Re: Part of the canon/flat earth issue

ktredwell@xxxxxx wrote:
>
> "Stupid" is an extreme word to apply to people like Aristotle, Ptolemy,
> Thomas Aquinas, Regiomontanus, and Tycho. These people did not enjoy
> the benefit of being told from childhood that the Earth moves, as you
> probably did. Instead they adopted the equally reasonable explanation,
> offered by their cultures, that the celestial objects are
> interconnected and share a single motion. Would you really call them
> stupid because they failed to take a leap of imagination that, by all
> accounts, was very difficult?

Your point is well taken. In thos days people believed the stars were
lights pasted on the Celestial Sphere. So when the sphere turned, all
the stars moved about at once. It took a long time to realize that the
stars were not lights pasted on a crystal sphere, but glowing bodies
very, very far away.

Here is a question. How did the morning appearence of the sun over
horizon appeart to a Ptolemaist and how does it appear to a Copernican?
Answer: exactly the same.

Galileo thought he had -proven- Copernicus right in proposing his theory
of tides, which was, pardon the pun, all wet. Galileo believed that
tides are like the sloshing of water in a bath tub and it is the turning
of the earth that drives the slosh about the globe. Unfortunately there
there two tides a day so Galileo's explanation becomes a cropper.

Cardinal Bellarime was right in chiding Galileo for asserting the
Copernican hypothesis as a fact. The proof of the earth's motions would
not be at hand for another two hundred years.

Bob Kolker

.

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