Embracing Free Thought
Embracing Free Thought
If the law is of such a nature that it requires you to be an agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law."(HDT) In the past and present, non-conformists have tried to change the benchmarks of society, but were suppressed and chastised for their tenets, even though they were correct in their speeches. Such activists of the change movement were Copernicus, Galileo, and the ambiguous duo of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The late fifteenth and early to mid-sixteenth centuries were the times of Nicolaus Copernicus's revolutionary ideas in Poland that contradicted the latest ideas of astronomy. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, Galileo Galilei furthered the Copernican Theory, and openly disagreed with Aristotle's claims.
Eventually leading to his arrest and death. Finally, in the eighteenth century, Emerson's teaching of Transcendentalism to Thoreau lands Thoreau in jail for not paying his taxes. This was an open defiance, a smack in the face to the all-mighty United States government. The changes these people tried to bestow on society were extremely cost worthy, but were worth it. They were actual law and fact.
After years and years of more suffrage and proof from other dedicated scientists and non-conformists, though, these inevitable changes were finally ingratiated into the common world, but at great expense to the creators and supporters of them. Society, and change, just moves too slow for the over-achieving non-conformist.
In 1473, Nicolaus Copernicus was born in Poland. His entire life he studied astronomy and mathematics in many different institutes and universities. Starting in 1500, he began speaking on these topics all over Europe, this one being in Rome. He openly put down the closely held beliefs of Ptolemy from one thousand years ago. He believed that the Earth was not the center of the universe, but the sun was, and that the earth rotated once per day on an axis plane and one revolution per year around the sun. He called this his heliocentric, or sun-centered system. He knew that Ptolemy couldn't possibly be correct in his ideas because on March 9, 1497, he and his mathematics professor both witnessed an eclipse of the star Aldebaran by the moon. As he went throughout Europe he preached his own ideas of the heliocentric universe and returned to Poland in 1503, when he started work on his first of many major works. These works supported and endorsed...