How to Lift the Earth
This was something of a 17th-century obsession. Anyone care to calculate how big those gears would have to be?



UPDATE: Somewhere along the line, we neglected to document the provenance of these images. They can be found in a terrific essay by Kircher scholar Michael John Gorman titled “Mathematics and Modesty in the Society of Jesus: The Problems of Cristoph Grienberger (1564-1636).” As it turns out, Greinberger himself calculated that “by means of no more than 24 wheels with toothed axes, the Earth’s globe, even if it were made entirely of gold, could be driven away from the centre [of the universe], by the force of only one Talent.”
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