The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

by Arthur Koestler

I shall try to sum up briefly the main obstacles which arrested the progress of science for such an immeasurable time. The first was the splitting up of the world into two spheres, and the mental split which resulted from it. The second was the geocentric dogma, the blind eye turned on the promising line of thought which had started with the Pythagoreans and stopped abruptly with Aristarchus of Samos. The third was the dogma of uniform motion in perfect circles. The fourth was the divorcement of science from mathematics. The fifth was the inability to realize that while a body at rest tended to remain at rest, a body in motion tended to remain in motion.