Change is hard work

This is something I had copied a few years ago from a Christian web site.

For Centuries, people believed that Aristotle was right when he said that the heavier an object, the faster it would fall to earth. Aristotle was regarded as the greatest thinker of all times and surely he could not be wrong. All it would have taken was for one brave person to take two objects, one heavy and one light, and drop them from a great height to see whether or not the heavier object landed first. But no one steeped forward until nearly 2000 years after Aristotle’s death. In 1589,Galileo summoned learned professors to the base of the leaning Tower of Pisa . Then he went to the top and pushed of a ten-pound and a one-pound weight. Both landed at the same time. But the power of belief in the conventional wisdom was so strong that the professors denied what they had seen. They continued to say Aristotle was right, reinforcing the observation by Niccolo Machiavelli in his book, The Prince, that: “there is nothing more difficult to take hand, more perilous to conduct, or more certain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of the new order of things.”

I can't top that last quote from Machiavelli!