Like Copernicus, all good researchers - doctors, observers and thinkers - turn the data and the method around to see if they can't do better. The sentence comes with idiosyncratic word formations, but when the young Romantic poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801) wrote some "fragments" like the quoted sentence around 1798, the German language had not yet reached its classical state.
Goethe and others were still working on it, and Friedrich von Hardenberg gave himself the pen name Novalis so that he could join in. He wanted to create new territory, as the pseudonym suggests, with Novalis thinking not only of language but also of everyday life. Why shouldn't a citizen be both artistically active and practically oriented, i.e. be able to move and preserve something at the same time? Novalis, to whom reading mankind owes the invention of the Blue Flower of Romanticism, acted quite naturally between these poles, whose dual position generally reveals a trait of Romantic thinking that demands and expects a counterpart to every piece: Night to day, dreaming to thinking, the unconscious to the conscious, or the invisible light with its energies to the visible light with its colors. And with this fundamental attitude, we can gain a new perspective on the hypothesis of Copernicus from the 15th century, who famously suggested at the time that the sun should no longer revolve around the earth, but that the earth should revolve around the sun. Explaining the heavens really does make better progress if you "turn the data around", as Novalis writes, although one wonders where he got this word, which is so popular in the digital age, from. In the 18th century, the philosopher Immanuel Kant, whom Novalis calls a "nice observer", used the idea of getting better by turning things around when he attributed the movement of the stars that people see in the night sky not to the celestial bodies but, conversely, to the inhabitants of the earth standing on a rotating planet - Kant's Copernican turn in metaphysics, according to which people do not find the laws of nature in it, but prescribe them to it.
Novalis never saw our blue planet, but our cosmic home resembles his blue flower. "The poet understands nature better than the scientific mind," he once wrote. Who knows?
