Reason without science - the music of the spheres

Fifteen hundred years of fascinating nonsense. That's what I think as I listen to In Our Time's "The Music of the Spheres".

It's all rather like Freudianism - but he only lasted about 70 years.

What drives these examples of unreal reason?

I think of the underlying memes as attractive antigens that bind to our cultural and biological "memetic receptors" (it's hard to escape those immunology lectures). They're hypnotically interesting, and in age of scholarship without science they flourish like metastatic weeds.

The greatest cultural invention of the 2nd millennium, science, pulled the weeds. The Music of the Spheres became astronomy, mathematics, physics, neuropsychology, literature and art.

Science deserves more gratitude.