What Have We Done to Deserve a Cosmic Partner?

A few days ago, I delivered a keynote lecture in a public celebration at the city of Toruń in Poland, the birthplace of Nicolaus Copernicus 550 years earlier, on the subject of “The Next Copernican Revolution.” Copernicus inferred from data that we are not located at the center of the Universe because the Earth moves around the Sun. In other words, he realized that we occupy an unprivileged cosmic status, which was problematic given his role as a priest. The church adopted his heliocentric model because it allowed to accurately predict the time of Easter, but the theologians insisted that the model is a purely theoretical concept that does not represent reality and so they listed his De revolutionibus as a forbidden book until the 19th Century. Ironically, the agreement of a theoretical model with data is the only way to assess its realism in modern science, as pioneered by Galileo Galilei — who discovered the Moons of Jupiter a century later as confirmation of the heliocentric model of Copernicus. In 1992, the Vatican <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13618460-600-vatican-admits-galileo-was-right/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">admitted</a> that Galileo Galilei was right, but this came a bit late — 23 years after Apollo 11 that first landed humans on the Moon. <a href="https://avi-loeb.medium.com/what-have-we-done-to-deserve-a-cosmic-partner-e3ed3f29c6d3">Read More</a>