Inconceivable

"The importance of this discovery for the development of the human mind lay in the fact that the earth, mankind, and the individual ego became dethroned. The earth became a satellite of the sun which carried around in space the peoples swarming on it. Similar planets of equal importance accompanied it, describing orbits about the sun. Man was no longer important in the universe, except to himself. None of these amazing facts arose from ordinary experience (such as the confirmation of a round earth by circumnavigation of the globe), but from observations which were, for the time in question, very delicate and subtle and from accurate calculations of planetary orbits. At any rate, the evidence was such as was neither accessible to all men nor of importance to everyday life. Visual evidence, intuitive perception, sacred and pagan tradition alike all spoke against the new doctrine. In place of the visible disk of the sun the new doctrine puts a ball of fire, gigantic beyond imagination; in place of the friendly lights of the sky, similar balls of fire at inconceivable distances, or spheres like the earth, that reflect light from other sources; and all immediate sense impressions were to be regarded as deception, whereas immeasurable distances and incredible velocities were to represent the true state of affairs. Yet this new doctrine was destined to be victorious. For it drew its power from the burning desire of all thinking minds to comprehend all things in the material world—be they ever so unimportant for human existence—by simple, unambiguous, though abstract, concepts. In this process, which constitutes the essence of scientific research, the human spirit never hesitates nor fears to doubt the most self-evident facts of visual perception and to declare them to be illusions, but prefers to resort to the most extreme abstractions rather than exclude from the scientific description of nature one established fact, however insignificant it might seem."

-Max Born on the Copernican system