My view of the Copernican revolution used to be that when people finally switched to the heliocentric model,something clicked. The data was suddenly predictable and understandable.
It sounds like this is what happened though, but the click was at Kepler.
The surprising corollary is that Galileo just happened to be right, and I don’t really want to imitate him. I don’t want to be the kind of person who would have been a Copernican without knowing Kepler’s theory.
But on the other hand, to invent Kepler’s theory, Kepler had to be a Copernican.
alex_hhr comments on The Copernican Revolution from the Inside