3 comments

  1. Right. I took some history and philosphy of science, and remember the good (in contemporary context) arguments against heliocentrism. The author makes an IMHO shaky start regarding “motion” issues per se, but then notes the best example I’d heard earlier: stars should show observable parallax unless very far away. Well, they *do* for us, but it didn’t make much sense then for “stars” – whatever they were – to be thousands of times farther away than planets. (In 16-17th Cs we knew surprisingly much about the scale of the Solar System layout.)

    Also, there’s the point that with GR and Machian perspective there really isn’t supposed to be a “who is really moving” – ! (Yes, even with circular motion.) Sure, the Earth is “the one moving” in a simplest approximation to an inertial frame. But still, confident assertion that Earth moves instead of the Sun is flabby. That’s something Galileo should get … (BTW, he understood the sort of inertial relativity bearing his name – anyone REM more on his thoughts about circular motion, c.f. the Newton bucket etc?)

    BTW, Fourier analysis means that “in principle” we can indeed construct orbits out of epicycles, albeit clumsy and perhaps requiring infinite series for perfect match.

    Well, it makes me wonder: what apparently “justified” intuitions of today’s scientists, are misleading them now?

  2. Also, note that Mercury and Venus have to be going around the Sun anyway to explain their not circling all around our apparent sky! So people already had to think that *something* went around the Sun, despite the sloppy characterizations of “everything was thought to circle the Earth.” Furthermore, people say the phases of Venus noted by Galileo supported heliocentrism, but those phases would be seen regardless of whether the Sun+Mercury+Venus revolved together around the Earth, nor just the latter two around the Sun along with the Earth (remember, my point about relative motion!) Note also regarding Galilean moons of Jupiter, since they weren’t the first bodies to necessarily not orbit the Earth.

    But weren’t there issue with explaining seasons, the whole axis thing? We hear so little about that.

  3. Neil Bates asks: What apparently “justified” intuitions of today’s scientists, are misleading them now?

    The Geocentric model had the “advantage” that it put humanity at the centre of everything – and we all “know” that we are very very very special – so it must be true

    May I suggest that much research into the brain and human intelligence is based on the idea that we are very very very special. To confirm we are so special we have created the word “intelligent” to prove how intelligent we are.

    I am currently just setting up a Brain Storm on my blog (www.trapped-by-the-box.blogspot.com) which is hoping to look at this very issue and might interest you. Ideas that I think will come out of it could be

    (1) The basic information processing mechanisms of the human brain are no more special than the giraffe’s neck. Some parts of it have been significantly expanded to cope with the demand for more processing power to cope with an increasing cultural load.

    (2) The big difference between and the Great Apes (apart form extra processing capacity in a larger brain) is virtually all cultural – and this includes what we chose to call intelligence – which depends on what we learn – and not the basic biological properties of the neurons in our brain.

    (3) The widely used “stored program computer” model has led to the mad search for the right “intelligence algorithms”. No-one seems to have stopped ask the question “Which came first, the program or the data?”

Comments are closed.