This time it’s all about word selection. I’m a little shocked to read this passage by Shannon Stirone on Astronomy.com (via 3 Quarks Daily, which I love for its name):
Astronomy may be the oldest natural science in the world. Before humans ever took to systematically studying the skies, we were craning our necks upwards, observing the curious movements of some bright points of light, and the stillness of others. Civilizations around the world have incorporated astronomical observations into everything from their architecture to their storytelling and while the pinnacle of the science is most commonly thought to have been during the Renaissance, it actually began a thousand years earlier and 5,000 miles to the East.
Err, no. Pinnacle means “the highest point of development or achievement” [M-W]. In astronomy, that would be, ah, today.
Now, perhaps Shannon meant a period of time in which the discovery of astronomical knowledge was the fastest relative to what we knew, but even that would be debatable – it could still be today. And, frankly, I don’t know what word to use for that concept, just off-hand.
