I suppose it is inevitable that astronomy should be one of the easier sciences to “popularize.” The sky is all around us; even our remote cave-dwelling ancestors must have looked up into the sky and wondered at what they saw there, even though they could have no idea of the nature or scale of the universe. Naturally, they believed the Earth to be supreme, and to have everything else arranged around it for our special convenience. Believe it or not, this point of view is not quite dead even now — and this brings me on to my first point.

Some time ago I attended a meeting of the International Flat Earth Society, held in London. Its members believe that the world is shaped like a pancake, with the North Pole in the middle and a wall of ice all around. The meeting was quite remarkable, and participants were totally sincere. Later, I rather ill-naturedly put them in touch with a German society whose members maintain that we live on the inside of a hollow sphere, and I understand that they are still fighting it out; but of course this is quite harmless — and as I have often said, the world would be poorer without its “Independent Thinkers.” But other aspects of eccentric thought are less laudable, and of course I am thinking of astrology, which has experienced a curious revival in recent times.