copernican revolutions

Every day, we must experience a Copernican Revolution. As I see Greta and now Clara coming to world-expanding revelations each day, I'm putting my finger more and more on how important it is.

How long did we stare at the sky before realizing that the stars don't just move as a field across the sky the way the sun does? How long before we realized that there were wanderers — planets, in Greek — among them? And then, one day (what would you give to be there) some person looking up at stars and looking down at numbers and charts finally comes to an inescapable conclusion: we are on a planet. Earth is a planet.

We learn it in school as a drill; but that's not how it arrived. That fact arrived as a vision-changer. You look and look at the cartoon of an old clown and suddenly, click!, your brain resolves the picture and you see a Victorian child. Can you possibly imagine that the first person to make that switch, to realize that we are standing on one of the wanderers we see, that de-centrifugalizing moment — can you imagine that that person didn't lose his balance a bit?

We refer to the moment we realized we're not at the center of this stately swirl as the Copernican Revolution, but Copernicus only re-discovered what the Greeks knew, and possibly the Persians before them. It probably goes back to Göbekli Tepe, or before.

Yet we needed it again: we needed Copernicus, because that knowledge got put on a shelf, destroyed in war or by religious fervor or political convenience or ignorance. We, who perpetually destroy our Alexandrias, need him still.

Yesterday, I was holding Clara in front of the mirror, and she was delighting as she always does at seeing me in the mirror and in person, looking back and forth and back with growing glee: all these Daddys, magically multiplying! Then it happened: she looked at herself, just as I was toodling her nose with my finger. And I think — I think — she got it. That person in the mirror is me. When I wave my hand, so does my ... what? What's the word for reflection?

We still need Copernicus today, and we'll need him tomorrow, to tell us once again that we aren't the center of the universe, to teach us to see ourselves as planets, wanderers, rocks, dots. We're sometimes orbited, but we are orbiters always; we see others so easily as peripheral, but we need constant reminding that we are too.

Sometimes we don't like the news any more than Copernicus's bigwig detractors, those irreligious religious leaders who couldn't imagine that the God who pitched Christ to Bethlehem would ever situate Man in this Bethlehem of galaxies. Their voices, relegated to the dustbin in history, still speak in our hearts, though, until we decide, anew, every day, to listen to what the mirror in front of our face is telling us.