"Copernican" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... facts involved, and can be derived only from their study; but the attention of the experimenter is necessarily absorbed by the special work he undertakes. I refer to the three greatest events in science: the discovery of the Copernican system, the three laws of Kepler, and Newton's law of gravitation, none of which is due to direct and special experimentation. Copernicus was an astronomer, but the discovery of his system is due chiefly to his study of the complications of the Ptolemaic ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... nature, higher than some, lower than others, but right, and the only right for him, his true position in the cosmic scheme, his ultimate relation to the Power whence it proceeds. Life, like astronomy, has become Copernican. It has no centre, no significance, or, if any, one beyond our ken. Gravitation drives us, not love. We are attracted and repelled by a force we cannot control, a force that resides in our muscles and our nerves, not in our will and spirit. "Click—click—click—tick—tick—tick," ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... for all that is wrong in the world? I didn't invent Sin and Hate and Slaughter. Who made it my duty anyhow to administer the Universe, and keep the planets to their Copernican courses? My shoulders are bent beneath the weight of the firmament; I grow weary of propping up, like Atlas, this vast ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... for all the facts of a given kind. Theories which have been for a time believed have, as the world progressed in learning, been found unable to account for all of a given class of conditions. They have been replaced, therefore, by other theories, just as the Copernican theory of astronomy has displaced the ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... the Moral Reason which the Poet assigns, but because it would have been highly absurd to have given the Sanction of an Archangel to any particular System of Philosophy. The chief Points in the Ptolemaick and Copernican Hypothesis are described with great Conciseness and Perspicuity, and at the same time dressed in very pleasing and ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Now . . . stands still. This statement of the leading principle of the Copernican system, as a ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... like all movement proceeds by law. When Karl Marx discovered the central law of history he became the real founder of modern sociology. His discovery of this law of history ranks with Newton's discovery of gravity or the Copernican revolution in astronomy. It ranks Marx as one of the men whose genius created a new epoch ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis
... most exact observations that they were able without having succeeded in detecting any such apparent motion among the stars. Here was a mystery which they could not solve. Either the Copernican system was not true, after all, and the earth did not move in an orbit, or the stars were at such immense distances that the whole immeasurable orbit of the earth is a mere point in comparison. Philosophers could not believe ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... tragicomedy, there is to be but one main design, and though there be an under-plot or second walk of comical characters and adventures, yet they are subservient to the chief fable, carried along under it and helping to it, so that the drama may not seem a monster with two heads. Thus the Copernican system of the planets makes the moon to be moved by the motion of the earth, and carried about her orb as a dependent of hers. Mascardi, in his discourse of the "Doppia Favola," or double tale in plays, gives an instance of it in the famous pastoral of Guarini, called Il Pastor ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden |
