Post #5: The Backbone of Night
While watching episode 7, of Carl Sagan’s The Cosmos, Carl Sagan explains the early ideas of astronomy that came from ancient philosophers. He digs into their theories that shaped what we know today about space, and also talks about how the views were discarded and looked down upon in their time. An example is that the prevailing belief in ancient Greece was that the moon and the sun were gods. Anaxagoras, a Greek contemporary, believed that the moon was a place made out of ordinary matter and the sun was a a red hot star far away in the sky. Although his beliefs align more with what we know now, Anaxagoras was condemned, convicted, and imprisoned for questioning the beliefs of his time.
Out of this World 