Meme from reannon and <user site="livejournal.com" user="scarcr

[weaktwos]

Go find your 42nd entry. It's the theme of your life.

I went to my 42nd entry. It's me being awed by the sacrifices made by rennaissance era scientists. Well, there ya have it. Weaktwos: Genius Fangirl.

"Tycho observed and collected some of the best naked eye data on star and planetary movements in the sky.

Amazing.

Galileo built his own telescope and was able to observe Jupiter and 4 of its moons! Io, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa. Jesus Herbert Christ!

Galileo also observed the Sun through that Telescope. He ruined his eye sight for science.

Relatively speaking, I'm a slacker. All I can do is read of these brilliant men and be an awed, slack-jawed yokel.

Aristotle, the long-considered father of Philosophy turns out to be a moronic twit in the eyes of scientists. I never really liked him either, when I learned of his thoughts in my ancient philosophy classes.

Three cheers for ingenuity, creativity, and exploration."

Comments

[brittadotcom.livejournal.com]

Hmmm...it looks like my 42nd entry happened to be the week before Halloween 2004, so you know what that was all about... ;)

http://brittadotcom.livejournal.com/11421.html

[imlac.livejournal.com]

Aristotle, the long-considered father of Philosophy turns out to be a moronic twit in the eyes of scientists. I never really liked him either, when I learned of his thoughts in my ancient philosophy classes.

Oh, oh, OH, you could not be more wrong. First off, Socrates is generally considered to be the father of Western philosophy, not Aristotle. But more importantly, Aristotle was a man of greater brillance than virtually anyone else in history. His only rival is Isaac Newton.

Aristotle catipulted western civilization forward by centuries. Among other things, he invented the categories that we use to classify the science (physics, biology, chemistry, etc.) and granted these categories have evolved over time, but prior to Aristotle all science was just lumped together in one big mass. Can you imagine how hard it is to make progress in the science if you can't compartamentalize them?

Charles Darwin himself called Aristotle the best naturalist in history. Galileo himself defending his science against the church criticism that Galileo was contradicting Aristotle by saying "If Aristotle were alive today, he would agree with me."

It is a tragedy that Aristotle's science was translated into dogma by the medieval Church, which did indeed impeed scientific progress for centuries. But you can't blame Aristotle for what other pepole did with his writings, any more than you can blame Christ for the inquisition.

[big-ragu.livejournal.com]

pick up "standing on the shoulders of giants" by stephen hawking, its amazing.

[imlac.livejournal.com]

Or "Science: A History 1543-200" by John Gribbon.

[weaktwos.livejournal.com]

Oooh! another recommendation. Thanks!

[weaktwos.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the recommendation. :-)

[big-ragu.livejournal.com]

borders had the illustrated hardcover in the bargain section, it was under 10 bucks