
Anaxagoras Was Exiled for Claiming the Moon Was a Rock - pps
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ancient-greek-philosopher-was-exiled-claiming-moon-was-rock-not-god-180972447/
======
Agentlien
The title of the article doesn't really match what the article has to say
about his trial. It does, however, work nicely as an example of a general rule
I have:

I'm always suspicious when hearing tales about scientists who were punished
for their discoveries by less enlightened minds. Looking into it, it mostly
turns out they were either sentenced for other crimes or, as this article
claims was the case here, that it was most likely a political move
masquerading as being motivated by theology.

Which itself falls under another similar guideline: if any big societal
undertaking (wars unfortunately seem to be the most common example) seems
motivated by religion, that's usually not the true reason behind it.

Perhaps my own beliefs are colouring my interpretations, but it just seems
like people's actual motivations tend to be pragmatic but they market their
actions as being out of belief or morality.

~~~
asark
> Looking into it, it mostly turns out they were either sentenced for other
> crimes or, as this article claims was the case here, that it was most likely
> a political move masquerading as being motivated by theology.

Despite having been a believer until age ~14 or so (raised that way) I've been
having real trouble lately getting into the heads of adults who really,
actually believe all the stuff their religions teach. I don't mean the vaguely
spiritual Unitarian Universalist sorts or the new-age Buddhists who figure all
the weird stuff in Buddhist teachings & writings is purely allegorical, I mean
the ones who _truly_ think all the stuff in their books happened and maybe
even that the supernatural has a real influence on their lives today.

I have even more trouble modeling the mind of functioning, even intelligent
adults who _run_ religious institutions and are true believers, not just
pragmatists following along because that's What One Does, doing it all with a
bit of a wink and a nod. Like, your average priest: how many _actually_
believe? Is it really most of them? An abbott? Really, they do, for the most
part? How about back in, say, the middle ages, the cardinals and such really
believed? Nobles and heads of state did? I just can't wrap my head around it.

Or, ancient folks. How _real_ was religion in their lives? To what degree were
the gods of Greece a vehicle for conveying (this part clearly real and
important, to the Greeks!) common norms and lessons via (essentially) folk
tales, and how much did they actually think Zeus— _actually_ Zeus, a
supernatural being who for-real did all the batshit crazy stuff in the
stories—truly might show up at their door dressed as a beggar? Did most people
believe it? Did the elites? It's hard for me to imagine.

All this seems incredibly dumb, I know, but that's where I'm at.

[EDIT] incredibly dumb _that I 'm struggling so much to comprehend this_, I
mean.

~~~
camjohnson26
As a functioning, intelligent adult who believes everything written in my
religion’s holy book I empathize with how ridiculous it looks from the
outside. But to me I have just as much trouble understanding how someone can
go through life and not believe that there’s more to it than the natural
world, and probably struggle as much to understand that viewpoint as you do to
understand mine.

To me it’s a self evident miracle that any kind of universe exists, not to
mention that there’s life in it, and even more amazing that the life can
observe the universe, explore it, and enjoy it. To me something had to cause
all this, and if so then some religion has to be true. If some religion is
true then you can’t pick and choose the parts you like and discard what you
don’t.

I agree that many of the most powerful religious leaders don’t actually
believe everything they teach though. Religion is a powerful tool to get
people to do what you want.

~~~
zwkrt
Isn’t it much more likely that if a diety exists that it isn’t described by
any of the small handful of religions we have concocted here on earth?

~~~
ggggtez
This is a sort of "gambit" that doesn't work because it assumes that all
religion is created by humans. But most religions claim they are handed down
directly from God, so the point would be moot.

 _Of course_ anyone who thought their religion was made up by a human _wouldn
't_ really believe it. So this won't convince anyone either way.

~~~
zwkrt
I guess I just mean to say that I can still have the abject wonder about the
world we see around us and have reason to believe that there was something (as
opposed to nothing) responsible for the entirety of existence, without having
to fall back on saying that MY religion is the reason for this to be the case.

~~~
jbensan
I agree with your logic. Believing _something_ made the world doesn't
necessarily mean one religion reveals that _something_. In the journey of my
life experiences I have found a compelling case in the Bible and Jesus. I
understand that it sounds strange (incomprehensible?) to others with different
experiences. But the best I can say it in short form, logic opens the door for
belief, beauty guides me through that door. By "beauty" I mean that aesthetic
sense of _rightness_. The same feeling that makes me know a painting is good
is the same feeling that makes me feel that the story of revelation, fall,
redemption presented in the Christian religion is True.

What I can't understand is atheists who balk at the possibility of any kind of
god, but happily entertain the notion that we are in a simulation. What
exactly would be the difference in a created reality and a simulated reality?

------
perl4ever
I find the picture of Anaxagoras (the crater) rather annoying, because they
didn't orient it with the light source coming from the upper left, as is (or
used to be) kind of the convention on a computer screen.

~~~
s9w
Wow you're right - it's so much better rotated:
[https://files.catbox.moe/tt6mu1.png](https://files.catbox.moe/tt6mu1.png)

~~~
craigsmansion
Wow, indeed.

My thanks to both you and the OP. I had to replicate this to see if it wasn't
some sort of trickery.

Frankly this is a little unsettling; why am I primed to to recognise something
"with the light source coming from the upper left"? Is it an effect of
previous continuous exposure or a general principle of how the brain
interprets lights and shadows?

~~~
thristian
The sun is normally in the sky above us, we build buildings with lights on the
ceiling or high up on the walls, so it's reasonable that an image with a
light-source above would be more understandable than one with a light-source
below.

It's very unusual for a light-source to be exactly aligned with the thing it
illuminates, so unusual that if you see it, it looks wrong[1]. It's reasonable
that an image with a light-source to the top-left or top-right would be more
understandable than one with a light-source directly above.

As for why "left" rather than "right", I don't have a good answer. When
Microsoft redesigned Windows 3.0[2] to make the buttons look more like buttons
(instead of just rectangular or rounded outlines), they decided to put the
light-source at the top-left rather than the top-right. Why they chose that
direction I don't know, but I notice the mouse-cursor also points to the top-
left, the most important menu (the system menu) is in the top-left, the title
bar is at the top and the menus in the menu-bar are left-aligned, etc. etc. I
don't think there's a _neurological_ reason why shading should have a top-left
light-source, but if you're making an interface for people who read left-to-
right, top-to-bottom and you visually organise everything in that same order,
it makes sense to align shading in the same way as everything else rather than
have it be The One Thing Out Of Place.

[1]: [https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/04/lahaina-noon-when-
shad...](https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/04/lahaina-noon-when-shadows-
disappear.html)

[2]:
[https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win30](https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win30)

~~~
hyperpallium
When writing, right-handed, a lamp to the right will cast your hand's shadow
over the nib, and will cramp your elbow room.

------
VLM
I have no idea what the title "An Ancient Greek Philosopher Was Exiled for
Claiming the Moon Was a Rock, Not a God" has to do with the detailed
explanation in the last three paragraphs of how he was exiled.

The misleading implication of the title seems to be the ancients were dumb for
exiling someone who had a controversial scientific opinion; we'd certainly
never do that now (LOL); the records and detailed explanation imply he was
exiled simply for supporting the wrong politician.

Its exactly analogous to claiming James Watson was attacked because people
didn't like the chemical bond structure of DNA.

~~~
itp
The article writes:

> Anaxagoras was arrested, tried and sentenced to death, ostensibly for
> breaking impiety laws while promoting his ideas about the moon and sun.

This provides the context to understand that while the title is true at a
surface level, his claims around the moon likely served as pretext rather than
true cause.

You write:

> Its exactly analogous to claiming James Watson was attacked because people
> didn't like the chemical bond structure of DNA.

I disagree. An exact analogy would require that James Watson was actually
attacked for his belief in the structure of DNA, which served as a pretext for
the real claims against him. James Watson was attacked directly for his views
on race.

------
acqq
An Hipparchus (c. 190 BC - c. 120 BC) estimated the distance to the Moon in
the Earth radii between 62 and 80 (depending on the method he used). Today's
measurements are between 55 and 64, so it was quite good.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipparchus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipparchus)

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jmkd
A lovely story and a useful reminder that every single scientific norm or fact
we take for granted likely has thousands of years of thought, debate,
controversy before reaching the relative stasis from which we build.

~~~
zaarn
Well it's more of a story about how scientists who support the wrong
politicians in ancient Greece might find themselves exiled if their side ends
up loosing, regardless of their scientific beliefs.

~~~
jmkd
Which happens to this day in modern democracies, except swap exiled for
ostracised.

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8bitsrule
A more formal intro to the Anaxagoras story:
[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anaxagoras/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anaxagoras/)

"Democritus, a younger contemporary, dated his own life in relation to
Anaxagoras’, saying that he was young in the old age of Anaxagoras (DK59A5);
he reportedly accused Anaxagoras of plagiarism. Although Anaxagoras lived in
Athens when Socrates was a youth and young adult, there are no reports that
Anaxagoras and Socrates ever met. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates says that he
heard someone reading from Anaxagoras’ book.... As with all the Presocratics,
Anaxagoras’ work survives only in fragments..."

------
danjc
A little off topic but what great names the Greeks had. If Anaxagoras was
running for president I'd be tempted to vote for him just based on his name.

~~~
yongjik
I wonder if this is actually the other way, that is, so many words and names
of Greek origin are associated with ancient philosophy and classical wonders
(Archimedes, Pythagoras, Parthenon, etc.) that these words end up sounding
"great".

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rgrieselhuber
The Science was settled.

------
julienfr112
Instead of beeing what ? Cheese ?

TLDR : instead of being a god.

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axilmar
...if Anaxagoras knew that some people today would consider the earth flat and
the moon made of literally cheese, he would have commited suicide himself.

