it is to believe even what we know. Even to beleive that men are floating in outer space now requires a stretch of my imagination. And it tugs at all the other little strings of my belief system. Scientists are amazing more for their persistence in the face of the unthinkable than for their sheer brilliance. I think scientists are dreamy.