Seeing is not simple: you need to be both knowing and naive | Aeon Essays
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One astronomer’s dimpled pie is another’s cratered moon. How can our mind’s eye learn to see the new and unexpected?
When Galileo looked at the Moon through his new telescope in early 1610, he immediately grasped that the shifting patterns of light and dark were caused by the changing angle of the Sun’s rays on a rough surface. He described something akin to mountain ranges ‘ablaze with the splendour of his beams’, their sides in shadow like ‘the hollows of the Earth’; he also rendered these observations in a series of masterful drawings. Six months before, the English astronomer Thomas Harriot had also turned the viewfinder of his telescope towards the Moon. But where Galileo saw a new world to explore,…
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