May I not seem to have lived in vain.
Tycho BraheRead
Now it is quite clear to me that there are no solid spheres in the heavens, and those that have been devised by the authors to save the appearances, exist only in the imagination.
Interpretation
This quote challenges the traditional view of celestial spheres, suggesting they are mere constructs of the imagination.
Tycho Brahe, a prominent astronomer, expresses his realization that the concept of solid celestial spheres is a flawed understanding of the universe. He emphasizes that these spheres were created by theorists to explain astronomical observations, yet they do not correspond to reality, highlighting the importance of questioning established beliefs in the pursuit of knowledge.
In practice
In a lecture about the history of astronomy, this quote can illustrate how scientific understanding evolves over time.
May I not seem to have lived in vain.
Those who study the stars have God for a teacher.
When I had satisfied myself that no star of that kind had ever shone before, I was led into such perplexity by the unbelievability of the thing that I began to doubt the faith of my own eyes.
You can't turn on your television without seeing these advertisements about clean coal, clean tar sands and the claim that there's more jobs associated with fossil fuels than other industries. That's of course not true. But they're hammering that into the voters' heads.
Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.
I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set off the fire alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. I do not think we will have to wait for long.
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
Science appears to us with a very different aspect after we have found out that it is not in lecture rooms only, and by means of the electric light projected on a screen, that we may witness physical phenomena, but that we may find illustrations of the highest doctrines of science in games and gymnastics, in travelling by land and by water, in storms of the air and of the sea, and wherever there is matter in motion.
We know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot.
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