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Geocentrism: Galileo Was Wrong

I think they're going to find a lot more people willing to pay good money for mugs and t-shirts than are willing to read their thesis.

Which might be the point.
 
Pope praises Galileo's astronomy

Pope Benedict XVI has paid tribute to 17th-Century astronomer Galileo Galilei, whose scientific theories once drew the wrath of the Catholic Church.

The Pope was speaking at events marking the 400th anniversary of Galileo's earliest observations with a telescope.

He said an understanding of the laws of nature could stimulate appreciation of God's work.

In 1992, Pope John Paul said the church's denunciation of Galileo's work had been a tragic error.

Galileo used his scientific methods to demonstrate that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not the other way around.

His view directly challenged the church's view at the time - that the Earth was static and at the centre of the universe.

Galileo was accused of heresy in 1633 and forced to publically recant his theories.

He lived the rest of his life under house arrest at his villa in the hills outside Florence.

Pope Benedict had been criticised in the past for appearing to condone the heresy verdict against Galileo.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7794668.stm

At last it seems that everyone agrees - Galilieo was right!
:D
 
sorry to be the fly in the ointment folks, whilst I agree the church was wrong I not totally convinced that Galileo had it 100% right. I have a hard time trying to mentally construct circular orbits when everything is rushing through space at fantastic speeds. I can only see sine waves. No, I've not been drinking and I'm only smoking tobacco. :shock:
 
Galileo wasn't 100% right and the orbits aren't circular, they're eliptical, not to mention on a lot of different planes, so sine waves may be a fruitful construct under certain conditions. Perhaps you could take a few astronomy courses and play with the idea.

In science, the goal is not to be 100% right (which is impossible). It is to be less wrong than you were before doing your research/experiment/study of the literature, and to proceed to further advances and discoveries from there.

Given that nature is infinite, and the human mind is finite, that goal isn't as modest as it sounds. It's all we can reasonably expect of ourselves.
 
What I was taught in childhood Roman Catholic education (and, yes, of course, consider the source) was that Galileo was NOT condemned by the Church for maintaining that the Earth revolved around the Sun. That was pretty much accepted belief by Galileo's day.

He ran afoul of the Church for his attempts to prove the Copernican
theory by use of biblical quotes, and he was (apparently) as rotten a Bible scholar as great as he was as an astronomer and cosmologist.

"But it still moves!" Galileo said at the end of the hearing. Many sources insist (without documentation) that he whispered this under his breath.

Yet if that was actually the truth, why do we all know his proclamation?

But Galileo said it OUT LOUD. He used it in the sense of "Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water." It wasn't the Copernican system which had been under attack!
 
According to the only book I ever read on the subject, *Gallileo's Daughter,* (David Sobel, Walker & Co., 1999), the work in which Gallileo laid out the Copernican system was marketed as a discussion of the evidence and arguments for the Classical vs. the Copernican system, in the form of an imaginary dialog, and what the Pope objected to was that most readers regarded the Copernican argument as the winning one. The defense was that he wrote the book partly to answer Protestant assertions that Catholic countries rejected Copernicus because they didn't understand the science involved. By laying out each set of arguments impartially, but not authorially favoring one over the other, he refuted that charge and left the reader free to make up his own mind. It's not his fault if Catholic readers found the Copernican arguments stronger than the Classical ones. The Catholic party line on this subject, then, would seem to be that he did not present the arguments impartially, but misrepresented the Classical argument with bad theology.

I have two other books on the subject, but haven't read them yet. This one, which collects the surviving correspondence between Gallileo and his older daughter, a nun in the Convent of San Matteo in Florence, presents a charming picture of Gallileo running errands and conducting business on behalf of the nuns, who in turn mended his shirts, and followed his ongoing troubles with the Inquisition with sympathetic interest, cheering for his victories and rooting for him against the Pope. Gallileo lived on the same street as the convent, and since the nuns couldn't leave and outsiders couldn't enter (they could, under certain conditions, communicate through a small hole in one door), the families of inmates nearest geographically were an important resource, both for the convent as an institution, and for the nuns from out-of-town.

History looks simple in broad overview. Look at the details and it all becomes much more complex and interesting.
 
Thank you very sincerely, Peni, for the clarification and additional information.
 
yes, I probably need a deeper understanding of astonomy. If I plot time and space on a graph it shows sine waves not circles. either the graph is an illusion or the received wisdom is and I'm not sure which.
 
Don't limit yourself to two options. If there's anything Fortean studies can show you, it's that our mental constructs of reality are a convenient way to limit our perception of the world to something we can grasp. Reality is not constrained by the way we look at it. Look at the "paradox" of quanta. People talk as if quanta acted sometimes like a wave and sometimes like a particle. Nonsense. Quanta always act like quanta - but so far we haven't been able to envision quanta except in terms of those two metaphors. This allows us to deal with them at all, but until someone grasps quantum behavior at a level beyond that we'll be limited in where we can go in experimenting with them.

The received wisdom can be right as far as it goes without excluding the possibility that the angle you're looking at the data from reveals a different truth. That was the case with Newton and Einstein, for example. Newtonian physics still works just fine for the systems it was describing; but it didn't describe everything, ane when physics got to the point of trying to understand those anomalies, Einsteinian physics was necessary to get past that point. It's the nature of the beast. Until we're prepared to ask the right questions, we can't get more nearly right answers.

Whether we're ready for the next set of refinements in astronomy, I have no idea. Even if you're having a breakthrough, you'll have to understand the received wisdom really well in order to demonstrate that breakthrough to others without being dismissed as a crackpot. It's a career choice and the rewards aren't guaranteed.
 
"But it still moves!" Galileo said at the end of the hearing. Many sources insist (without documentation) that he whispered this under his breath.

Yet if that was actually the truth, why do we all know his proclamation?

But Galileo said it OUT LOUD. He used it in the sense of "Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water." It wasn't the Copernican system which had been under attack!

If he really uttered it at all ...

This lengthy essay examines the evidence for the story of Galileo's "And yet it moves" statement. To date the surviving evidence doesn't indicate the story dates back as far as Galileo's time.

Did Galileo Truly Say, ‘And Yet It Moves’? A Modern Detective Story
https://blogs.scientificamerican.co...ay-and-yet-it-moves-a-modern-detective-story/
 

Clever. Not wise, but clever. Using a slow and deliberate speaking style, flattering his audience a little with assuming their understanding of science, promising not to hit them with too much detail, and acknowledging that one of the few scientists they've heard of — Newton — was "right".

Here's the gist of his argument: Newton did not say that the Earth revolves around the Sun, or that the Sun revolves around the Earth. Newton said that the Earth and the Sun both revolve around a common point: the centre of mass of the two of them. (So far so good.)

He then asks, "But what if there are more than two bodies?" A perfectly valid question.

He then says that you need to calculate a single centre of mass for all of the bodies, and that they all revolve around that.

Yes, in a sense, he is right. The Sun, 8 planets, their moons, Pluto, the asteroids and the comets all revolve around the centre of mass of the solar system; all of the solar systems of the galaxy revolve around the centre of mass of the galaxy; and so on. Within these big revolutions, there are smaller sub systems: moons revolve around planets, planets around stars, stars within galaxies and so on.

He then says, "So by assuming that the Earth is at the centre of mass of the universe, we then use Newton's laws (i.e. indisputable science!) to "prove" that everything revolves around the Earth.

Good try, but no, because he is making a massive assumption on the basis of faith and convenience alone, that the Earth is the centre of mass of the universe.

He simply ignores the more complex scientific evidence about the distribution of mass in the universe shows that Earth is an utterly insignificant blue green planet orbiting a small unregarded yellow sun far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy.

This is around 6 minutes in, by which time I got bored!
 
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