Quote of the Week
(March 9, 2026)

Another classic example of our “lying” senses has to do with an appearance we witness every day: it looks, we are told, as if the sun goes around the earth, not as if the earth is rotating as it goes around the sun. In his play, Jumpers, Tom Stoppard skewered this particular claim by having one of his characters ask: "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth was rotating?"

Surely it should look exactly as it does look; any other appearance would have been false to the fact of rotation. It’s just that we have to employ our thinking in order to make sense of any appearance. Once we grasp this truth, we cannot help realizing how wrong it is to declare the appearances from earth to be false. We are free to take up any vantage point we choose. Copernicus chose to look, in imagination, from the vantage point of the sun. This was a decisively important step. But surely we have no more right to absolutize that perspective than we do the one from earth. The heliocentric view is as "parochial" as the geocentric view compared, say, to a galactocentric view, where observations over time would make it clear that both the earth and the sun engage in a complex dance around an ever-changing point that is neither at the center of the earth nor the center of the sun — a dance that is influenced by all the other planets.

(from Chapter 13, “All Science Must Be Rooted in Experience”, in Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)

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