[In reference to public opinion after Eddington's initial 1919 confirmation of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity:]
But for most people, to whom Newtonian physics, with their straight lines and right angles, were perfectly comprehensible, relativity became more than a vague source of unease. It was grasped that absolute time and absolute length had been dethroned; that motion was curvilinear. All at once, nothing seemed certain in the movement of the spheres. 'The world is out of joint,' as Hamlet sadly observed. It was as though the spinning globe had been taken off its axis and cast adrift in a universe which no longer conformed to accustomed standards of measurement. At the beginning of the 1920s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism.
Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (Revised Edition), Harper Perennial (1992), p 4.
We are all, very properly, familiar with the idea that in every age the human mind is deeply influenced by the accepted Model of the universe. But there is a two-way traffic; the Model is also influenced by the temper of mind. We must recognise that what has been called 'a taste in universes' is not only pardonable but inevitable. We can no longer dismiss the change of models as a simple progress from error to truth. No Model is a catalogue of ultimate realities, and none is a mere fantasy. Each is a serious attempt to get in all the phenomena known at a given period, and each succeeds in getting in a great many. But also, no less surely, each reflects the prevalent psychology of an age as much as it reflects the state of that age's knowledge. Hardly any battery of new facts could have persuaded a Greek that the universe had an attribute so repugnant to him as infinity; hardly any such battery could persuade a modern that it is hierarchical.
C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Cambridge University Press (1964), p 222.
[From Aristotle's dynamics, it would be fair to conclude that] when bodies of different weight were moving through the same medium, the times required for their motions would be inversely proportional to their weight. For example, if the weight were doubled, the time needed would be half. But this is compeltely erroneous, as may be confirmed by actual observation more effectively than any sort of verbal argument. For if you let two weights fall from the same height, one of them being many times as heavy as the other, you will see that the times required for the motion are not in a proportion dependent on the ratio of their weights, but that the actual difference in time is very small.
Ioannes Philoponos, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics, circa 6th Century A.D., as quoted in The Fabric of the Heavens, p 117.
So if we mean to study astronomy in a way which makes proper use of the soul's inborn intellect, wee shall proceed as we do in geometry -- working at mathematical problems -- and not waste time observing the heavens.
Plato, The Republic [530c], as quoted in The Fabric of the Heavens, p 83, see also section 30 of Benjamin Jowett's clumsier online edition of The Republic.