2 stories i will tell my students, when i have them

1.
--that galileo, after creating a stir by announcing that the earth was not the center of the universe and, in fact, revolved around the sun, after being told by the catholic church that this was incompatible with doctrine, after being forced to publicly recant, had, according to folklore, this to say under his breath: 'eppur si muove' -- 'it moves nevertheless'.

2.
-- that in the late 19th century, there lived a man named percival lowell, astronomer, mathematician, and founder of the lowell observatory. lowell famously believed that he could see canals running across the surface of mars, long straight criss-crossing tracts running from poles to equator. he was so convinced of this that he was able to persuade many of his contemporaries that he had seen them, and collectively, this group of scientists decided that the canals were sufficient evidence for life on mars. they named the canals. they formulated a theory that they were built because of the scarcity of water on all parts of the planet save its poles, and they thus postulated that whatever society existed on mars was both technologically far more advanced than earth, and also utopian, for how else could they facilitate such large scale planet-wide cooperation? lowell himself wrote several books on the subject, including mars and its canals, and mars as the abode of life. at the time, all this was taken with deadly seriousness; lowell was highly regarded, and pluto, in fact, was named in his memory (PL being his initials). which just goes to show, that for a while anyway, you can fool all the people all of the time.

incidentally:

(#1: knowing this helps makes sense of why h.g. wells radio broadcast scared the hell out of so many people)

(#2: if you have jstor or some other access, this is a cute paper reviewing all the details of what happened.)