The first part of this article lowered my expectations, but maybe it’s the sort of thing some people need to hear, so okay.
But in the second part, you tell a few flat-out lies—about historical context, about the work of Galileo, and about what evidence contemporaries had. For a more complete picture, as usual, I recommend wikipedia, specifically this page on the timeline of heliocentrism. Especially if you don’t know what was going on with Brahe and Kepler—or like me, you didn’t have a good understanding of when these things happened relative to each other.
But in the second part, you tell a few flat-out lies
Please tell me exactly what you consider to be a flat-out lie, preferably with proof. Otherwise you did nothing but accept only what you believe in, and refuse proofs supporting what you don’t believe in.
When you say “The heliocentric view had only a single advantage against the geocentric one: it could describe the motion of the planets by a much simper formula,” you falsely do it a service, because you overstate the practical differences. Galileo was no Kepler—he didn’t have improved observational accuracy. The Copernican model and the Tychonic model (adopted by the Catholic church only a decade and change before Galileo published the Dialogue) make basically the same predictions for planetary movement.
This means the really interesting lie is “The geocentric view had a very simple explanation, dating back to Aristotle: it is the nature of all objects that they strive towards the center of the world, and the center of the spherical Earth is the center of the world. The heliocentric theory couldn’t counter this argument.” Because Galileo’s answer is what this was really about! If Tycho Brahe was right, Earth was made of a lazy type of matter, which desired to be at rest and fall down, while the heavens followed an entirely different set of rules that demanded perpetual motion. But if Galileo was right, an object in motion would stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force, whether on earth or in the heavens.
After 1610 or so, if one had a decent understanding of astronomy, one accepted that Ptolemy was wrong and that heliocentrism was now not about overthrowing the Greeks’ astronomy, but their mechanics. Who was right? Was it Aristotle and Brahe? Or was it Descartes and Galileo? Of course, the discussion would have been a lot more interesting if the church hadn’t started banning the books of one side after they declared heliocentrism heretical, but oh well.
This is a very insightful comment—in the sense of making something “click” for me that hadn’t done so before. Namely:
After 1610 or so, if one had a decent understanding of astronomy, one accepted that Ptolemy was wrong and that heliocentrism was now not about overthrowing the Greeks’ astronomy, but their mechanics
So, thank you.
(Cf. Douglas Knight’s comment, which also implies that Galilean relativity was central to the argument.)
The first part of this article lowered my expectations, but maybe it’s the sort of thing some people need to hear, so okay.
But in the second part, you tell a few flat-out lies—about historical context, about the work of Galileo, and about what evidence contemporaries had. For a more complete picture, as usual, I recommend wikipedia, specifically this page on the timeline of heliocentrism. Especially if you don’t know what was going on with Brahe and Kepler—or like me, you didn’t have a good understanding of when these things happened relative to each other.
Please tell me exactly what you consider to be a flat-out lie, preferably with proof. Otherwise you did nothing but accept only what you believe in, and refuse proofs supporting what you don’t believe in.
When you say “The heliocentric view had only a single advantage against the geocentric one: it could describe the motion of the planets by a much simper formula,” you falsely do it a service, because you overstate the practical differences. Galileo was no Kepler—he didn’t have improved observational accuracy. The Copernican model and the Tychonic model (adopted by the Catholic church only a decade and change before Galileo published the Dialogue) make basically the same predictions for planetary movement.
This means the really interesting lie is “The geocentric view had a very simple explanation, dating back to Aristotle: it is the nature of all objects that they strive towards the center of the world, and the center of the spherical Earth is the center of the world. The heliocentric theory couldn’t counter this argument.” Because Galileo’s answer is what this was really about! If Tycho Brahe was right, Earth was made of a lazy type of matter, which desired to be at rest and fall down, while the heavens followed an entirely different set of rules that demanded perpetual motion. But if Galileo was right, an object in motion would stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force, whether on earth or in the heavens.
After 1610 or so, if one had a decent understanding of astronomy, one accepted that Ptolemy was wrong and that heliocentrism was now not about overthrowing the Greeks’ astronomy, but their mechanics. Who was right? Was it Aristotle and Brahe? Or was it Descartes and Galileo? Of course, the discussion would have been a lot more interesting if the church hadn’t started banning the books of one side after they declared heliocentrism heretical, but oh well.
This is a very insightful comment—in the sense of making something “click” for me that hadn’t done so before. Namely:
So, thank you.
(Cf. Douglas Knight’s comment, which also implies that Galilean relativity was central to the argument.)