Cosmos - Carl Sagan [40]
The major intellectual pursuit of his last years was a concordance and calibration of the chronologies of ancient civilizations, very much in the tradition of the ancient historians Manetho, Strabo and Eratosthenes. In his last, posthumous work, “The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended,” we find repeated astronomical calibrations of historical events; an architectural reconstruction of the Temple of Solomon; a provocative claim that all the Northern Hemisphere constellations are named after the personages, artifacts and events in the Greek story of Jason and the Argonauts; and the consistent assumption that the gods of all civilizations, with the single exception of Newton’s own, were merely ancient kings and heroes deified by later generations.
Kepler and Newton represent a critical transition in human history, the discovery that fairly simple mathematical laws pervade all of Nature; that the same rules apply on Earth as in the skies; and that there is a resonance between the way we think and the way the world works. They unflinchingly respected the accuracy of observational data, and their predictions of the motion of the planets to high precision provided compelling evidence that, at an unexpectedly deep level, humans can understand the Cosmos. Our modern global civilization, our view of the world and our present exploration of the Universe are profoundly indebted to their insights.
Newton was guarded about his discoveries and fiercely competitive with his scientific colleagues. He thought nothing of waiting a decade or two after its discovery to publish the inverse square law. But before the grandeur and intricacy of Nature, he was, like Ptolemy and Kepler, exhilarated as well as disarmingly modest. Just before his death he wrote: “I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the seashore, and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
*The root of the word means “Moon.”
*Skepticism about astrology and related doctrines is neither new nor exclusive to the West. For example, in the Essays on Idleness, written in 1332 by Tsurezuregusa of Kenko, we read:
The Yin-Yang teachings [in Japan] have nothing to say on the subject of the Red Tongue Days. Formerly people did not avoid these days, but of late—I wonder who is responsible for starting this custom—people have taken to saying things such as, “An enterprise begun on a Red Tongue Day will never see an end,” or, “Anything you say or do on a Red Tongue Day is bound to come to naught: you lose what you’ve won, your plans are undone.” What nonsense! If one counted the projects begun on carefully selected “lucky days” which came to nothing in the end, they would probably be quite as many as the fruitless enterprises begun on the Red Tongue days.
*Four centuries earlier, such a device was constructed by Archimedes and examined and described by Cicero in Rome, where it had been carried by the Roman general Marcellus, one of whose soldiers had, gratuitously and against orders, killed the septuagenarian scientist during the conquest of Syracuse.
*In a recent inventory of nearly every sixteenth-century copy of Copernicus’ book, Owen Gingerich has found the censorship