  Recently, however, it has been argued convincingly that Marchia’s admittedly complicated texts could be read in a different, less radical way. Marchia may say that at the most fundamental level the matter in the celestial and the terrestrial realms is the same, since they share “the same prime matter and thus the same bare potentiality,” but practically speaking he drew such strong distinctions that, since their natural potencies are different, the laws applying to each are different (Thakkar 2006). In response to this reinterpretation, one could point out that, even in the post-Galilean world, we still think that the celestial and terrestrial realms are really different, just as water and air are radically different realms on earth. The search for the luminiferous ether went on until comparatively recently, and it is still common sense that objects in deep space behave differently from those in our atmosphere. All agree that the question for future research is whether and to what extent Marchia went further than his predecessors and contemporaries.