Today, Dr. Goldish started off reading a passage from “Angles and Demons”. I really enjoyed his passion behind what he was discussing, and his anger about how false what they were saying in the novel really was. He then began discussing the Scientific Enlightenment, which he said basically began with Copernicus’s idea. He gave evidence that there wasn’t conflict with Copernicus and the church because he was the church. He brought in Kuhn, which I think was good because he explained paradigm shifts a little more. The way he presented material was in a very interesting way, he was very passionate about it, which made it easier to listen to because you could tell it was a very important topic to him. His main point is that there is no warfare between science and theology. The idea that these two things had a war between them was completely foreign to people during that day and age. He then began discussing Kepler who dealt with planetary motion and mathematics. He wanted to suggest an elliptical orbit, but it was hard for him to even say, but as soon as he theorized it, all the problems went away. He talked a little about Galileo as well, which I have learned about in many other classes. This talk was very interesting because we learned about things that I have learned before in other classes, just in greater detail and from someone who has more expertise on this information.
Yes, Theresa, Dr Goldish certainly does bring passion to the subject. I am always interested to hear what he will be talking about and this year, he kind of combined the talks from previous years. I thought it was a good overview of many of the ideas we have been discussing this semester.