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One day
in 476 BC, the Gallipoli Peninsula was blinded by a searing light
and shaken by a thunderous sonic boom. The people of the rural corner
of Thrace found themsleves looking at an enormous smoking black
boulder, the size of a horse and cart, that had apparently fallen
from the sky. Word soon spread throughout Greece of 'the stone star
that fell down flaming at Aegospotami'.
Anaxagoras, one of the fourth generation of Greek
thinkers called the 'physici', soon came up with his own theory
about the origin of this 'stone star': The Sun and the Moon were
simply stones that had been flung off into space by the spinning
Earth. The stars were also simply glowing stones. Periodically some
of them came crashing back to Earth, like the meteorite at Aegospotami.
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