Ex Astris Scientia — What's the most interesting thing you've learned...

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
sweebs

babooshka-yah-yah asked:

What's the most interesting thing you've learned recently?

earnedmagic answered:

in one of my art history classes i learned about this guy, percival lowell, who was a dude in the late 1800s with too much money and too much time on his hands. he built himself an observatory because that’s what rich dudes did for fun back then

he had a fairly popular theory about their being purposefully designed canals on mars- 1800s europe was all about industry and what mankind could build, so it made sense that humanity would see similar formations in space. and so lowell was on trend when he charted these canals on venus:

image

except that no one else could reproduce his findings. most of his theories were discredited over time as we learned more about space, and it wasn’t until the early 2000s that someone posited a theory to what lowell had been seeing

image

the specific adjustments of his telescope may have caused it to act as a gigantic ophthalmoscope- leading lowell to see the veins of his own retina.

i think there’s something very sweet about that whole story- mankind looking at space and seeing themselves