But Copernicus’s new doctrine inspired fear as well as ridicule and confusion, because it led almost at once to questions that transcended science. If the Earth was only one planet among many, were those other worlds inhabited, too? By what sort of creatures? Had Christ died for their sins? Did they have their own Adam and Eve, and what did that say about evil and original sin? “Worst of all,” in the words of the historian of science Thomas Kuhn, “if the universe is infinite, as many of the later Copernicans thought, where can God’s Throne be located? In an infinite universe, how is man to
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