The Loop In Science: The Copernican Center

Science, Modern Man’s most embraceable Religion, began with a verifiable claim on planetary self-displacement. Where we stand is not the true center. The Observer is not the unmoving ground.

Nickolaus Copernicus [1473-1543], a Renaissance scholar and a catholic cleric, began the Modern Age of Science. In his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium:

‘There is no center for the celestial spheres; the center of the Earth is not the center of the Universe; the spheres revolve around the Sun..‘.

Before him, dear old Earth was the static center of the Universe [‘Geocentric’ paradigm]. The Heliocentric Theory [‘Helios’, the Greek Sun-God] found a new deity. The real center, it said, was in-fact the Sun.

But Science keeps replacing every displaced god with a new deity. Is there a center, any center? Is there an Independent, Observing ‘Self’?

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Earth, taken from the hugely successful Voyager mission [1990], 6 billion KM away, as it turned its lens inward one last time before entering interstellar space.

A ‘Pale Blue Dot’, they called it. Less than a Pixel; but still not Zero.

What exactly are you looking at when you look through a telescope? And who is doing the Looking?

‘To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world‘ noted Carl Sagan a principal scientist on the mission [and one never known to be shy at the mic.]

The universe does not begin in a distant and cataclysmic ‘Big Bang’. It is less dramatic than that portrayed by the scientists.