Truthers and Galileo

Posted on August 20, 2007
Filed Under Uncategorized |

This is funny even though it goes into a topic I find no humor in, 9/11 Truthers.

The History Channel ran a program tonight called 9/11 Conspiracy: Fact or Fiction. The concept is that, as was the case with Pearl Harbor and the assassination of President Kennedy, conspiracy theories become part of the historical record, no matter how absurd they are. So THC, my favorite cable channel, looks into it and features a number of vocal Truthers in the process.

In the program, which just finished a few minutes ago, a character named Alex Jones (who claims to be a filmmaker and radio talk show host (that I have never heard of) tells the interviewer that Galileo was persecuted in his time for proclaiming that the world was round and not flat… and that he himself is a modern day Galileo.

This would be a good analogy were it not for the inconvenient fact that Galileo was accused of heresy for suggesting the Earth moved around the Sun and not the other way around. In Galileo’s time it was widely acknowledged that the world was indeed round.

Ironically, in a tangent but an interesting one at that, it was Islamic astronomers who were among the first to calculate the circumference of the Earth, developing spherical trigonometry in the process, and plot  the movement of the known planets at the time, in the 9th century. I say ironic because the world would indeed be a better place if Islamic fundamentalists again pursued mathematics and the sciences for the betterment of mankind instead of our destruction.

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