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Slowly, and only in a few, I watched them struggle to realize that having opposite seasons in the different hemispheres could not possibly be compatible with their "closer to the sun for summer" theory, and that the sun and the moon in the sky together could not possibly be compatible with their "Earth blocks the suns rays" theory of the phases.

Why more serious? Because the UCLA students and professors (and their Harvard counterparts) knew something that contradicted the very theories they were trying to articulate and not one of them could get to that contradictory knowledge to say, "Hey, wait a minute..."! In some form, they "knew" about the opposite seasons and that they had seen the sun and the moon in the sky at the same time, but they did not "know" in any operational sense of being able to pull it out of their memories when thinking about related topics. Their "knowings" were isolated instead of set up to be colliding steadily with new ideas as they were formed and considered.