Two thousand years ago the night sky looked completely different, and so when you get right down to it, the Greek conceptions of star signs as related to birth dates are grossly inaccurate for today's day and age. It's called the Line of Procession: back then the sun didn't set in Taurus, but in Gemini. A September 24 birthday didn't mean you were a Libra, but a Virgo. And there was a thirteenth zodiac constellation, Ophiuchus the Serpent Bearer, which rose between Sagittarius and Scorpio for only four days.
The reason it's all off kilter? The earth's axis wobbles. Life isn't nearly as stable as we want it to be.
Stichwörter: astronomy constellations
Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg, including Hitler's former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression against Czechoslovakia and committing atrocities against the Jewish people. On the same day, the State of Israel celebrated its first Passover seder and the United Nations, still meeting in those days at Flushing Meadow in Queens, voted to consider the Jewish state's application for membership. In Damascus, eleven newspapers were closed by the regime of General Hosni Zayim. In America, the National Committee on Alcoholism announced an upcoming 'A-Day' under the non-uplifting slogan: 'You can drink—help the alcoholic who can't.' ('Can't'?) The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled in favor of Britain in the Corfu Channel dispute with Albania. At the UN, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko denounced the newly formed NATO alliance as a tool for aggression against the USSR. The rising Chinese Communists, under a man then known to Western readership as Mao Tze-Tung, announced a limited willingness to bargain with the still-existing Chinese government in a city then known to the outside world as 'Peiping.'
All this was unknown to me as I nuzzled my mother's breast for the first time, and would certainly have happened in just the same way if I had not been born at all, or even conceived. One of the newspaper astrologists for that day addressed those whose birthday it was:
There are powerful rays from the planet Mars, the war god, in your horoscope for your coming year, and this always means a chance to battle if you want to take it up. Try to avoid such disturbances where women relatives or friends are concerned, because the outlook for victory upon your part in such circumstances is rather dark. If you must fight, pick a man!
Sage counsel no doubt, which I wish I had imbibed with that same maternal lactation, but impartially offered also to the many people born on that day who were also destined to die on it. Christopher Hitchens
Stichwörter: history war united-states censorship antisemitism alcohol diplomacy china gods birth astronomy communism newspapers jews nazis hitler ussr prohibition israel birthdays britain alcoholism astrology vatican mao united-nations corfu mars damascus albania andrei-gromyko beijing breastfeeding communist-party-of-china corfu-channel-incident czechoslovakia ernst-von-weizsacker flushing-meadows flushing-queens horoscopes hosni-zayim international-court-of-justice nato nuremberg passover-seder the-hague
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl SaganStichwörter: science inspirational astronomy space-travel
Mathemata mathematicis scribuntur.
Nicolaus CopernicusStichwörter: latin astronomy mathematics nicolaus-copernicus
...Bana öyle geliyor ki, Pythagorasçılar bazılarının düşündüğü gibi, öğretilerini paylaşmaktan duydukları kıskançlıktan değil de, büyük insanlara ait böylesine güzel ve binbir zorlukla dolu keşif, maddî bir kazancı olmaksızın kalem oynatmayı sıkıcı bulan ya da başkalarının yüreklendirip örnek olmasıyla hür felsefe çalışmasına özendirilse de aklî donukluklarından ötürü filozoflar arasında tıpkı bal arılarının arasındaki erkek arılar gibi duran kişilerce hor görülmesin diye böyle yapıyordu.
Nicolaus CopernicusStichwörter: astronomy nicolaus-copernicus c-cengiz-çevik
I esteem myself happy to have as great an ally as you in my search for truth. I will read your work ... all the more willingly because I have for many years been a partisan of the Copernican view because it reveals to me the causes of many natural phenomena that are entirely incomprehensible in the light of the generally accepted hypothesis. To refute the latter I have collected many proofs, but I do not publish them, because I am deterred by the fate of our teacher Copernicus who, although he had won immortal fame with a few, was ridiculed and condemned by countless people (for very great is the number of the stupid).
{Letter to fellow revolutionary astronomer Johannes Kepelr}
Stichwörter: science truth science-vs-religion astronomy ridicule copernicus nicolaus-copernicus johannes-kepler kepler
Your Excellency, I have no need of this hypothesis.
Pierre-Simon LaplaceStichwörter: humor science god atheist astronomy mathematics napoleon
Interviewer: Didn't Sagan want to believe?
Druyan: he didn't want to believe. he wanted to know.
Stichwörter: science truth knowledge belief atheism astronomy agnosticism carl-sagan sagan
There's no obvious reason to assume that the very same rare properties that allow for our existence would also provide the best overall setting to make discoveries about the world around us. We don't think this is merely coincidental. It cries out for another explanation, an explanation that... points to purpose and intelligent design in the cosmos.
Guillermo GonzálezStichwörter: science biology cosmology physics astronomy intelligent-design id
We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes. The perfection that the human mind has been able to give to astronomy affords but a feeble outline of such an intelligence.
Pierre-Simon LaplaceStichwörter: science intelligence certainty past present determinism free-will nature time mind universe naturalism space physics comprehension eyes perfection astronomy omniscience data human-mind motion analysis formula lack-of-free-will
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