 Our judgment that the earth orbits the sun (and not vice versa) provides a simple illustration. The opposite claim seems more compelling to common sense, and consistency in observations is generally sufficient to confirm everyday knowledge. But scientific knowledge aspires to law-like completeness. It is not just that Galileo’s observations with the telescope suggest that everyday appearances are misleading. For Kant, more important is how reason unifies these observations through laws of gravity, momentum and so forth. By compassing the motion of all heavenly objects, and not only the movement of the sun relative to the earth, Newton provides the proper confirmation of Copernicus’ heliocentric hypothesis (Bxxii n; cf. §1.4 below). The extension and modification of Newton’s laws by general relativity gives one indication of the open-ended, “regulative” nature of this quest; so too does the as-yet unsatisfied ambition to integrate general relativity with quantum  mechanics.[7]