But once Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo realized the planets orbit the Sun
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The the planets orbiting the Sun goes back to antiquity. the aforementioned Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo just rediscovered the knowledge lost with the fall of the Roman Empire, the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, and the Dark Ages - typified by the muslim invasion and their destruction of everything that was not found in the koran, hadiths or sunnahs, or was not useful in some way to them at different times and countries. Everything else they burned or destroyed in their murderous zeal to destroy classical western civilization and classical Christianity.
While Aristarchus championed a heliocentric model, his “discovery” was little more than speculation. The superiority of Ptolemy’s model was that it could be used to make useful predictions. It wasn’t until Tycho made long-term accurate measurements of planetary motion that a better theory was necessary. Copernicus’s theory really isn’t any better, in that its predictions were no more accurate than Ptolemy’s. In fact, given that Copernicus needed more terms, literally more epicycles, it involved more computations and more parameters. Occam’s razor favors Ptolemy over Copernicus.
Kepler’s theory, or simply Kepler’s laws were the first real advance over Ptolemy in 1400 years. Coupled with Newton’s Law of Motion (published by Hook 12 years earlier, and usurped by Newton without attribution) they revolutionized astronomy, and ultimately, science.