Theme: “Am I Right Side Up or Upside Down?”

A Lonely Speck in the Great Enveloping Cosmic Dark

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in...

Source: Pale Blue Dot  by Carl Sagan

Is There a Problem with the Earth’s Gravitational Pull?

Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the earth’s gravitational pull?

Source: Back to the Future

The Centre of the World Was Not a Position of Honor

But the actual tendency of the geocentric system was, for the medieval mind, precisely the opposite. For the centre of the world was not a position of honor; it was rather the place farthest removed from the Empyrean, the bottom...

Source: The Great Chain of Being  by Arthur Oncken Lovejoy

Human Beings Literally Lost the Ground of Their View

There are people who regard the deed of Copernicus as the biggest of the cultural revolutions which humanity has ever experienced as far as the historical memory reaches. One has to admit that the impression and the influence of this...

The Earth May Now Be a Mere Planet Moving Around the Sun

The earth may now be a mere planet moving around the sun, but man is no longer confined to it. His spiritual energy, his reason, his brain power, his psyche, his consciousness have become the center and the purpose of...

Source: Utopian Thought in the Western World  by Frank E. Manuel

To Remove Man From the Centre of Things Was To Raise Him From His Low Estate

And the one change of this kind implied by the abandonment of the geocentric system was, as is evident from what has already been said, the reverse of that often attributed to the new astronomy; to remove man from the...

Source: The Great Chain of Being  by Arthur Oncken Lovejoy

Man on the Moon Viewing the Earth Was in the Service of the Copernican Hypothesis

Moon voyages became popular in the 1630s, their underlying inspiration Galileo’s telescope and the curiosity it piqued about the planet; but the way of reaching the new world on the moon was more important than the substance of an ideal...

Source: Utopian Thought in the Western World  by Frank E. Manuel

It Is Probably a Sphere

Before any celestial distances or sizes could be calculated, the ancient Greeks first had to establish that the Earth is a sphere. This view gained acceptance in ancient Greece as philosophers became familiar with the notion that ships gradually disappear...

Source: Big Bang  by Simon Singh

All of a Sudden, Proved to Be a Sphere

The first of these schemes derives from the fact that the generally accepted "flat earth" was, all of a sudden, proved to be a sphere by the voyage of Magellan's ships around the world.

Source: JFK  by L. Fletcher Prouty

There Is No Up and Down in Universe

If you, the reader of these lines, personally use the words up and down, you, too, are as yet imprisoned in the Dark Ages. There are no parallels on the surface of the Earth; what may appear to be parallel...

Source: Cosmography  by Buckminster Fuller

The Earth Must Be Stationary

First, the Greeks expected that if the Earth moved then we would feel a constant wind blowing against us, and we would be swept off our feet as the ground raced from under us. However, we feel no such constant...

Source: Big Bang  by Simon Singh

Somehow Glued to It by Gravity

While almost everyone is taught that the Earth is a sphere with all of us somehow glued to it by gravity, the reality of our circumstance did not really begin to sink in until the famous frame-filling Apollo photograph of...

Source: Pale Blue Dot  by Carl Sagan