There's a comment from his Foundation trilogy about them trying to find the Second Foundation on the other side of the galaxy. I won't toss out any spoilers or long explanations of the reference though, if you've read it you know and if you haven't you'd doubtless love it. It was on my mind with Rome reference though.



That's a pretty decent way to think of these things, I'm not going to throw rocks at people for referring to the Sun as the center or the Earth as a sphere, unless they start including words like 'exact' or 'perfect'. What bugs me about these things is that this really is one of those big ones. It's that very bit of thought that causes people to routinely answer "which exerts more force, the Earth on the Moon, the Moon on the Earth, or neither" with the first option. Missing that most objects aren't perfect spheres isn't a conceptually big one, because they already know about hills and mountains, they know that it is approximate, rough, more or less. I don't think most people realize that two objects do not have the smaller rotating around the bigger, and so I'm not sure the quote applies quite as firmly. If someone says 'the Earth is a sphere' and you say 'well, not exactly' people instantly can think of various things that make it non-exact even if they might leave out a big one like spin. I've never seen a particular power to 'less wrong' in this sort of respect, not sure someone who could calculate eclipses decades out of an old pre-Kepler model should really be considered less wrong than someone who knows the Sun is the center, but doesn't really have any appreciation of that beyond as a piece of memorized data and an image of an old science fair ping pong model. It's the elliptical orbit itself that was the big deal, IMO, and I think if that concept is lacking in this example then the degree of 'less wrong' between the two is slight.