To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree.
Quotes about spherical (15 Quotes)
Musical consonance occurs in the element which is the mean of all (i.e. air), and reaches the ears through motion, spherical motion so that it is not surprising that it should be fitting to the soul, which is both the mean of things, and the origin of ci.
(With reference to a correspondent) The young specialist in English Lit ... lectured me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern 'knowledge' is that it is wrong. ... My answer to him was, '... when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.'
And here Dante describes an evidently spherical world... 'The lamp of the world the sun rises to mortals through different passages but through that which joins four circles with three crosses the position of the rising sun at the vernal equinox it issues with a better course and conjoined with better stars, and tempers and stamps the wax of the world more after its own fashion. Although such an outlet had made morning there and evening here, and all the hemisphere there was bright, and the other dark...'
This is the excellent foppery of the world that when we are sick in fortune -- often the surfeits of our own behavior -- we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star.
Every schoolchild knows that Columbus set out across the sea to prove that the world was round. But the belief in a spherical earth had a long and illustrious pedigree, as Columbus himself was well aware.... 'The second reason that inspired the Admiral Columbus to launch his enterprise and helped justify his giving the name 'Indies' to the lands which he discovered was the authority of many learned men who said that one could sail westward from the western end of Africa and Spain to the eastern end of India, and that no great sea lay between.'
... for until that God who rules all the region of the sky ... has freed you from the fetters of your body, you cannot gain admission here. Men were created with the understanding that they were to look after that sphere called Earth, which you see in the middle of the temple. Minds have been given to them out of the eternal fires you call fixed stars and planets, those spherical solids which, quickened with divine minds, journey through their circuits and orbits with amazing speed....
In fact, the belief in the spherical earth had currency more than a century before Columbus' famous voyage. 'For which cause men may well perceive that the land and the sea are of round shape and form, for the portion of the firmament that shows itself in one country does not show itself in another country. And men may well prove by experience and subtle exercise of wit that if a man should find routes by ship that would go to search the world, men might go by ship all about the world and around and beneath it....'
The earth also is spherical, since it presses upon its center from every direction.
First of all, we must note that the universe is spherical.
It can be thought of as a spherical diameter is the usual sense.
Here a contemporary and putative correspondent of Columbus takes the spherical earth for granted...'I therefore send to His Majesty a chart drawn by my own hand, upon which is laid out the western coast from Ireland on the north to the end of Guinea, and the islands which lie on that route, in front of which directly to the west, is shown the beginning of the Indies... And do not marvel at my calling 'west' the regions where the spices grow, although they are commonly called 'east' because whoever sails westward will always find those lands in the west, while one who goes overland to the east will always find the same lands in the east.'
Though he avoided outright endorsement of the view, fifth-century Church Father Saint Augustine was clearly familiar with the theory of the spherical earth 'They those who believe that 'there are men on the other side of the earth' fail to observe that even if the world is held to be global or rounded in shape, or if some process of reasoning should prove this to be the case, it would still not necessarily follow that the land on the opposite side is not covered by masses of water.'
I have always read that the world, both land and water, was spherical, as the authority and researches of Ptolemy and all the others who have written on this subject demonstrate and prove, as do the eclipses of the moon and other experiments that are made from east to west, and the elevation of the North Star from north to south.
We regard it as a certainty that the earth, enclosed between poles, is bounded by a spherical surface.