Haha, in some ways, I think we've been in it for a hundred years, in other ways, we're still in the old one... same hysterical ad-hominem attacks on new ideas, religiously held dogma, idolisation of 'great men of science' and so on...seasmith wrote:Are we now entering another dark age ?
I think these days, the new 'god' is science itself, as if looking at something and measuring it somehow makes you wise, as if applying enough new terms in newly minted Greek words makes us the 'inventor' of the amazing things going on around us... flux tubes come to mind for some reason... these things have been going on since Aristarchus' time, presumably....seasmith wrote:The ancients knew the sun was the center, just as they knew about precession of the equinoxes.
It wasn't until later 'dark ages' that the Earth was made ego-centric center of the universe.
Haha yes, its true... the ancients knew about the sun as centre of the solar system...
At first, it was ***scientists, as well as religion, who opposed the revived heliocentric hypothesis:Aristarchus of Samos (ca. 310 BCE – ca. 230 BCE) was the first to advance a theory that the earth orbited the sun. Further mathematical details of Aristarchus' heliocentric system were worked out around 150 BCE by the Hellenistic astronomer Seleucus of Seleucia. Though Aristarchus' original text has been lost, a reference in Archimedes' book The Sand Reckoner (Archimedis Syracusani Arenarius & Dimensio Circuli) describes a work by Aristarchus in which he advanced the heliocentric model. Thomas Heath gives the following English translation of Archimedes' text:
Copernicus cited Aristarchus of Samos in an early (unpublished) manuscript of De Revolutionibus (which still survives)Aristarchus of Samos wrote: You are now aware ['you' being King Gelon] that the "universe" is the name given by most astronomers to the sphere the centre of which is the centre of the earth, while its radius is equal to the straight line between the centre of the sun and the centre of the earth. This is the common account (τά γραφόμενα) as you have heard from astronomers. But Aristarchus has brought out a book consisting of certain hypotheses, wherein it appears, as a consequence of the assumptions made, that the universe is many times greater than the "universe" just mentioned. His hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the sun remain unmoved, that the earth revolves about the sun on the circumference of a circle, the sun lying in the middle of the orbit, and that the sphere of the fixed stars, situated about the same centre as the sun, is so great that the circle in which he supposes the earth to revolve bears such a proportion to the distance of the fixed stars as the centre of the sphere bears to its surface.
— The Sand Reckoner
Copernicus was criticised for not inventing a 'cause' for the Earth's motion....The prevailing theory in Europe during Copernicus's lifetime was the one that Ptolemy published in his Almagest circa 150 CE; the Earth was the stationary center of the universe. Stars were embedded in a large outer sphere which rotated rapidly, approximately daily, while each of the planets, the Sun, and the Moon were embedded in their own, smaller spheres. Ptolemy's system employed devices, including epicycles, deferents and equants, to account for observations that the paths of these bodies differed from simple, circular orbits centered on the Earth.
Copernicanism was absurd, according to Tolosani, because it was scientifically unproven and unfounded. First, Copernicus had assumed the motion of the Earth but offered no physical theory whereby one would deduce this motion.
(No one realized that the investigation into Copernicanism would result in a rethinking of the entire field of physics.)
It was Science of Copernicus' day rejected the heliocentric theory, even ***before the Roman Catholic church got involved:Galileo's championing of heliocentrism and Copernicanism was controversial during his lifetime, when most subscribed to either geocentrism or the Tychonic system. He met with opposition from astronomers, who doubted heliocentrism because of the absence of an observed stellar parallax.
So Aristarchus of Samos had only been dead nearly 2000 years before his theory was reconsidered by 'scientists', generally accepted, and pronounced to be truly 'scientific', you'd have to be very patientCopernicus's theory was originally slow to catch on. Scholars hold that sixty years after the publication of The Revolutions there were only around 15 astronomers espousing Copernicanism in all of Europe:
The intellectual climate of the time "remained dominated by Aristotelian philosophy and the corresponding Ptolemaic astronomy. At that time there was no reason to accept the Copernican theory, except for its mathematical simplicity [by avoiding using the equant in determining planetary positions]." Tycho Brahe's system ("that the earth is stationary, the sun revolves about the earth, and the other planets revolve about the sun") also directly competed with Copernicus's. It was only a half century later with the work of Kepler and Galileo that any substantial evidence defending Copernicanism appeared, starting "from the time when Galileo formulated the principle of inertia...[which] helped to explain why everything would not fall off the earth if it were in motion." "[Not until] after Isaac Newton formulated the universal law of gravitation and the laws of mechanics [in his 1687 Principia], which unified terrestrial and celestial mechanics, was the heliocentric view generally accepted."
The matter was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, which concluded that heliocentrism was "foolish and absurd in philosophy, ***and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture."