"The sun also ariseth and the sun goeth down and hasteth to his place where he arose." - Ecclesiastes 1:5
What does it take to convince a child riding a carousel that it is not the entire world which is magically spinning around him, but the carousel itself which is rotating rather pointlessly around an ordinary, rusty pole? A lot. Nothing less than a portkey.
How detached does one have to be from contemporary science and technology, how clueless does one have to be about how things work before one comes to the conclusion after seeing the stars and planets streak majestically across the night sky drawing great arcs, before one comes to the conclusion that it’s not the planets which stream across "our" sky, but our humble planet which goes round a beggarly star situated at some arbitrary nook?
In a medieval world, the astonishment at the novelty of the suggestion would have been matched only by the embarrassment it would have caused a lot of people. Imagine the awkwardness establishments would have felt when people found out that the things they have been told for the past two thousand years were absolute baloney.
I believe that was the defining moment in History, when we as a race stopped all the nonsense we were upto and started talking some sense. Everything cool that was ever invented since then, including Atari's Space Invaders (1977) and Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (1905), is just blown out of the park.
An idea's genius is in direct proportion to the number of people it embarrasses. On that basis alone, I rate Nicolaus Copernicus' Heliocentric theory as the most staggeringly revolutionary idea EVER.
