Copernican Revolutions…

New pages from Chapter 2! These two were not part of my working outline, and as I finished the previous pages on ways of seeing and Eratosthenes’s unflattening of the earth and was looking ahead to the next pages, I kept feeling there was a missing transition visually and conceptually. Copernicus’s reenvisioning of the known universe as sun-centered kept coming to mind. I’d played with it subtly in “Mind the Gaps,” which this chapter builds on, and an image from that (my redrawing of the Flammarion woodcut) was used as part of the discussion on education and the metaphor of the Copernican Moment that I contributed to in response to David Scobey’s Imagining America Keynote speech. In that text response, I made mention of the Copernican revolution fueling further scientific and cultural revolutions – and in part this means the Enlightenment. So, i went on a sidetrack of reading: Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers, about Copernicus, Kepler and other early astronomers; EO Wilson’s Consilience, a look at what the Enlightenment got right (and wrong) and how we can unify knowledge; Horkheimer and Adorno’s The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, which looks at what went wrong; Kant’s What is Enlightenment?; the writings of Marquis de Condorcet, prime figure in thinking of the progress of mankind during the Enlightenment; Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (and here, i had an odd experience, i was reading Pirsig on Kant, Phaedrus’s knife of analysis, and stumbled on a paragraph on Copernicus that uncannily resonated with what i had just written on the Copernicus page); and hordes of astronomical history websites to think through the shift from the various models. All of that boils down to these two pages, and i’m on to the next. Also below, a few of the sketches that led to these. Onward to the next pages! Thanks – Nick