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At the Center of the Controversy<br />
by Jory Mickelson<br />
“At the Center of the Controversy” copyright © 2012 by Jory Mickelson.<br />
The Earth rested snug inside the curve of the spheres<br />
God had placed in successive layers like blankets<br />
on a child’s bed or shrink-wrap over a prized piece of meat.<br />
The earth wasn’t a pearl in an oyster so much as the centrifuge<br />
for the fan of planets. Sun and moon, stars and spirits<br />
all slipped along the surface of the bulging bowl of sky.<br />
Light filtered down at night through holes in a colander revealing<br />
the glories of heaven. Aristarchus in his Daily News interview<br />
said he was the first to take a pry bar to geocentrism, but was put off<br />
by pressure from the astronomers’ guild. It took millennia for dissent<br />
to build. Copernicus ran the numbers to prove his revolutionary theories<br />
about the sun, but the mortal blow came from Galileo and his glass eye<br />
that pried between the lines of conventional wisdom. The Daily News<br />
interviewed an astronomers’ guildsman: “If the idea<br />
of heliocentrism took hold, it’d be just a matter of time before<br />
someone would come and kick out the sun.”<br />
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