YDS READING PASSAGES / TEST 7 43. Soru

-15.SCIENCE OR FICTION? Science fiction — usually thought of as a 20th-century literary form — actually made its first appearance in the 2nd century AD. Most educated people of that period believed that the moon was a solid body. Plutarch, in his 'On the Face That Appears in the Moon', summed up the advanced views of his time. He held that the moon was a smaller Earth. The idea of flight to the moon was devised in two stories written as early as AD 160 by Lucian of Samosata, a Greek. In Lucian's True History', the hero is blown to the moon during a storm. The hero of Lucian's 'Icaro-Menippus' uses the wings of large birds. During the Middle Ages, no more stories of space travel were written. Late in the Renaissance, however, as scientific interest was revived, people also became more interested in space. In the 17th century, the invention of the telescope and the work of Johannes Kepler in Germany and Isaac Newton in England yielded knowledge of the solar system, when Kepler precisely described the orbits of the planets and Newton described mathematically the laws of gravitation and motion.,

The majority of educated people in Plutarch's time believed that------ .