I’m trying to find a detail from a historical anecdote.
The anecdote is this: Galileo had looked through the telescope at the moon, and seen all its craters and mountains and reported them. A lot of people got upset at that because their theology told them that God made the moon a perfect sphere.
Someone tried to reconcile the two by saying “the moon really IS a perfect sphere; the reason it doesn’t look like it is that there’s an invisible crystalline substance that’s filling in all the valleys and all the way up to the top of the highest mountain — and you can’t prove that it isn’t there.” Galileo retorted “Well, guess what; if that substance is there, then I’m going to say that there’s even BIGGER mountains made of it, so that the moon is even LESS of a perfect sphere — and you can’t prove THAT isn’t there.”
The part that’s driving me crazy: what was that invisible crystalline substance CALLED? I swear that when I first read the anecdote decades ago the name of it was there; now I can find plenty of descriptions of the anecdote but NONE that have the name!
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