Talmudic cosmology and the scientific method

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: We No Longer Live in the World of Talmudic Rabbis. What’s a Modern Jew to Do? In the Bible, the rabbis had the most accurate possible description of the world—a flawed and limited cosmology. Excerpt:

Just about every page of Talmud I read makes clear to me that the rabbis lived in a different world than we do. But this week’s Daf Yomi reading showed that this was true in the most literal sense: The world, for the rabbis, was not our planet Earth, a small blue planet orbiting the Sun in the vastness of empty space. To them, as to all educated people of their time, the Earth was the center of the universe, surrounded by a series of concentric spheres, the outermost of which was studded with stars. “The Jewish Sages,” according to Pesachim 94b, “say the celestial sphere is stationary, and the constellations revolve in their place within the sphere.” In this they differed from the Gentile sages, who “say the entire celestial sphere revolves, and the constellations are stationary within the sphere.”

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and here and links.