Search for Copernicus Over 188
blamanj writes "Nikolaus Kopernik, aka Copernicus, father of modern heliocentric theory, was buried in Frombork Cathedral (Poland) after he died in 1543. However, the cathedral's tombs were a mess, and it was unclear exactly where he was. Archaeologists now believe they've found his remains, and are planning to do DNA testing to verify. The search began in 2004."
DNA Testing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Alright, so, they track down known relatives... problem is, 500 years? Thats what... 25 generations?
"Yes, this man is Copernicus's Great-great-great-....-great-grandson. We can see they both have green eyes. This woman is his great-great-...-great-granddaughter, twice removed. We can see by this DNA that they're both left handed. So, of course, these must be is bones!"
Not to mention he didn't have any kids of his own. Which just quarters the probabiliy of similarities.
Or did I miss something? Anyone know how accurate this will actually be?
Re:Why should we care? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:check out that portrait (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why should we care? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:check out that portrait (Score:5, Insightful)
You should not apply current views of knowledge to earlier times when the entire paradigm wa different. Nowadays we prize independent and inovative thinking - as the Greeks did around 500 BC. During the Middle Ages and up to the Renaissance, however, this was not the case. All human knowledge was believed to have already been revealed, either in the Bible or the 'wisdom of ancients', and the job of an intellectual was to extract this knowledge.
So prior authority was not only important - it was critical. You HAD to cite such authority for your ideas, otherwise they could not be accepted. Producing your own ideas with no authoritative backing was seen as a sin similar to fabricating your base data nowadays. Intellectual giants like Roger Bacon fought against this approach in favour of the experimental method, but it was not really overcome until the 1700s. This is why all writings of this period cite earlier authority.
School histories of Galileo and others are always done in complete ignorance of the mediaeval mindset, and end up portraying all his opponents as a set of unthinking morons - they were most decidedly not. However, I suppose simple ideas make better television!
Re:A Cynical Response... (Score:1, Insightful)
Plus ca change (Score:3, Insightful)
In the Middle Ages they messed up old bones in old cathedrals in order to put somewhere on the map and provide an attraction for thousands of credulous vistors from all over the world.
Let the old guy rest in peace. Why should he want a thousand cheap busts and other trinkets knocked out in his name in the local tourist shops? Modern scientists: the religious relic traders of yesterday had nothing on them.
James Cromwell in Copernicus - The Movie (Score:3, Insightful)
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/40982000/jp
Separated at birth? You decide....
In any case it is interesting that Copernicus or Kopernik continued his studies of astronomy as a hobby and not as a profession.
Good Copernicus quotes:
For I am not so enamoured of my own opinions that I disregard what others may think of them.
I shall now recall to mind that the motion of the heavenly bodies is circular, since the motion appropriate to a sphere is rotation in a circle.
Moreover, since the sun remains stationary, whatever appears as a motion of the sun is really due rather to the motion of the earth.
The earth also is spherical, since it presses upon its center from every direction.
The massive bulk of the earth does indeed shrink to insignificance in comparison with the size of the heavens.
We regard it as a certainty that the earth, enclosed between poles, is bounded by a spherical surface.
and finally....
To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.
BRILLIANT!
Re:Why should we care? (Score:3, Insightful)
A good thing (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:check out that portrait (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:check out that portrait (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:check out that portrait (Score:1, Insightful)
Check the links provided in response to the other comment to the parent. There are non-catholic sources that support the parent's posters posistion. Based only on your comments, I think you have some very uniformed opinions about the way the Catholic Church operates. They do not rewrite their history, any documentation that was ever produced by the Church is painstakingly archived and kept for posterity.
Barring destructive events like fires, floods, and warfare; any documents that were made during Galileo's persecution still exist. Also, the Church would allow any qualified historian (qualified in the sense handling ancient documents correctly) to examine them. Now, if someone off the street asked to see them, they probably wouldn't be able to. However, that is not do to some sort of cover-up, just concern about untrained people unitentionally damaging irreplacable documents.
All that said, obviously the Church can and does reinterprets historical events. This is not neccessarily a bad thing though. Witness the apologies given by the late Pope John Paul the II for both the Inquisition and for not taking a more active role in defying the geocidal policies of Nazi Germany in the 30's and 40's. However, whether done for good or ill, reinterperting history is not the samething as rewriting it.
However, let's remember that even intelligent and great men can make mistakes. And often great men have great egos to go along with their greatness. While ultimately what Galileo went through is unjustifed, certianly by the standards of our time, it is possible that he poured oil on troubled waters and set them ablaze. I'm not saying he deserved what he got, just they he probably didn't help himself by being as belligerent in his claims as he was.
Re:check out that portrait (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, burnig Giordano Bruno alive on the Flower Market in Rome on February 17 1600 was quite a signal just shut up when the inquisition want to chat with you. Of course, Galileo Galilei just shut up because he preferred to live. In secret he still continued his work under the surveilance of the Inquisition. Next statement will be that no-one was killed or tortured by the Inquisition. The Catholic (and the growing Protestantic movement too) was terrorizing people like the Gestapo or KGB in modern times.
So stating that the Church supported science is just a lie, without any substance! Just look at the list of Index librorum prohibitorum latest and last revision.
What I see now is a religious movement similar to the Stalinistic period falsifiyng or denying facts that do not fit the dominating powers.
"Galileo was one of a few isolated incidents"
C'mon you must be kidding! It's like saying that the Gestapo or KGB did not murdered millions of people because there's so few evidence of it!
Magellan has showed that the world is a globe in 1519 by taking a trip around the word so the Church kept a bit lesser agressive attitude. But calling it science-friendly is just falsifying the truth.
"Lissl claims that "Copernicus' De Revolutionibus Orbium had been in print for nearly seventy years before the Church placed any restrictions on its teachings" and notes "how easy it had been for Galileo to obtain the Church's permission"
Well Magellan has proved that the Earth is a globe in 1951 so it made a slightly difficult to withhold that the Earth is flat.
And I actually red the transcriptions of Galilei's private letters and it was not easy at all to get published even if he made some efforts so avoid the Inquisition's radar. Lissl just denies the actual documents from that era like some others denying the holocaust.
"This point is most interesting here and now because of the whole controversy between evolutionists and creationists. All the evolutionists I know (well, except maybe one) think that a religious person must automatically oppose scientific study,"
Well, I worked very close to a Catholic geophysician, and we talked a lot privately too. He used the Bible as a human filter of God's words, literally and not word-by-word. He was very clever, and a very nice person. But with this abstraction of the Bible he had no problem to accept any scientific observations, and I'm rather sure that many religious scientists works the same way.
Just as creationists (theists) are not the same kind neither are evolutionists (mostly but not all ateists). The problem is that the religious fanatics are growing in numbers and getting louder and stating the Bible has to be red word-by-word which is absurd.
"American funding mechanisms in the scientific establishment are very much like the Catholic church all those years ago. "
Well, I'm rather confident that if the Soviet did not sent rockets into space starting back in the 50's, space travells (by man or with robots) would be prohibited just like research on "ethical grounds" like in some biological fields (stem-cell research). http://www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/07/31/cloning. bush/ [cnn.com]
YES, I suppose, you will reply that it's on ethical not scientific grounds, but it's just BS: there are a lot of experiments done in blind or double blind tests were people suffer and probably dies for the results.
Actually, I'm European, but I visited the USA several times and talked to yankee scientists and found that there's just as much pressure to avoid "delicate" areas as in the Soviet were about human rights. I have'nt been in the Soviet but met several Soviet researchers too.
As a rather famous European immigrant scientist lived in the USA sade to me "say that you're Jewish, or Mu