Pale Blue Dot Revisited

Earth is barely visible as
a pale blue dot in the  red
band on the right.

I love Carl Sagan. He was as much a poet as he was an astronomer.  Back in 1994, he published a book  entitled, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. These are the opening words to his book:

The spacecraft was a long way from home, beyond the orbit of the outermost planet and high above the ecliptic plane - which is an imaginary flat surface that we can think of as something like a racetrack in which the orbits of the planets are mainly confined. The ship was speeding away from the sun at 40,000 miles per hour. But in early February 1990, it was overtaken by an urgent message from Earth. 

Obediently, it turned its cameras back toward the now-distant planets. Slewing its scan platform from one spot in the sky to another, it snapped 60 pictures and stored them in digital form on its tape recorder.  Then slowly, in March, April, and May,  it radioed the data back to earth. Each image was composed of 640,000 individual picture elements ("pixels"), like the dots in a newspaper wirephoto or a pointillist painting.  The spacecraft was 3.7 billion miles away from Earth, so far away that it took each pixel 5 1/2 hours, traveling at the speed of light, to reach us. 

What the pictures showed was the Earth - just a pale blue dot in the black of the universe.  Sagan's words have become the inspiration for many, including artists and filmmakers.  I highlighted one such artist/filmmaker in an early post on the Symphony of Science. Recently, I came across another video on Vimeo by Michael Marantz using Sagan's words. Sagan himself provides the narration. Marantz shot the time-lapse images and composed and performed the music. I thought it might be worth sharing here. In these troubled and troubling times, a little perspective is useful.  Hope you enjoy.


EARTH: The Pale Blue Dot from Michael Marantz on Vimeo.

Kudos to one of my favorite sites, Open Culture, for suggesting the idea for this blog.

The Inexorable March Towards the Virtual

Second Life, The Sims, video games: the virtual world seems to be taking an ever-stronger hold in the high-tech world we live in.  Some people seem to feel even more comfortable in the virtual world, where they can craft new and different identities through their self-invented avatars.  But it's not hard to hear the murmured fears about how much time some people spend in these Neverlands rather than being grounded in reality.  The people that inhabit these binary universes are thought to be somehow just a bit whacky.

But these fears of the virtual are not new.  The move from the physical world to a more virtual world has been going on for a very long time.  I was reminded of this as I was reading T.J. Stiles National Book Award-winning biography, The First Tycoon, The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.  In the first decades of the 19th century, the economy consisted of individual proprietors and limited partnerships.  As the first corporations began to be chartered to build canals and railroads, the concept of what constituted a business began to become untethered from the hard and comforting reality of the physical world.  The structure of the corporation not only created a new entity that had a legal life of its own (including legal immortality), the stock issued by the corporation began to move away from an accounting-based recognition of the value of the corporation's real property.  Stocks began to be issued for financial reasons and were now free to seek their value in the open market.  This uncoupling of what used to be considered "real" for something more intangible created great angst in the general public.  Shares that were issued for financial reasons were considered to be "watered stock", an expression that derives from the trick of old drovers who would would let their cattle over-drink just before being weighed to determine their market value.  What did stock represent if not the total capital assets of the corporation?  If it couldn't be taken apart and sold, many felt it wasn't real.  Things like an existing customer base, brand recognition, or know-how were considered to be intangibles and hence of no monetary value.  People like Cornelius Vanderbilt helped to move the country forward into a new era, a more virtual era, through his creation of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad.

The march to the virtual continued during the Civil War when the lack of enough gold in the U.S. Treasury made it impossible to procure all that was needed to fight the war.  The Greenback was issued as legal currency and it set off a wave of negative reaction that went on for decades.  Why should a piece of printed paper be worth something?  It wasn't either gold or silver.  It was just... paper.  We moved another step towards a more virtual world.

When Samuel Morse invented the telegraph, communication took a giant step towards the virtual.  No longer would long-distance communication require either people or a written document moving from place to place to carry information.  Information could now move instantaneously, unfettered by the limitations imposed by geography.  The same sense of uncoupling followed the introduction of the telephone and the phonograph.  Edison was known as The Wizard of Menlo Park, not because of his lightbulb, but because his phonograph took the physical world of sound and somehow encapsulated it so that it could be reproduced at will.

So many of our technologies have a component of abstraction to them; photography, motion pictures, radio, and television all uncoupled the real from the virtual.  With the blooming of the Information Age, we have moved to virtual money through ATMs, cash cards, and PayPal.  We make friends through social networks such as Facebook and MySpace.  We chat through text messaging, tweets, instant messaging, and video calls.  We shop on the internet without giving it a second thought.  We fight our wars using pilots who fly Predator aircraft through virtual links halfway around the planet.  The boundaries blur rapidly.

As surely as there is an Arrow of Time that moves in only one direction, there is also an Arrow of the Virtual which moves ever more away from what we like to call the Real World.  The rate of change often exceeds our capacity to cope.  We feel disoriented and apprehensive as we are pried loose from the old objects of our security.  But what was uncomfortable to one generation is taken for granted in the next.  Our world of 2010 is only a way station on the journey to something that will seem even more disconnected from what we think of as real.  Maybe the comfort in all of this is to realize that it is not only natural, it is inevitable.  People will feel just as comfortable (and uncomfortable) with the world of 2110 as people felt in 1910.   Maybe the secret is to relax and try to enjoy it.

David McCullough: Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are

I first came to know the work of historian, David McCullogh, not through his writing, but through his narration of Ken Burns' PBS production, The Civil War.  McCullough's voice was melodious and had the sort of character that made him instantly believable.  Since that time, I have read many of his fine works of history including John Adams and 1776.  He is a gifted writer who makes history come alive.  He has even written on the history of technology with The Great Bridge, on the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, and The Path Between the Seas, the story of the Panama Canal.

In 2005, McCullough gave a speech entitled, Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are, for a conference sponsored by Hillsdale College.  I came across the speech in my files recently and I noted that the college gave permission to reprint it as long as it was accompanied by the following credit:

Reprinted by permission from IMPRIMIS, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College,www.hillsdale.edu.


I think the speech is terrific and I am going to copy it in full below.  I don't usually send out long blog posts but this will have to be an exception. If you don't want to read the whole thing on line, you might print this one out. It runs about six pages, but once you start reading, I think you will finish it.  I am in awe of his skills as a writer.

Then and Now

We love the new.  New has become a synonym for Improved.  New is novel, something we haven't experienced before.  New is progress.  New is fun.

But, as the old adage says, "There is nothing new under the sun."  You would think that technology would be the exception.  In the details this is, in fact, true.  We have only just begun to explore nano, bio, and eco technologies.  What we take to be new technology systems, however, are not so new. Here are a couple of examples in what I might call the Then and Now category.

Light-rail transportation (the Now) is being brought to cities that for years have had no public transportation except buses.  But light-rail is not a new concept.  You might think the Then parallel to light-rail is the streetcar but the better comparison is the interurban rail network that connected towns and cities in much more of a commuter-like pattern.  Interurbans were the marriage of the electric motors of the streetcars with the heavy coaches of the passenger train.  The interurbans exploded onto the transportation scene (particularly in the midwest) in the first fifteen years of the twentieth century.  From virtually no trackage at the turn of the century, by 1916 interurbans accounted for over 15,000 miles of track in the United States.  The reason for their emergence was the need for more cost-effective and frequent connections between small towns and cities that the railroads might not have served or served infrequently.  Another major factor was that while the automobile was becoming more common in cities, the roads between cities were poor at best and a more reliable transportation system was needed.

But most of the interurbans, while technically successful, were poor businesses from the start.  They were under-capitalized, expensive to maintain, and always starved for enough revenue-paying business to support themselves as private enterprises.  By 1930 and the Great Depression, most of the interurban companies had gone into bankruptcy.  The emergence of light-rail in the last two decades is largely predicated on a new business model:  public ownership.  The common gripes about light-rail is that they must be supported by taxpayers who don't use the system and that they only serve a small geography.  Those arguments are true for the first line that is built.  But like all networks, the power of the network goes up as a power function of the number of nodes in the network.  More lines bring even more power to the entire network.  Eventually, as can be seen in the robust networks in some of our larger cities, people choose to take the public transportation system even if they own a car.

So, light-rail is the reincarnation of an older concept of interurban rail networks.  The second New but Not-So-New concept is the mega on-line retailer.  Think Amazon.  Amazon revolutionized the book trade and has been moving into adjacent markets in other consumer product lines.  Their business model recognized the power of two things: the internet and package delivery services.  By selling to such a wide market, they can increase their volume and hence offer lower prices.  Neat but not new.

In the 1870's Aaron Montgomery Ward began his catalog retailing business in Chicago.  It was based on the concept of customers in the rural country-side ordering their products directly from his catalog and having them delivered by the post office.  He was one of the first to innovate the idea of a money-back guarantee return policy.  If you didn't like it, send it back.  No questions asked.  Ward's concept was quickly copied by Sears and for the better part of a century, these two catalog retailers were among the largest in the country.  They were Amazon pre-internet.  It is interesting to speculate how they might have survived had not the automobile created the shopping mall in the years before the internet.  If the internet had been born earlier, perhaps the catalog retailers would simply have morphed onto the internet and still be dominant.

My point is only that while a specific technology might be new, a technology concept can be reused multiple times.  Then and Now.  The new New.  There is nothing new under the sun.

Why Care about the History of Innovation and Enterprise?

There is nothing inherently beautiful about an old, rusty gear. The beauty I see is in the solid order of the object; finely made, well-designed for its purpose. A new gear has some of these properties, but it has no long history. It does not represent what once was and what might have been. It holds no mystery about people now gone. Its history is still being written. Old objects, however, have tales to tell. These stories may be real or they may be a fiction of my own imagination. But the stories make these pieces of scrap come to life. They are more interesting just because they are but a remnant of what once was. I cannot look at these things without thinking that the people who created them are now gone. But they had lives, and dreams, and hopes that were moving them towards some promise in their own future. That future is now past and this is what is left to remind us of their lives.

I like stories. Most of the stories I am interested in are about passionate people that tried to do some pretty amazing things. We still have the evidence of many of those efforts. Whether it is a great canal, or the successor machines of the automobile pioneers, or even the clothes that we wear. All of these things came from people with big dreams. Many of the early folks had no formal training in either technology or business. It didn’t matter. They could see something that others couldn’t see and went after that vision despite criticism, or the opposite, total indifference. They persevered. Some of them even succeeded. It didn’t have to turn out the way it did. Some of the successes could have easily been failures. We might never have heard of the Wright Brothers or Eli Whitney or Henry Ford. Others could just as easily occupied their niches in history. But they didn’t and in that is the story.

The history of technology and enterprise continues to be written every day in the business and tech news of the day. We are often so close to it we cannot see the old patterns that continue to be played out; the scrounging for capital, the defense of a patent, the creation of a market demand. Every historic technology faced the same general problems as those innovations and enterprises being created today. Of course, some things have changed (the speed of information flow, the scale of markets, the political environment). But the winners and losers today could learn a great deal from those who have gone before them.

Every now and then I have to remind myself of these things. I hope the reminder is helpful to you as well.

[The image is from Flickr by nohjan of and gear on a lock of the Erie Canal. Used under Creative Commons license]

The Idea For the Steamboat

John Fitch is not a name that immediately springs to mind if asked to name a great American Inventor. In fact, he could reasonably claim to have invented the steamboat decades ahead of Robert Fulton. If you visit the U.S. Capitol you will find a painting of John Fitch decorating one of the arches of that building. In fairness, Fulton never claimed to have invented the steamboat. But he and his partner, Robert Livingston, made it the first economically successful steamboat company by operating the North River steamboat (later called the Claremont) on the Hudson River between New York and Albany.

John Fitch was the complete opposite of Fulton in almost every way. Fulton was a learned man, a successful artist turned entrepreneur. Fitch was poorly educated, a sometime-clockmaker, button maker, and surveyor. But they shared a vision of how a successful steamboat could forever change commerce by allowing water navigation that was freed from the constraints of either currents or winds.

I am interested in Fitch because I am interested in how inventors and innovators think. How do they come up with their ideas? Is there anything in common between these influential creators that we can apply to today’s problems? Are these people somehow gifted with insights beyond the abilities of the rest of us? If we understood how the “Aha’s!” occurred, maybe we could learn how to be more creative or maybe even teach creativity.

John Fitch was born in 1743 and grew up in Connecticut, the fifth child of six in a poor, religiously-strict family. He went to school until he was ten after which his father pulled him out to work on his farm. He was a very bright child and devoured whatever books he could get his hands on. He taught himself advanced math and geography from books he read outside of school. Fitch was apprenticed at a young age to learn clock-making and he fulfilled his apprenticeship despite the fact that the clock maker only used John to work his farm fields and never taught him any of the skills of the clock-making trade. Fitch taught himself about clocks later by taking clocks apart to clean and repair them. He was taught a little about brass founding which he later used in a small successful business making and peddling buttons.

Fitch comes across in the histories as a cantankerous man who bickered his way through life. He was married just a year when he left his wife and newborn child because he couldn’t get along with his spouse. During the Revolutionary War, he tried to serve in various New Jersey militia units and was voted out of various officer positions by other people who took a dislike to him. He turned to surveying the lands west of the Appalachians after the war and was captured by Indians who sold Fitch and his companions as hostages to the British in Detroit. Along the way during the long enforced march to Detroit, he fought he fought with his fellow captives and later on with his captors. Eventually, he was released back in New York and returned to Pennsylvania where he had lived before his western adventures began.

None of this would suggest what came next. According to his own autobiography, Fitch and a friend were walking home after church one Sunday in the spring of 1785. Fitch was on foot because he had rented out his horse to help pay for the feed to keep the animal. Fitch was now in his forties and getting arthritic. His knee was hurting and they stopped for a moment to let him rest when a horse-drawn carriage whisked past them. According to Fitch, not having his horse he was suddenly struck with the idea of creating a horseless carriage. Not only that, and this is the part that I find hard to believe, he thought the power for this machine should come from steam. Why does this amaze me? Fitch had never even heard of a steam engine, let alone seen one. When he later described his idea to the minister, Fitch was chagrinned (his words) to have the minister show him a picture of a Newcomen steam engine in a book. At the time, there were only three steam engines in the whole of the United States and all of these engines were the large, stationary engines that were used to pump water.

Fitch went furiously about trying to work out the details of his horseless carriage idea for a few weeks. The details of what he came up with are missing but he apparently quickly came to the realization that the horseless carriage had bigger problems in terms of poor roads and other impediments to its success. Fitch did have direct experience with taking rafting boats down the Ohio River. These boats only made a one-way journey as it was just too difficult to row them back up the river against the current. They were broken up for timbers when they reached their destination. Fitch knew that a boat that could travel up-river easily would be of tremendous commercial value. Fitch also realized that it was not enough to come up with the idea. He had to have a way to protect it. He sought patent protection for the idea from state legislatures before there was a national patent law. He was locked in a furious battle with another independent inventor, James Rumsey, who also claimed to have invented the steamboat. For a fascinating account of all of this I would suggest you read Andrea Suttcliffe’s excellent book entitled Steam.


So how did it turn out? Badly. Fitch went on to actually create a working steamboat that operated for a year out of Philadelphia on the Delaware River but it was a financial loser and Fitch eventually gave up. He moved to Kentucky, turned to alcohol, and, legend has it, killed himself in despair in 1798. Not a happy ending to our story. Rumsey, by the way, also came to naught, dying in England of a stroke after an attempt to build a steamboat there.

So what to make of this story about Fitch? I find it amazing that Fitch could have conceived of a steam-powered horseless carriage when he had never in his life to that point seen or heard of a steam engine. That would be the equivalent of me thinking of using, I don’t know, an ion transmission de-rectifier (ficitious...I think?) to produce ethanol when I had never seen or heard of one. I think the story that Fitch told is an apocryphal one that he later invented for his own glory. Somewhere along the line, Fitch knew something about steam and harnessing it for power. He had heard of the concept or seen the power of steam in some other context. His trade work might have given him the insight. He was a brass founder and the melting and cooling of metal certainly involved water and quenching which produces steam. Being skeptical of his self-reported flash of insight may not be fair. He might truly have had just such a vision in which case, Fitch really was a genius. Fitch spent the rest of his life trying to realize his idea and he almost made it. The Delaware River was much slower flowing than the Hudson and there were decent enough roads by the river so that travelers had a viable alternative to his relatively slow steamboat.

Back to my original questions. Can we learn anything about creativity from Fitch? First, he was very bright and inquisitive. He described himself as a child as “crazy about learning”. He was tenacious. He was constantly looking for some way to make a buck. He could visualize a different future and he could also foresee the need for protection for his ideas. And his flash of insight first came as an answer to his own personal need. Fitch was too early. The technology wasn’t there yet, the patent laws weren’t yet in place. If Fitch had been born twenty years later, school children for generations might have learned that John Fitch, not Robert Fulton, invented the steamboat. So the last lesson is that ideas have their time and place. But hats off to John Fitch, American Inventor.

Quotation for the Day

Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.

Howard Aiken, U.S. Computer Scientist (1900 -1973)

[As quoted from The Quotations Page]

Technology: I Know It When I See It

Technology. We live with it every day. It creates our life experiences as much as we create technology. We can't pick up a publication without reading about what is hot in "tech" (the shortened version of hi-tech which is itself the shortened version of high technology). Our current list of what wears the "tech" accolade consists of biotech, nanotech, infotech, and other esoteric topics. Carl Sagan once remarked,

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology,in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

I am trying to do my little bit to remedy that. I have started planning a short course on the history of technology. It seems that a practical place to start such a history is to define the word "technology". The word is used so frequently and so casually that surely a good definition would be easy to find. Not so. The word has its roots in the Greek words "techne" and "logos". For the Greeks, techne related to the arts and crafts and contrasted with "episteme" which usually referred to the sciences. More specifically, techne referred to the skills that were needed to make or build something. The term "logos" meant "word" and has been broadened to mean "knowledge". So, techne+logos has been interpreted to mean the knowledge of skill and crafts.

It's not clear who first used the word "technology" in its modern form. One candidate whom has been suggested is Jacob Bigelow, a professor at Harvard who wrote a book in 1829 entitled The Elements of Technology. This book was intended to be a catalog of technologies from ancient to modern. Bigelow was the first to hold the Rumford Chair at Harvard, a chair endowed by Count Rumford (Sir Benjamin Thompson) who had been born in Massachusetts in 1753 and who died in Paris in 1814. Thompson, a loyalist, fled the colonies for England during the American Revolution. He was named Count Rumford in 1792 while working for the Bavarian Government (the name he took, Rumford, was the early name of Concord, New Hampshire where he taught school). But Rumford would have been very much in tune with Bigelow's book.

Bigelow wrote extensively in the introduction of his book about the "arts and sciences" (the same as the Greek techne and epsiteme). This is an older pairing than our more current "science and technology". In Bigelow's world, the arts included all of the practical arts embodied in the Greek word "techne". Technology was part of the arts and separate from the sciences, which focused more on discovery than on crafts. As technology has become evermore based on science, we have coined the phrase "applied sciences" to represent the intersection between pure science and the more pragmatic technologies. The boundaries between these domains get ever blurrier and we probably will never have something that is pure technology.

But I still am looking for a good definition of technology. Perhaps a good working definition is:

The systematic knowledge and the methods and procedures which can be used in a specific area in order to resolve practical problems.(ref)

What makes up what we call technology changes with every generation and often much more often than that. A century ago it was airplanes, automobiles, electric power distribution, motion pictures, and a host of other things that have since receded into the background fabric of our lives.


The late Douglas Adams who wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy gave a great tongue-in-cheek description of the evolving stages of technology in a 1999 essay on the internet:

1) Everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) Anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) Anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

I love this description because it not only helps to define the "newness" angle on technology but also our ambivalence about the new dimensions of tech that threaten our status quo. The New New Thing is still trying to solve some practical problem in our lives. It seems to often happen that the original target for the technology proves to be unworkable but technology is amazingly resilient and seeks an application as surely as water seeking its own level. The reservoir of technology, of knowledge of the practical arts, keeps rising.

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin, statesman, inventor, scholar, businessman, and scientist, was born on January 17, 1706. Franklin strikes me as being about as close as we get to America's Da Vinci. He was a man that seemed to be good at virtually everything. He left his mark on our language (Poor Richard's Almanac), our daily life (lightning rods, fire departments, bifocals), and most especially our country (Founding Father and diplomat extraordinaire).

Franklin always had an inquiring mind. Self-educated, in 1727 he organized a club for philosophical inquiry that he named the Junto (Latin for club). He wrote of it in his Autobiography:

I should have mentioned before, that, in the autumn of the preceding year, [1727] I had form'd most of my ingenious acquaintance into a club of mutual improvement, which we called the Junto; we met on Friday evenings. The rules that I drew up required that every member, in his turn, should produce one or more queries on any point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy, to be discuss'd by the company; and once in three months produce and read an essay of his own writing, on any subject he pleased.

Our debates were to be under the direction of a president, and to be conducted in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute or desire of victory; and to prevent warmth, all expressions of positiveness in opinions, or direct contradiction, were after some time made contraband, and prohibited under small pecuniary penalties.

One spin-off of the Junto was Franklin's later founding of the American Philosophical Society in 1743. This is America's oldest society for inquiry in science and technology.

The Junto, however, seems to me to be an idea worth reviving. Where in our society today can we find a place where people can talk with friends and colleagues about such a broad range of topics? Most of us find what discussions we can through our work environment. But this is a limited substitute for a group like the Junto.

Recently, I have begun attending meetings of a group called the Socrates Cafe. They are held in many places across the country - coffee shops, book stores, churches - and they are always open to new participants. Socrates Cafe shares some things in common with Franklin's Junto. The meetings consist of groups of people who come together freely to discuss a philosophical questions suggested by the attendees themselves. I find these meetings to generate some great discussions but they do not usually allow inquiries into science and technology. With the rapid advancements in science, perhaps discussions groups are more critical now than ever. We need to be better informed about issues like climate change, energy utilization, nanotechnology and a host of other areas. Something like the Junto may be needed now more than ever. Franklin would have understood completely.

Quotation for the Day

The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

- Mark Twain

Galileo's Door

I was in Rome in September. We were walking from the Forum to the Pantheon when our guide, Francesca, commented almost as an aside about yet another Catholic church that we were passing. The door on the side of the church was the very door that Galileo Galilei had passed through when he was called by the Catholic Inquisition in 1633. This literally stopped me in my tracks. I had just seen the eyepiece of Galileo's telescope at the Science Museum in Florence.

Galileo was called to Rome to defend himself from charges of heresy. He had observed that the sun, and not the earth, was at the center of the solar system. The Catholic Church had objected to Galileo's science as early as 1616 but it was not until 1633 that he was forced to recant under a threat of death. By then, Galileo was an old man and very ill. To survive, he swore that the earth indeed was the center of the universe and that all of his prior teachings were in error. He was sentenced to house arrest in Florence for the rest of his life.

This story gives an extreme example of the reaction to any revolutionary new idea that threatens the status quo. At first, the church tried soft techniques to get Galileo to change. But when more of the Enlightened actually started listening to what Galileo had to say, and particularly when Galileo started to make the Pope look foolish, the Inquisition used all of its power to squelch his ideas.

How often does this still happen today? The church no longer has an Inquisition but the majority of people still reject revolutionary ideas as being "heretical, or crazy, or simply wrong. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if an idea hasn't been initially rejected, it probably isn't revolutionary. Modern physics provides many examples. Relativity Theory, the Big Bang, Quarks, and the duality of photons come to mind. Each was met with derision and skepticism. The authors of these ideas were probably not threatened with their lives but they were threatened with their livelihoods.

Why do revolutionary ideas upset us so much? One possible reason is that we need to remain in control. We have a mental model that explains how the world works. If that model is wrong, we are clearly out of control...and hence vulnerable. Another possibility is that that powerful individuals and groups are highly vested in the status quo, with their remaining in their positions of power.

Revolutionary ideas are never accepted without a fight. But at least we don't burn the idea's originator at the stake. But each one of these people has walked through his or her own form of Galileo's Door.

The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.

- P.B. Medawar

(Photos: Galileo's Door, Painting of Galileo Inquisition from Wikipedia)