Pseudoscience/Heliocentricism: Difference between revisions

 

====900–700 BC====

 

====800–500 BC====

====550-400 BC====

(India) Aryabhata, in his magnum opus Aryabhatiya (499), '''propounded''' (To offer for consideration; to exhibit; to propose.) a planetary model in which the Earth was taken to be spinning on its axis and the periods of the planets were given with respect to the Sun. His immediate commentators, such as Lalla, and other later authors, rejected his innovative view about the turning Earth. He also made many astronomical '''calculations''', such as the times of the solar and lunar eclipses, and the instantaneous motion of the Moon. Early followers of Aryabhata's model included Varahamihira, Brahmagupta, and Bhaskara II.

 

====390 BC====

(Turkey) Heraclides Ponticus (390BC – 310BC) was a Greek philosopher and astronomer who was born in Heraclea Pontica (now Karadeniz Ereğli, Turkey) and migrated to Athens. He is best remembered for '''proposing''' that the Earth rotates on its axis, from west to east, once every 24 hours. He is also hailed as the originator of the heliocentric theory; although this is disputed.

 

 

The Pythagorean concept of uniform circular motion remained unchallenged for approximately the next 2000 years, and it was to the Pythagoreans that Copernicus (a [[Agencies/Jesuits|'''Jesuit''']]) referred to show that the notion of a moving Earth was neither new nor revolutionary.

 

====270 BC====

(Greek) Aristarchus of Samos is known to be the first person to have '''proposed''' a heliocentric system. Like his contemporary [[People/Eratosthenes|Eratosthenes]], Aristarchus calculated the size of the Earth by '''assuming''' both the sizes and distances of the Sun and Moon. From his '''estimates''', he concluded that the Sun was six to seven times wider than the Earth, and '''thought''' that the larger object would have the most attractive force.

 

 

Seleucus also '''theorized''' the phenomenon of tides to be caused by the attraction to the Moon and by the revolution of the Earth around the Earth and Moon's center of mass.

 

====1st Century AD====

 

Bacchic rituals were said to have included omophagic practices, such as pulling live animals apart and eating the whole of them raw. This practice served not only as a reenactment of the infant death and rebirth of Bacchus, but also as a means by which Bacchic practitioners produced "enthusiasm".

(India) Nilakantha Somayaji (1444–1544) developed a '''computational system''' for a geo-heliocentric planetary model, in which the planets orbit the Sun, which in turn orbits the Earth, similar to the system later '''proposed''' by Tycho Brahe. it was said to be more mathematically accurate at predicting the heliocentric orbits of the interior planets than both the Tychonic and Copernican models. Nilakantha's "planetary system" also incorporated the Earth's rotation on its axis. Most astronomers of the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics seem to have '''accepted''' his planetary model.

 

 

In his model, Copernicus maintained that Earth was not the center of the universe. Instead, Copernicus '''believed''' that Earth and the other planets revolved around the Sun. Copernicus' system offered a simple explanation for many of the observed phenomena that could not be easily explained within the old system. Retrograde motion was one such phenomenon.

 

====16th Century AD====

(France) Jean-Felix Picard (1620-1682), (a [[Agencies/Jesuits|'''Jesuit''']]) earned the title of founder of modern astronomy in France even as he labored as a "priest". Born in La Flèche, where he studied at the [[Agencies/Jesuits|'''Jesuit''']] Collège Royal Henry-Le-Grand, he was fascinated from an early age with the heavens, and he gave his intellectual life to the cause of astronomy. Picard introduced new methods for watching the stars and improved and developed new scientific instruments.

 

 

(Italy) Giovanni Domenico Cassini (1625-1712) a [[Agencies/Jesuits|'''Jesuit''']], astronomer, mathematician, discovered Saturn’s moons, rings.

 

=====The Copernican principle=====

 

The "Copernican Revolution" is named for Nicolaus Copernicus (a [[Agencies/Jesuits|'''Jesuit''']]), whose Commentariolus, written before 1514, was the first explicit presentation of the heliocentric model in Renaissance scholarship. The '''idea''' of heliocentrism is much older; it can be traced to Aristarchus of Samos, a Hellenistic author writing in the 3rd century BC, who may in turn have been drawing on even older concepts in Pythagoreanism. Ancient heliocentrism was, however, eclipsed by the geocentric model presented by Ptolemy in the Almagest and accepted in Aristotelianism.

 

====17th Century AD====

 

(Hungary) Gyula Fényi (1845-1927) a [[Agencies/Jesuits|'''Jesuit''']], astronomer, studied solar prominences.

 

====19th Century AD====

(Europe) Thomas Wright and Immanuel Kant '''speculated''' that fuzzy patches of light called nebulae were actually distant "island universes" consisting of many stellar systems. The shape of the Milky Way galaxy was expected to resemble such "islands universes."

 

(United States) George Coyne (1933-2020) a [[Agencies/Jesuits|'''Jesuit''']], astronomer, director of the Vatican Observator ("Lucifer" telescope).

 

Harlow Shapley's work on globular clusters and Edwin Hubble's '''assumptions''' in 1924 showed that the Sun is not the center of the universe, cosmology moved on from heliocentrism to galactocentrism, which states that the Milky Way is the center of the universe.

 

 

The '''concept''' of an absolute velocity, including being "at rest" as a particular case, is ruled out by the principle of relativity, also eliminating any obvious "center" of the universe as a natural origin of coordinates. Even if the discussion is limited to the Solar System, '''the Sun is not at the geometric center of any planet's orbit''', but rather approximately at one focus of the elliptical orbit. Furthermore, to the extent that a planet's mass cannot be neglected in comparison to the Sun's mass, '''the center of gravity of the Solar System is displaced slightly away from the center of the Sun.''' (The masses of the planets, mostly Jupiter, amount to 0.14% of that of the Sun.) Therefore, a '''hypothetical astronomer''' on an extrasolar planet would observe a small "wobble" in the Sun's motion.

 

===See Also===

* [https://gregorylessinggarrett.substack.com/p/is-the-heliocentric-model-really gregorylessinggarrett.substack.com Heliocentrism - A Reverse Engineered Masterpiece]

* [[:File:Matkinson,+02+feat+Overgaard.pdf|Pdf: Early Modern Catholic Defense of Copernicanism: The Jesuits and the Galileo Affair]]