Matt Kaplan

Hey, thanks for having me, Neil.

Yeah, yeah, I'm in Davis, California right now.

So you got to go back to the 15 and 1600s.

And this is really a time where the church was pretty adamant that the earth was the center of the universe.

And

It was problematic because people invented the telescope, and folks started looking through the telescope and noticing the movements of things like comets and planets and saying, well, hang on a second.

I've plotted where those things are going, and my calculations suggest that we are not the center.

There might be something else that is the center.

It might be the sun.

And unfortunately, the church didn't like that.

That was heresy.

And it could get you into an awful lot of trouble.

And this is very much where Galileo Galilei found himself long, long ago.

And in fact, it became a huge political issue in his time.

And it really started out with his discourse on comets, which was a battle with this other mathematician named Orazio Grassi.

who was saying, look, I think the comets are going around the earth, and Galileo was fairly certain they were not.

And he wrote this piece called Discourse on Comets, and eventually wrote a book called Il Sagittore, which eviscerated Grassi not based upon and anything else other than his methods.

And Sagittore's so important.

Because Sagittarius effectively established what we know today as the scientific method.

I'm going to ask a question, I'm going to explore it, and then come up with some conclusions based upon what I found.