Acc. to Bohar 'the task of science is bothto extend the range of our experience and to reduce it to order.' comment

It has been the historical aim of science both to extend our experience and to reduce it to order, these two aspects being always interconnected. The ancient astronomers -- early Greek or pre-Greek -- extended their experience by carefully mapping the sky and its motions over centuries. At some point this suggested, or allowed, the strange notion that Earth was not an indefinitely extended cosmological boundary but a thing, a body, perhaps a sphere, poised in space. This was proposed as a fact which fitted all the data, but it was much more; it was a reduction to order of many otherwise unrelated astronomical phenomena. But this new order conflicted with commonsense intuition, which required a universal cosmological up and down. The conflation of these two ways of thinking created the uneasy question about why the Earth, now a body among bodies rather than a cosmographic division, didn't fall, and a question about upside-down inhabitants of the antipodes. Even Dante put the entrance to Hell down there. A century or two after the early Greek discoveries, Aristotle announced, with a lingering note of triumphant understanding, that "down is toward the center." The round Earth-body was not simply a new fact to be stored along with other facts; it was a fact which required a radical reorganization of the whole category structure of geographical and cosmological thinking. If it were taught merely as a fact, without appreciation of the need to help it penetrate into the subsoil of understanding and to rebuild the mind's category structures in the process, it would remain something merely bookish and abstract, to be entertained nervously and then forgotten. Perhaps children of today can grow up without this particular conflict of understanding, one which many of us can remember from our own childhoods. The educational time scale here, that of the transition from opaque fact to intuitive widespread grasp, has been at least a couple of millennia. We ought to do better.