James Webb Telescope and Cristoforo Colombo

It is a moment in time of the remarkable James Webb telescope launch of December 26, 2021, targeting outer space a million miles away. Yet not all that far in Universe miles! It is worth looking back in our public Library collections for another exhilarating moment in time (besides the early 19th century Lewis and Clark Expedition of previous articles), when even the learned few knew so, so much less about the Universe than now. In the 15th century, knowledge was largely restricted to Earth, distances of thousands of miles at most, and much of what was supposedly earthly scientific knowledge was wrong anyway. Nicolaus Copernicus had yet to make the mathematical case in the mid 16th century for heliocentricity. Galileo’s empirical landmark use of a primitive telescope trained on Jupiter…