No, it isn’t. People believe the Catholic hierarchy opposed heliocentrism on biblical grounds, which they did. I’ll grant you this paints an incomplete picture. But phrasing it as a “deliberate purpose of hindering scientific progress” is a clear strawman.
Copernicus didn’t have any affairs with the Inquisition.
Perhaps because he published and died at roughly the same time. His followers apparently did not make much of a fuss before Galileo.
They used Aristotle and, for the time being, good scientific reasoning.
Until this proved impossible, in a difference you conceal under the phrase “a lot of very complicated formulas”. Actually, geocentrism required a departure from the regular circular motions that Aristotle’s physics predicted. They called it the “equant”. As a physical process it would be a non-circular motion, though we could find other ways to interpret it. And even Tycho Brahe required this (see the third use of the term, if it doesn’t take you there). Note that Kepler discovered this before your Riccioli wrote the book you speak of, and indeed Kepler published his more correct heliocentric account—to explain the observations—long before. (I’ll grant you Kepler included a lot of other ideas, probably all wrong.) Newton founded modern science by building on Kepler, hence the lack of interest in the later work of Riccioli.
No, it isn’t. People believe the Catholic hierarchy opposed heliocentrism on biblical grounds, which they did. I’ll grant you this paints an incomplete picture. But phrasing it as a “deliberate purpose of hindering scientific progress” is a clear strawman.
Perhaps because he published and died at roughly the same time. His followers apparently did not make much of a fuss before Galileo.
Until this proved impossible, in a difference you conceal under the phrase “a lot of very complicated formulas”. Actually, geocentrism required a departure from the regular circular motions that Aristotle’s physics predicted. They called it the “equant”. As a physical process it would be a non-circular motion, though we could find other ways to interpret it. And even Tycho Brahe required this (see the third use of the term, if it doesn’t take you there). Note that Kepler discovered this before your Riccioli wrote the book you speak of, and indeed Kepler published his more correct heliocentric account—to explain the observations—long before. (I’ll grant you Kepler included a lot of other ideas, probably all wrong.) Newton founded modern science by building on Kepler, hence the lack of interest in the later work of Riccioli.