Well sure, there were discrepancies and difficulties with the prevailing theory. Lots of people were working on it. However the arbitrariness of Copernicus' thought isn't far off the mark. As I have mentioned before (a couple of times and for this very reason) the Tychonic scheme was a good an explanation as the Copernican, better in fact because it explains the lack of apparent motion of the stars due to the earth's motion in the Copernican scheme. Suppose Copernicus had thought of Tycho's scheme first. Galileo might never have been persecuted.
in a certain way Copernicus was radical, and he was right.
I said science is conservative. I hope you agree that science can be conservative even if not all scientists are. But, was Copernicus radical? Certainly he had a new and promising idea, but he also kept circular motion and even added epicycles. Was Einstein radical? He turned physics upside down. But he could never reconcile himself to the reality of QM. I don't think radical is the right term.
There were radicals though. For example, when Napolean asked Laplace why his book didn't mention God, he reportedly said "I have no need of that hypothesis." Methodological naturalism was a radical development. The overthrow of determinism with QM is another. I guess my point is that radicalism in science has more to do with changing the underlying philosophy in a fundamental way. On the scale of radical-ness then I'd put Copernicus way down the list.
Everything I know about fossils, besides a few I've gotten to hold in my hand, comes from the testimony of other observers.
So? Everything I know about virtually everything is that way. I've never seen the Eiffel Tower first hand. I've never seen George Bush in person. China? They say there're over a billion people there, but I've never seen them.
I think what you may have been trying to say is that the interpretation of fossils is suspect and arbitrary because it is theory laden. Have I got that right?
Quantum Mechanics was accepted almost instantly (during 1926 or so). Einstein only thought QM incomplete, not wrong. QM was accepted because it explained so many things; the periodic table, radioactive decay, electron diffraction, heat capacities, the photoelectric effect, superfluidity, etc. Physics went from Laplacian-deterministic to Heisenbergian-random in less than a year.