Link to the Show / Show NotesPhilip Gulley-Our nation's leaders gathered Thursday evening at the White House to rescue the nation from economic peril. I wasn't invited, so instead went to the Olive Garden in Avon to help Gene Carter celebrate his birthday. Then I came home and went for a walk around the block. It was dark, and the stars were out. I could see the Big Dipper and the North Star, Polaris, which is 430 light years away, which means I was seeing it as it was in 1578, long before the world had ever heard of sub-prime mortgages. The future astronomer, Galileo, was 14 years old. Galileo would grow up to inform us the Earth was not the fixed center of the universe. For that radical heresy, the Roman Catholic Church, which considered itself and the Earth the center of the universe, placed him under house arrest, where he spent the remainder of his life writing one of his finest books, Two New Sciences, which effectively launched the field of physics. But the light from the star Polaris predates all of that.
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