An Old Science.

For almost two thousand years the greatest European thinkers agreed with the Greek scientist Aristotle's conception of the universe. Aristotle believed that the Earth was at the center of the universe, surrounded by the Moon, the Sun, the planets, and the stars. Each heavenly body orbited the Earth in a perfect circular motion. There was only one Moon in the universe. The Sun's orbit around Earth was between the spheres of Venus and Mars. The realm of fixed stars was at the outer edge of a small, finite, limited universe. Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo, and Sir Isaac Newton had different views. During the same decades that Columbus discovered America, Jacques Cartier discovered the Saint Lawrence River, and John Smith founded Jamestown, Europeans were restructuring the universe. They believed that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center. Moreover, the Sun was the...