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.
Not any more than any of the other posters. You have to admit, some of them are being quite silly.
So says you, and then we have the preeminent physicist of the past century disagreeing with you, and several fairly preeminent ones in the present century as well.
Tell me something - what is your objective experience of life on this Earth, as far as motion? What do you sense, what do you see? You see the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. You see the moon rise and set as well.
You are engaging in the very point of view that you claim is untrue, when you do so.
So, it’s obviously not untrue. But, it’s not “right,” nor is it “wrong.” What does your purporting, that the origin of this frame of reference is religion, have to do with anything, in light of this?
I've got to call BS on this one. There is NO WAY that observing Mars, Venus and Saturn rotating around the sun, could possibly fit any theory where they rotate around the earth. Absolutely no way. Uh uh. I don't buy it. No way.
Of course, this is our SUBjective experience. We can make direct objective models of it, such as the celestial sphere, and this is more or less what Ptolemy did, but he invested this model with absolute reality, and explicit states that it embodies the division between Heaven above and Earth below. He states that Heaven is perfect and unchangeable, and this is what allows it to be treated of mathematically, which is impossible for the changeable and corruptible Earth. It's not a simple question of reference frames, which already presumes a Heaven which can be understood by Earthly dynamics.
Sunrise and sunset most certainly are not subjective, dr_lew. Both are routinely forecast for any given locality on the planet, predicted well in advance. Data for these events have been published for centuries, and continue to be published.
It is no matter of opinion; sunrise and sunset occurs, whether you believe in such occurance or not (and you appear to be putting yourself in the odd position of disbelief). You can detect and record sunrise and sunset in numerous ways, independent of human observation.
Disagree with what?
Tell me something - what is your objective experience of life on this Earth, as far as motion?
Same as yours. We see things in the sky move, and yet we think we are not moving. We are actually moving quite fast in several directions at once, and I don't think any of them is an a straight line.
You are engaging in the very point of view that you claim is untrue, when you do so.
What point of view? Several have been discussed. Which one are you complaining about?
What does your purporting, that the origin of this frame of reference is religion, have to do with anything, in light of this?
This is really the focus of your opposition, is it not?
I will try to be simple. Many people 'had' their worldview locked into the precepts of the Bible where Earth is the center of everything. At least that is what those who 'translate' the Bible, say it 'means'. That has had an effect on people's beliefs. What they 'believe' about Copernicus, or any other astronomer/philosopher many times has little to do with the truth.
... and your reflexive opposition to what Einstein termed a “coordinate system” that was held by a religion is fueled merely by reflexive opposition to religion itself, and not due to any consideration of the objective, observable data available to you, that confirm that coordinate system.
So, how is this reflexive opposition to and avoidance of any conclusion that might somehow support some ancient, religious belief, any more scientific, than seeking to validate those same beliefs via science?
One represents gaping holes and manipulation, in order to avoid the “horror,” as Edwin Hubble put it, of concluding that Earth actually does hold a privileged place in the cosmos. The other represents an attempt at directing science in pursuit of a preestablished conclusion. There is precious little difference between the two, when it’s all said and done.
Go where it leads, wherever that might be. If our planet is privileged, then it is. Science is not served by pretending otherwise due to revulsion over validating some religious precept, it’s agnostic, as Einstein was.
The very words themselves describe the subjective experience. The sun and moon don’t objectively rise and set. These actions are apparent and depend on a point of view. Ancient peoples took this appearance for an objective fact, and hypothesized that after setting the sun traveled beneath the earth by various special means to reappear at its place of rising. This was a direct objectification of the subjective appearance. As moderns, we give objective accounts of the cause of these appearances, but recognize that the appearance is an illusion, just as it is an illusion that the moon “follows along” with you when you watch it from a car window, even though this can be accounted for objectively.
Really?
Returning to the cite that provoked this exchange, from The Evolution Of Physics, you are making a distinction that has been rendered meaningless by GR.
So this whole Global Warming / Gaia / Inconvenient Truth / Al Gore worshipping thing is just a figment of my imagination?
Boy, I'm not seeing this. I find your excerpt on page 212 of the Google Books "review" and there is no such Q&A evident anywhere leading up to it. There are some sequences of rhetorical Q&A and one where a "classical physicist" is imagined to be giving responses to questions, but I see no instance of such an interplay represented as being between the co-authors. So, I think my caveat applies.
Anyway, let me address the point itself. It comes from a section emphasizing the difficulty of identifying an inertial frame, as posited by Newtonian dynamics, and makes the statement then, that this is not necessary to do.
But what do you do in this case?
"Nothing is more distressing on first contact with the idea of "curved spacetime" than the fear that every simple means of measurement has lost its power in this unfamiliar context" - MTW, GRAVITATION
This is on page 5 of the introductory chapter 1, prefatory to a description of "Locally Lorentz" frames of reference, as determined operationally by a "Lorentzometer", which is pictured ( a sort of Rube Goldberg affair. ) The point is that the GLOBAL inertial frames of Newtonian dynamics have been abandoned, but the idea of inertial frames ( i.e Locally Lorentz frames ) has not. Locally Lorentz frames are the bedrock of GR, by which everything else is triangulated.
In contrast to Newton, gravity is not considered a force in GR, and any body in "free fall", e.g. in orbit around the earth, will pass the Lorentzometer test. The geodesics of spacetime are simply those paths followed by objects in free fall, and we can quickly see that the planetary orbits are such geodesics.
Of course, this determination, made operationally as described, is independent of "choice of coordinate system". This amounts to a more sophisticated expression of Copernicanism, and while it may sweep away the TERMS in which Copernicanism was stated, it does not in any way vitiate its substance.
This is a prime example of politicized science, of which I'd imagined Einstein as being rather dismissive previously, UCANSEE2. Perhaps I should have been more specific. The revulsion is invariably directed at validating any Christian religious precept.
The faux religiosity of Gore and those like him has been cloaked with science for decades, with the acquiescence of scientists, precisely because it's hostile to the dominant religious paradigm in the dominant, nonsocialist nation of the world. This is just a logical progression, from mere avoidance, to outright advocacy in opposition. Poltical activism, in other words.
As such it's not science, despite the widespread derision of anyone in science who dared to question the so-called "consensus" up to, what, last year, when the whole charade began to publicly fall apart, due to a few brave souls within the "climate change" apparatus beginning to surreptitiously release internal communications detailing the scale of the fraud, perpetrated via ommission and/or manipulation of data?
Omission and manipulation of data ... seems this was mentioned upthread, wasn't it?
I last read the book in 2009, so I may have conflated the Q&A with Einstein’s statements, but the cite in question was plainly his response, because the premise of the entire book was to provide an accessible and understandable explanation of what was then a rather radical departure.
It strikes me as being highly doubtful, that such a controversial, supposed “misrepresentation” of his work would have been somehow overlooked by Einstein, in a book he was credited with co-authoring. so there again, it’s not Infeld doing the talking, there.
Regarding the remainder of your reply, it’s going to have to wait until this evening, being a workday Monday morning as it is.
What revulsion? I stated that religion could and has had an effect on changes in world-awareness, whether it be astronomy or oceanography. The professional society and philosophers have also had the same 'restraining' effect when someone proposes new 'beliefs' or 'theories'. It is going on today with the Global Warming Issue.
It has happened, it is happening now, and it will likely ever be that way. People are very resistant to a change in their matrix, whether it be a change to their religious, or their scientific viewpoint.
The real issue is not science, not religion, not morality.
The issue is, people are stubborn, and what they believe about the past can be quite at odds with the reality of the past.
I thought this was what the article was about. Guess I'm wrong.
(I just like reading run-on sentences.)
Oh, it's a privileged place. It is the most important planet in the Universe. So much so, we would DIE without it.
For all you know, everything I claim may be untrue.
Well, if you put in horses to draw them across the sky like chariots, then you can.
You mean in this part? "Why Galileo was Wrong, Even Though He was Right"
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