And Yet It Moves….

Google… ca. 1609

The Nobel Museum in Stockholm is exhibiting Galileo’s telescope.

In 1609 Galileo turned his new instrument to the skies and changed the world forever.  

What he saw – mountains and valleys on the moon, moons themselves circling Jupiter, overturned a thousand years of Christian dogma that had insisted that the heavens were made of pure and unblemished crystal spheres.

It was the moment at which science, until then a sort of dark art close to astrology, began to take on religion as the locus of thinking.  But it would take time… still does.

One might think that upon peering through Galileo’s telescope, the Pope and his minions, viewing the unmistakable mountains on the moon, might have said ‘OK, I guess we were wrong’.

Uh… no.

On the contrary, Galileo was warned not to publish, and when he did, was arrested, tried and put under house arrest and forced to recant – which he did, despite the very clear evidence before him and the rest of the world.  Dogma trumps reality. 

It often does.

Change is very hard for people to accept, even when the evidence is clearly before them.  They cling to old mythologies because there is a comfort in it.  

Lasts night, we went to see Ricky Gervais live at Carnegie Hall.  Gervais is the star and creator of The Office, (that would be the extremely clever BBC version and not the rather dumber and more slapstick US version). 

In any event, Gervais did a hilarious send up of a Noah’s Ark childhood book, pointing out the sheer impossibility of the story.  We all laughed till we cried. Of course, this was a Manhattan audience.  I don’t think this would have gone down particularly well in, say, Alabama.

(Then again, I don’t think that Gervais is booked into any Alabama venues either).

This morning I am going off to give a talk to the journalism students at SUNY Stony Brook on Long Island.

Their professor, Barbara Selvin has been instructing them to post questions they might want to ask. As reading this blog is apparently part of the assignment, their questions revolve around the current discussion about making journalism more business oriented.

It should be an interesting morning.  Like the 17th Century Pontiffs, the students seem capable of seeing the mountains on the moon but unable to acknowledge what they mean.