Every one of us begins life with an open mind, a driving curiosity, a sense of wonder.

I recently learned that the Pythagoreans, whose mathematics are popular today, reigned supreme over the obscured Ionians and held a state of oppression to preserve their slave system. Pythagoreans loved the idea of purity and that ideas were better than the natural world. However, when they discovered that there existed irrational numbers, numbers that cannot be represented by their whole number system and the dodecahedron, a polygon that didn’t align with their basic polygons, they hid away the truth. They imposed an elitist ideal and kept “ordinary” people ignorant. Many Ionian discoveries and scientific musings were destroyed.

It’s astonishing (Sagan voice) to learn about how our ancestors started to think about stars, their distances and make predictions about them. From using holes cut into metal disks to “fit” stars to watching the shadow casted by a stick to measure time, humans are impressive for their novel ideas. Long story short, their curiosity and ideas to figure things out are beautiful.

The term cosmos is the antithesis of chaos and it is our journey to find our place in the cosmos. Our planet, cosmically insignificant, as there are more galaxies and suns than there are people on earth is made significant by the courage of our questions and depth of our answers. Our solar system lives in the suburbs of our galaxy.

Speaking of our galaxy, let’s not forget about the Milky Way…the goddess Hera’s breast milk squirted across the heavens…

Here’s a summary or too long didn’t watch tldw;,

• Sagan is from Brooklyn and eats roasted chestnuts.
• Sagan as a child played Chinese handball.
• Sagan as a child looks up at stars at the playground, goes to library asks about stars, librarian gives him a book about celebrities.
• Sagan once did not know about the inverse square law of the propagation of light.
• Sagan says there’s a potato orbiting Mars.
• The Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert believe the Milky Way to be the backbone of night. It holds the sky. If it not were for the backbone, the sky would come crashing down.
• Sagan has a cool jacket when he visits Greece.
• Sagan slips almost falls on some slippery rocks while walking the wall Polycrates built.
• Polycrates was a tyrant who started out as a caterer and then switched careers to become a pirate.
• He feared invasion and so built a massive wall to protect his city.
• The merchants and artisans were the first scientists.
• Once upon a time, theoreticians and engineers were one.
• Isolation is good for creativity.
• First Ionian scientist, Thales, believed the earth was once all covered in water.
• Anaximander, the sundial man.
• The legacy of the Ionians rests with Theodorus, inventor of the key, ruler, level, carpenter’s square, the lathe and bronze casting.
• Empedocles, inventor of the water thief.
• The water thief is a sphere with tiny holes at the bottom and a tube at the top.
• Submerge the thief in water with the tube open and it fills, otherwise it doesn’t.
• Discovery of air. Good job Empedocles.
• Democritus from the town Abdera. Abdera was the butt of jokes.
• Democritus intuited about the stars and galaxies and atoms.
• Pythagoras -> Plato -> Aristotle : servers of tyrants.
• Pristarchus of Samos inspired Copernicus (heliocentric model)
• Copernicus suppressed Aristarchus in final revisions of his work.
• Geocentric language is still in use today. We say the sun rises and sets, but we (the earth) is the one that moves.