Dave Trott’s blog: The Copernican shift | Opinion

When we see footage shot by a GoPro camera, it looks like we are stationery and everything else is moving around us.

We experience our position as a fixed and unchanging point of view.

So naturally humanity has always believed this is the way the universe works.

Ptolemy formalized it, with the earth in the center and the planets moving around us.

This has always been the accepted truth for the Christian Church – the earth was the center, the stars were hanging in the sky, and God was looking down.

But in 1543 Copernicus published De Revolutionobis and mathematically proved that the earth was not the center of the universe.

In fact, the sun was the center and the earth was just one of the many planets that revolved around it.

Two thousand years of geocentrism collapsed, heliocentrism was the new truth.

But this truth was impossible for the Christian Church to accept.

If the heavens were no longer above the earth, then where was God?

Astronomer Galileo became a strong supporter of heliocentrism – in 1609 his observations confirmed Copernicus’ position.

in 1613, the Church accused Galileo of taking a stand against the Bible.

Galileo said that the Bible is an authority on faith and morals, but not science.

So in 1615 Galileo was called before the Inquisition – they found his statements that the earth revolved around the sun as: “Foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical because it explicitly contradicts the meaning of the Holy Scriptures.”

He was asked to “abjure, curse and hate these opinions” and “completely abandon the opinion that the sun stops at the center of the world and the earth moves, and henceforth no longer hold it, teach it or defend it in any way. , either orally or in writing “.

The Church banned all of Galileo’s writings, and since the Church had power over life and death, Galileo was placed under house arrest until his death in 1642.

Galileo’s writings were not published until after his death, since then he has been known as “the father of modern physics”.

For the Church, accepting Galileo’s discoveries would have meant a paradigm shift on her part, and she was not capable of it.

The term “paradigm shift” was coined by Thomas Kuhn in 1962.

The Church was founded on belief, therefore belief came before facts; for the Church, it was necessary to match facts to belief.

A paradigm shift would turn their world upside down, it would put facts before belief.

Those of us who work in advertising need a paradigm shift.

We believe that advertising shapes public opinion, this opinion revolves around us.

We need a paradigm shift to see that we are not at the center, people are at the center.

Therefore, the advertising awards, bestowed by the Advertising Church, are not the truth about what constitutes good advertising.

If we do not recognize it, we will continue to believe that the little statuettes and champagne flutes distributed on the yachts in Cannes, are the center of the universe.

Like the medieval Church, we will believe, against all evidence, that people revolve around advertising, while advertising revolves around people.

But, in fact, Galileo was wrong: the sun is not the center of the universe.

The sun is one of the BILLION stars that make up our galaxy, and our galaxy is one of the BILLION galaxies that make up the known universe.

We don’t even revolve around the center of the universe because there is no center.

But it’s an inconvenient truth for advertising.

So, like the Christian Church, we make sure that the facts match our belief.

Dave Trott is the author of The Power of Ignorance, Creative Blindness and How to Cure It, Creative Mischief, Predatory Thinking, and One Plus One Equals Three. This article first appeared on CampaignLive.co.uk