In praise of astronomy

In praise of astronomy, the most revolutionary of sciences

On August 25th 1609 an Italian mathematician called Galileo
Galilei demonstrated his newly constructed telescope to the merchants
of Venice. Shortly afterwards he turned it on the skies. He saw
mountains casting shadows on the moon and realised this body was a
world, like the Earth, endowed with complicated terrain.

He saw the
moons of Jupiter--objects that circled another heavenly body in direct
disobedience of the church's teaching. He saw the moonlike phases of
Venus, indicating that this planet circled the sun, not the Earth, in
even greater disobedience of the priests. He saw sunspots,
demonstrating that the sun itself was not the perfect orb demanded by
the Greek cosmology that had been adopted by the church. But he also
saw something else, a thing that is often now forgotten. He saw that
the Milky Way, that cloudy streak across the sky, is made of stars.

That observation was the first hint that, not only is the Earth not the
centre of things, but those things are vastly, almost incomprehensibly,
bigger than people up until that date had dreamed.


source: http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14213985