General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsFor millenia, humans thought the sun moved about the Earth.
Recently, some people have been speculating that the actual situation is just the opposite.
Really, people--should we throw aside the wisdom of the ages in favor of some Polish agitators' cockamamie notions?
Buzz Clik
(38,437 posts)Faux pas
(14,582 posts)can we quit believing the earth is flat too?
Jackpine Radical
(45,274 posts)who is forever trying to lure people off the edge so they will fall to Perdition.
DetlefK
(16,423 posts)NuclearDem
(16,184 posts)Recursion
(56,582 posts)Copernicus didn't offer a new testable prediction that could disprove Ptolemy's model; his just had greater aesthetic simplicity. It took until Kepler to actually get better matching of observations.
Jackpine Radical
(45,274 posts)more people associate heliocentrism with Copernicus than with, say, Aristarchus.
And what Kepler did was to break with tradition & realize that things worked out better if you postulated elliptical orbits rather than perfect circles (a holdover from Medieval Christian Idealist philosophy). Kepler, of course, used the observations of Tycho Brahe for much of his work.
An interesting book on the early post-Copernican years was Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers.
malthaussen
(17,065 posts)Or, to put a finer point on it, around humans. You just need a different perspective, Jackpine, stop thinking about foolish things like objective reality.
-- Mal
MisterP
(23,730 posts)even Galilei got in trouble mostly because 1. he couldn't differentiate his system from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonic_system and 2. everyone involved was Italian
snooper2
(30,151 posts)ISUPK HEBREW ISRAELITES