I agree with your conclusions, but I have some complaints about this essay.
Do you really need 5000 words to present this? I’m not sure I’m reading you correctly, but you seem to boil it down to 3 points. Why not cut out most of the other material?
The 3 points that you present in the dialogue seem to me to be a pretty good summary of the debate in 1632. They are 3 issues that we recognize today as the most important and which I think the people in 1632 also recognized as most important. They probably didn’t see them as distinct from other important issues, just the top 3 on a list. But if you want to present this to people today you have to stop somewhere, and that seems like a pretty good place.
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However, your treatments of those 2 of those 3 points are in serious error. You leave out Galileo’s two greatest contributions to science. Lack of parallax was a real strike against heliocentrism. As for the size of Venus, it was not only possible to observe, but Galileo did observe it changing in 1610.*
As for the Tower Argument, that was an argument made by geocentrists against heliocentrism (actually, stationary Earth vs rotation, not about revolution). The argument is that if the Earth were rotating, a ball dropped from the Leaning Tower of Pisa should land a kilometer to the west. Or, to put it another way, there should be winds of 300 meters per second. The rebuttal to that argument is not “something, something, Newton,” but “something, something, Galileo.” Not everyone was convinced by Galileo, but the fact that he addressed the argument was a very big deal.
Why bring up the Coriolis effect? To say that the situation is complicated? Sure, it’s complicated, and a lot of people weren’t convinced by Galileo. But his simple argument is correct, to first approximation. And the relevant part of the Coriolis effect is not complicated. He could have computed, without Newton, that a ball dropped from the Leaning Tower would land 3 millimeters east. I don’t think he did this calculation and if he had, he would have discarded it as irrelevant to the debate. It is true that it would have provided a way to measure the rotation of the Earth, to distinguish the two hypotheses. This makes it very different from parallax, which has an additional free parameter, the distance to the fixed stars. A measurement of small parallax could be explained away as a large distance to the fixed stars, but the Coriolis effect makes a precise prediction. Heliocentrism predicts nonzero parallax, but the Coriolis effect predicts not just nonzero drift, but 3mm of drift. If you prove that the drift is more than 1mm, you disprove a stationary Earth. If you prove that the drift is less than 2mm, you disprove a stationary sphere of fixed stars.
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* Galileo also observed the phases of Venus, and most people treat this as more important. It appears to me that Ptolemy’s model also predicts the changing size of Venus. If the reason that Venus goes between 45° degrees east and west of the Sun is that it is traveling on an epicycle, then that circle should bring it close and far from the Earth. My impression is that very few people understood what Ptolemy actually said and a large part of Copernicus’s contribution was bothering to read Ptolemy.
Whereas the phases of Venus shows that the Venusian realm intersects the Solar realm, rather than being much farther away. They show that Venus goes around the Sun, rather than around a point that is on the radius through the Sun, but farther away.
I agree with your conclusions, but I have some complaints about this essay.
Do you really need 5000 words to present this? I’m not sure I’m reading you correctly, but you seem to boil it down to 3 points. Why not cut out most of the other material?
The 3 points that you present in the dialogue seem to me to be a pretty good summary of the debate in 1632. They are 3 issues that we recognize today as the most important and which I think the people in 1632 also recognized as most important. They probably didn’t see them as distinct from other important issues, just the top 3 on a list. But if you want to present this to people today you have to stop somewhere, and that seems like a pretty good place.
—
However, your treatments of those 2 of those 3 points are in serious error. You leave out Galileo’s two greatest contributions to science. Lack of parallax was a real strike against heliocentrism. As for the size of Venus, it was not only possible to observe, but Galileo did observe it changing in 1610.*
As for the Tower Argument, that was an argument made by geocentrists against heliocentrism (actually, stationary Earth vs rotation, not about revolution). The argument is that if the Earth were rotating, a ball dropped from the Leaning Tower of Pisa should land a kilometer to the west. Or, to put it another way, there should be winds of 300 meters per second. The rebuttal to that argument is not “something, something, Newton,” but “something, something, Galileo.” Not everyone was convinced by Galileo, but the fact that he addressed the argument was a very big deal.
Why bring up the Coriolis effect? To say that the situation is complicated? Sure, it’s complicated, and a lot of people weren’t convinced by Galileo. But his simple argument is correct, to first approximation. And the relevant part of the Coriolis effect is not complicated. He could have computed, without Newton, that a ball dropped from the Leaning Tower would land 3 millimeters east. I don’t think he did this calculation and if he had, he would have discarded it as irrelevant to the debate. It is true that it would have provided a way to measure the rotation of the Earth, to distinguish the two hypotheses. This makes it very different from parallax, which has an additional free parameter, the distance to the fixed stars. A measurement of small parallax could be explained away as a large distance to the fixed stars, but the Coriolis effect makes a precise prediction. Heliocentrism predicts nonzero parallax, but the Coriolis effect predicts not just nonzero drift, but 3mm of drift. If you prove that the drift is more than 1mm, you disprove a stationary Earth. If you prove that the drift is less than 2mm, you disprove a stationary sphere of fixed stars.
—
* Galileo also observed the phases of Venus, and most people treat this as more important. It appears to me that Ptolemy’s model also predicts the changing size of Venus. If the reason that Venus goes between 45° degrees east and west of the Sun is that it is traveling on an epicycle, then that circle should bring it close and far from the Earth. My impression is that very few people understood what Ptolemy actually said and a large part of Copernicus’s contribution was bothering to read Ptolemy.
Whereas the phases of Venus shows that the Venusian realm intersects the Solar realm, rather than being much farther away. They show that Venus goes around the Sun, rather than around a point that is on the radius through the Sun, but farther away.