Cosmos - Carl Sagan [41]
*By no means the most extreme such remark in medieval or Reformation Europe. Upon being asked how to distinguish the faithful from the infidel in the siege of a largely Albigensian city, Domingo de Guzmán, later known as Saint Dominic, allegedly replied: “Kill them all. God will know his own.”
*The proof of this statement can be found in Appendix 2.
*Some examples are still to be seen in the Graz armory.
*Brahe, like Kepler, was far from hostile to astrology, although he carefully distinguished his own secret version of astrology from the more common variants of his time, which he thought conducive to superstition. In his book Astronomiae Instauratae Mechanica, published in 1598, he argued that astrology is “really more reliable than one would think” if charts of the position of the stars were properly improved. Brahe wrote: “I have been occupied in alchemy, as much as by the celestial studies, from my 23rd year.” But both of these pseudosciences, he felt, had secrets far too dangerous for the general populace (although entirely safe, he thought, in the hands of those princes and kings from whom he sought support). Brahe continued the long and truly dangerous tradition of some scientists who believe that only they and the temporal and ecclesiastical powers can be trusted with arcane knowledge: “It serves no useful purpose and is unreasonable, to make such things generally known.” Kepler, on the other hand, lectured on astronomy in schools, published extensively and often at his own expense, and wrote science fiction, which was certainly not intended primarily for his scientific peers. He may not have been a popular writer of science in the modern sense, but the transition in attitudes in the single generation that separated Tycho and Kepler is telling.
*Sadly, Newton does not acknowledge his debt to Kepler in his masterpiece the Principia. But in a 1686 letter to Edmund Halley, he says of his law of gravitation: “I can affirm that I gathered it from Kepler’s theorem about twenty years ago.”
CHAPTER IV
HEAVEN AND HELL
The doors of heaven and hell are adjacent and identical.
—Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ
The Earth is a lovely and more or less placid place. Things change, but slowly. We can lead a full life and never personally encounter a natural disaster more violent than a storm. And so we become complacent, relaxed, unconcerned. But in the history of Nature, the record is clear. Worlds have been devastated. Even we humans have achieved the dubious technical distinction of being able to make our own disasters, both intentional and inadvertent. On the landscapes of other planets where the records of the past have been preserved, there is abundant evidence of major catastrophes. It is all a matter of time scale. An event that would be unthinkable in a hundred years may be inevitable in a hundred million. Even on the Earth, even in our own century, bizarre natural events have occurred.
In the early morning hours of June 30, 1908, in Central Siberia, a giant fireball was seen moving rapidly across the sky. Where it touched the horizon, an enormous explosion took place. It leveled some 2,000 square kilometers of forest and burned thousands of trees in a flash fire near the impact site. It produced an atmospheric shock wave that twice circled the Earth. For two days afterward, there was so much fine dust in the atmosphere that one could read a newspaper at night by scattered light in the streets of London, 10,000 kilometers away.
The government of Russia under the Czars could not be bothered to investigate so trivial an event, which, after all, had occurred far away, among the backward Tungus people of Siberia. It was ten years after the Revolution before an expedition arrived to examine the ground and interview the witnesses. These are some of the accounts they brought back:
Early in the morning when everyone was asleep in the tent, it was blown up into the air, together with the occupants.