“João have you heard about the new theory coming out of Prussia by that Copernicus guy?”

“Teixeira, you spend too much time with your head in the clouds, why do you worry about these things?”

“João he says that we have been thinking about the earth and the sun all wrong, that actually it is the sun that is the fulcrum of the universe, and that all the planets and the stars revolve around it.”

“Teixeira, let me put your mind at ease. Think about this astrolabe. No matter where you are, you can just look into the sky, find the angle of that planet there, then go to this almanac and figure out exactly how far north or south you are. I can tell you right now that we are exactly three hundred miles south of Salamanca, right on line for Lisbon. Every one of the calculations in that almanac was done knowing that the earth was the fulcrum of the universe, and that the sun and all the planets orbit around it.

The that’s how you know it is the truth. It just works, every time, whether you believe in it or not”