Posted on 03/07/2010 11:42:51 AM PST by SeekAndFind
In the early seventeenth century a courageous and brilliant scientist, Galileo Galileo, confirmed heliocentrism, the idea first proposed a century earlier by Nicolaus Copernicus that the sun was at the center of the universe. Heliocentrism challenged geocentrism, the religiously motivated idea that a stationary earth was at the center of the universe. Galileo explained why heliocentrism was true and not surprisingly the church strongly opposed and persecuted the scientist. Ultimately, however, the truth could not be denied and church was forced to, once again, reluctantly give in to the objective truths of science.
That was the false history of the Galileo Affair according to later revisionists who promoted the view that science and religion were in conflict. In fact while Galileo indeed was brilliant, he also made it difficult for friendly voices to support him. Furthermore he did not confirm heliocentrism, and heliocentrism was not the only viable alternative to geocentrism. And geocentrism was hardly religiously motivated. The church had little objection to heliocentrism when Copernicus wrote of the model in the sixteenth century, and Copernicus was not the first to consider the idea.
The Galileo Affair is far more complex than the simple-minded warfare thesis supposes. Yes Pope John Paul II issued a declaration in 1992 acknowledging the church's errors. And the church was no doubt mistaken. But the church's action in the Galileo Affair was far more complex than simply opposing a scientific finding. In fact, there were at least four reasons why the church opposed Galileo's heliocentrism which confound the naive warfare thesis.
First, in Galileo's day internal church politics had made it less receptive to new ideas such as heliocentrism. Second, Galileo's style--such as satirizing his friend Pope Urban VII who had been a supporter--fomented opposition. Third, it was understood that science could devise models that, on the one hand fit the data but on the other hand were not true or approximately so. In fact, at the time it would not have been clear, without intuitive preference which Galileo seemed to have, that heliocentrism was obviously superior to geocentrism. In fact geocentrism modeled the celestial motions quite accurately. And finally, where geocentrism did fail, another alternative--Tycho Brahe's hybrid model--succeeded.
An important failure of geocentrism were the phases of Venus which indicated it circled the sun, not Earth. Galileo expounded upon this point, but what he failed to mention was that the Tychonic system, in which the sun circles the earth and the inner planets in turn circle the sun, handled the phases of Venus just fine.
In fact new research reported on this week indicates another problem with Galileo's firmly held views. When observing stars through a telescope, as Galileo did, they do not appear as points of light, as they should, but as a small extended area, or disk, as did the planets. This disk appearance is due to the diffraction of light which was unknown at the time.
Of course the stars were assumed to be like the sun, and therefore much larger than the planets. Given their larger size the observed small disk meant they must have been much farther away than the planets. But the calculated distances to the stars were thousands of times less than what we now calculate. Yes the stars were far away, but those small disks were misleading. The diffracting light made the stars appear closer than they actually are.
Galileo was therefore assuming the stars were much closer than they actually are. Why is this important? Consider objects you observe out the window as you sit in a moving train. A nearby tree may be behind a closer tree, but as the train moves you will see the farther tree emerge as your angle changes. Two stars in the sky, on the other hand, do not move in relation to each other as you move along, because they are so far away.
Because Galileo calculated the stars to be much closer than they actually are, he would necessarily expect to see some change in their relative positions as the earth circled the sun in his heliocentric model. But no such relative change was observed. It was an important failure of Galileo's model which, again, he did not mention. And again, it was an observation that the Tychonic system handled just fine.
What the new research points out is that a contemporary of Galileo, the German astronomer Simon Marius, famous for naming the moons of Jupiter, was aware of these implications and followed them to their logical conclusion.
While Galileo was making high claims for heliocentrism, Marius had made clear in his 1614 book Mundus Iovialis (The Jovian World), that the observations confirmed the earth-centered Tychonic system.
The new paper, aptly entitled "How Marius Was Right and Galileo Was Wrong Even Though Galileo Was Right and Marius Was Wrong," is another example of how not just science, but the history of science, is more complicated than self-serving black-white renditions would have it.
They all got it wrong.
Barack Obama is the center of the universe.
Just ask him.
Hail to the Queen!
Exactly.
Which is why the claim that the Earth is at the centre of the universe, is bull.
You’d have to do a whole circus of academic gymnastics, to account for all physical phenomena, to support that view.
Greek Pagans?
The Sect of the Golden Compass.
I’ve seen multiple references and articles over the past few years, regarding a cosmological model attributed to astrophysicist Dr. George Ellis, of a semi-geocentric universe containing a naked singularity as a recycling mechanism, a model that does not require mysterious “dark matter,” messierhunter. It would seem your objections are not entirely valid.
Latitude, Altitude, Attitude... it’s all the same.
Racist.
I bet a black mountain climber could beat a white mountain climber.
That sounds kinda dirty.
He was an Alexandrian Greek, and belonged to late antiquity. His work references observations made between 127 and 151 A.D. The Introduction to the Great Books edition of The Almagest notes:
The geocentric theory of Ptolemy was not the only theory known to the Greeks nor even at times the most accepted. The Pythagoreans, prior to Plato, had theories involving a motion of the earth, and we know that Aristarchus of Samos after Plato had a heliocentric theory which in all essentials was that of Copernicus.
Ptolemy's theory of the planetary motions was a great achievement, but his perfunctory reasoning justifying geocentrism and his insistence on the doctrine that the unchanging Heavens are utterly distinct from the changeable and corruptible sublunary sphere, to which the science of physics is confined, certainly give a premonition of scholasticism, and may even be the same thing; that is, founded on religious doctrine.
Certainly these doctrines are alien to the way of thinking that we see in Aristarchus, whose theorizing seems so modern in style and approach, even though we have only glimpses of it.
So, Greek pagans constituted an early church, some "politician" voted geocentrism into law to win election, and it was all an act on Ptolemy's part, to avoid sanction by these Greek pagans?
Do I have your intended meaning right, here?
It’s that Greek pagan influence, they just rolled that way, you know.
Ptolemy's theory of the planetary motions was a great achievement, but his perfunctory reasoning justifying geocentrism and his insistence on the doctrine that the unchanging Heavens are utterly distinct from the changeable and corruptible sublunary sphere, to which the science of physics is confined, certainly give a premonition of scholasticism, and may even be the same thing; that is, founded on religious doctrine.
Yeah, what Dr_Lew said.
You’re just being silly now. Can you successfully paraphrase what you’ve cited? I’m beginning to suspect that you can’t.
This book is by Einstein and Infeld, and as per Clark’s biography of Einstein, Infeld approached Einstein with the idea of collaborating on a popular work because he was in financial straits. Einstein was aware of this, and the implication seems to be that he agreed to it as a kindness to Infeld, who pretty much carried the load.
This is not to say that Einstein didn’t actually collaborate, and even if Infeld did the writing I’m sure he would have taken pains to reflect Einstein’s views, which were pretty well known to him. At the same time, one should be careful about attributing any particular implications to Einstein personally.
The cite I provided is taken from a question-and-answer format in the book itself, with Albert Einstein answering the questions posed by Infeld, dr_lew.
I provided a link to archive.org. The entire book is available there, for free download. Give it a look.
What I was saying was that it is our 'perception' through history books (altered to fit perception) that before the Sun centered astronomy, we only had Earth centered astronomy, and before that men lived in caves and were quite stupid.
Much of this has to do with the influence of religion.
None of it is true.
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