Stoning False Prophets

I've been traveling for work lately, and was lucky enough to spend some time in Europe, which is why things have been so dead around here for the past few weeks. While there I went to a museum that contained a piece that represented the solar system in both the Copernican (heliocentric) and Ptolemaic (geocentric) forms. As I was about to move on, a tour group swarmed around and the tour guide began to tell about the piece. In discussing the Ptolemaic portion of it, she briefly gave some background about how medieval beliefs were backward, including the belief that the Earth was flat. Then she spoke of how people had believed that the solar system revolved around Earth, but that Copernicus had come along and said that that was ridiculous.

Although her tour group probably wouldn't care, I felt that the guide did them a disservice by giving such a cartoonish picture of science history. For starters, the notion that medieval people thought that Earth was flat is a myth. It's one of those things that everybody knows, but that isn't true. Beyond that is the implied notion that geocentrism was self-evident nonsense. It is easy for us to look back at beliefs that we now know to be wrong and sniff at what imbeciles people who held those beliefs were. But aside from being uncharitable, this tendency reinforces (and perhaps derives from) a cartoonish version of how science works and progresses--that it's a simple matter of smarter people coming on the scene.

In truth, the path of scientific knowledge and understanding is often crooked, with many false turns and dead ends. Science is a matter of evidence, and it turns out that geocentrism had a lot going for it, in spite of Copernicus. (Thanks to Mormon Metaphysics, for bringing the linked post to my attention.) Heliocentrism was the new kid on the block, and it would take time before it would prove its worth. That it ultimately succeeded does not nullify its need to do so in the first place, and the same holds for any successful theory that was initially resisted (e.g. plate tectonics)--something that is often missed by cranks pushing self-proclaimed revolutionary ideas.

It seems to be human nature to want to stone false prophets. We see it in politics constantly. In science there is no dishonor in being wrong (or at least there shouldn't be), as long as the mistake is one of pure intention in the quest of discovery. Being wrong is often a step toward being right.

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