Eureka! ...!?

I just wanted to blog (legitimately blog in that a blog is supposed to be something you truly want to express rather than a means of conversing with classmates--No offense, Professor Bary) that I had a Eureka moment just now, reading Koestler. A couple weeks ago, we had mini group discussions about the failure of nerve. I didn't see an example of "failure of nerve" in the chapter assigned. To me, a failure of nerve is one's personal holding back of ideas because one thinks they're not true or one thinks probably that the argument is weak. All I saw in the chapter were people trying to give evidence to a hypothesis that was set in stone as opposed to finding evidence and modifying the hypothesis as such.

In reading Koestler today, however, I got my Eureka moment. The top of page 81 wraps up a discussion on the continued myths of circles vs. ellipses, which was the discussion of the "failure of nerve" section as well. The very last sentence in the whole thing lays out failure of nerve right there!:

We shall see that, two thousand years later, Johannes Kepler, who cured astronomy of the circular obsession, still hesitated to adopt elliptical orbits, because, he wrote, if the answer were as simple as that, "then the problem would already have been solved by Archimedes and Apollonius."

I reread the sentence, underlined it, circled it, wrote next to it "failure of nerve" and then promptly got up to write this blog. It's too perfect! The reason why people hesitated to put out new ideas wasn't for fear of church persecution but for simple self doubt. The whole idea was that it would have been too easy to be right and by the same token that all the great philosophers and astronomers past hadn't put it out there first.

This is by no means the assigned blog for Friday, but I just thought I'd redeem myself a little bit. And by God, I hope I'm not wrong.