21 ms·

The popular creation story of astronomy is wrong

110 points by dustfinger 8y ago

dhimes 8y ago
This is not about the birth of the universe, but rather the birth of the science of Astronomy.
- ItsMe000001 8y ago
  In particular (you can take this as a TL;DR summary), it is about the myth that some people were stupid (for example, to oppose ideas of Kepler or Galileo), while others were smart. They were all pretty smart, and the opposition to new ideas actually had math and data (that were available at the time!) on its side. Kepler's model, for example, required a believe in gigantic stars (all starts are the size of Betelgeuse or even larger), based on data available at the time, which today we know was wrong. Somewhere else I read about Galileo, as far as I remember apparently his telescope was pretty bad and it wasn't that other astronomers refused to look through it, as our modern myth about their "stupidity" goes, but that what could be seen was not conclusive. I may be wrong about the last one, this is from what I read long ago elsewhere, the Kepler theory is a main theme in the linked article though. Another document: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0903/0903.3429.pdf https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0903/0903.3429.pdf > How Marius Was Right and Galileo Was Wrong Even Though Galileo Was Right and Marius Was Wrong -- or, how telescopic observations in the early 17th century supported the Tychonic geocentric theory and how Simon Marius realized this. Sometimes scientists who followed their instincts were right, and those who followed the available facts/data were not. Sometimes. Or in other words: Things are not that simple.
  - mannykannot 8y ago
    It should be noted that Brahe's model was not the classical Ptolemaic geocentric / epicyclic model: "It is conceptually a geocentric model: the Earth is at the center of the universe, the Sun and Moon and the stars revolve around the Earth, and the other five planets revolve around the Sun." [1] The Popperian model of science suggests that it steps from one empirically-sound but falsifiable position to another, but that is the view with hindsight - what happens at the leading edge is much more fluid, and having the right sort of instincts about where the evidence is leading is not just a matter of luck. Heliocentricity was generally accepted well before stellar parallax was observed. It appears to me that MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics) seems to be going the way of Brahe's model - it fitted the initial data, but does not seem to work consistently for the general case. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonic_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonic_system
  - DanAndersen 8y ago
    "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown" [0] also provides information to this effect. Yes, as the link you provide mentions, there's an optical phenomenon known as the Airy disk that suggests an incorrect apparent size of stars when looking through such old telescopes. It wasn't until the 1800s that this phenomenon was understood. [0] http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown.html http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smac... (part 1)
    - acqq 8y ago
      And still, the whole "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown" is based on false arguments: The author claims: "the reaction at the time was "WTF? Which heresy are you talking about here?" But the exact heresy was explicitly and very clearly stated both in the sentence by the Inquisition: http://hti.osu.edu/sites/hti.osu.edu/files/documents_in_the_case_of_galileo.pdf http://hti.osu.edu/sites/hti.osu.edu/files/documents_in_the_... "the above-mentioned Galileo, because of the things deduced in the trial and confessed by you as above, have rendered yourself according to this Holy Office vehemently suspected of heresy, namely of having held and believed a doctrine which is false and contrary to the divine and Holy Scripture: that the sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west, and the earth moves and is not the center of the world, and that one may hold and defend as probable an opinion after it has been declared and defined contrary to Holy Scripture." And in Galileo's Abjuration: http://www.creatinghistory.com/galileo-galileis-abjuration-22-june-1633/ http://www.creatinghistory.com/galileo-galileis-abjuration-2... "after having been judicially instructed with injunction by the Holy Office to abandon completely the false opinion that the sun is the center of the world and does not move and the earth is not the center of the world and moves, and not to hold defend, or teach this false doctrine in any way whatever, orally or in writing; and after having been notified that this doctrine is contrary to Holy Scripture; I wrote and published a book in which I treat of this already condemned doctrine and adduce very effective reasons in its favor, without refuting them in any way" The premise of the whole series by that author is also wrong, approximately, that because the parallax wasn't observed until around 1750 Galileo couldn't prove in 1633 that the Earth is not standing still, therefore the Church was right and it wasn't a matter of faith but a personal thing. It's obviously a completely invalid argument.
  - Florin_Andrei 8y ago
    The epicycle theory was pretty clever and complex, and fully supported by data at the time.
    - 8bitsrule 8y ago
      fully supported by data at the time. Not so much; people who -could see- the phases of Venus were in possession of -conclusive- data that it was not moving in a circle between the Earth and Sun. "Although the extreme crescent phase of Venus has been observed with the naked eyes, there are no indisputable historical pre-telescopic records of it being observed." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_Venus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_Venus There may be no records, but that might not have stopped ANYone with keen eyesight from knowing (including the Greeks back to Aristarchus, or even the Babylonians). For 2000 years, the 'authorities' (e.g. Aristotle) were wrong.
      - Florin_Andrei 8y ago
        No, I don't think that would have been considered solid data in any time period. It's almost the definition of "things only very few people claim to see". There are no records of it from the ancient world, and "Venus with horns" could mean anything. > For 2000 years, the 'authorities' (e.g. Aristotle) were wrong. Careful to not let desires and personal aspirations cloud your judgment there.
  - gmiller123456 8y ago
    The author of that article (Graney) on Galileo's observations teaches at a nearby university, and I was able to attend a lecture he gave about the effect. The tl;dr is that when you look through a telescope today stars are pinpoints. You can magnify them as much as you want, and they still appear pinpoints. Brighter stars might appear larger than smaller ones, but their size doesn't change with magnification. Galileo's telescope had such a small aperture that diffraction distorted the image, and the size of the disk of a star did change with magnification. Since they didn't understand diffraction at the time, they thought they were seeing the star's disk. Since there was no measurable parallax on stars at the time, they knew they had to be very far away, and thus unbelievable enormous in order to have a disk visible in a telescope.
- 8bitsrule 8y ago
  Exactly. Title is misleading in a very 'click-baity' way.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
nyc111 8y ago
Thanks for posting. Great article. A word of caution about Kepler's discovery of elliptical orbits. We usually encounter this topic in physics textbooks who illustrate the ellipticity of planetary orbits with highly eccentric ellipses of probably 0.7 or more ecentricity. But, as an example, the eccentricity of Venus' orbit is 0.0068! So if you draw such an ellipse on letter size (or A4) paper you cannot tell it apart from a circle.
- dustfinger 8y ago
  Thanks! I am glad that folks here found it engaging :-). Plus, I have learned a lot reading the comments. Thank you all for your contributions.
- acqq 8y ago
  That the modern illustrations are wrong doesn't diminish what Brache correctly measured and Kepler carefully figured out by his calculations.
  - nyc111 8y ago
    I agree. It's not their fault. What interests me is this: If the eccentricity of planetary orbits is so small, I wonder if we can still uphold the circularity of orbits, but place the sun slightly off center? Will this geometry save the observations?
tpeo 8y ago
>Copernicans like Thomas Digges, Christoph Rothmann, and Philips Lansbergen, spoke of the giant stars in terms of God’s power, or God’s palace, or the palace of the Angels, or even God’s own warriors. [...] The anti-Copernicans were unpersuaded. If you aren't the guy to be in some way off put by the way science and religion were rubbing together in this instance or by the sort of historical baggage implied in it, then this is perhaps one of the funniest things -- as in genuinely funny -- about Early Modern science and philosophy. That's what I think, at least. Everyone kept invoking God as if that were an argument, but whenever tables turned and people went through the same motions on the listening side they just went "... yeah, nah, I don't think so."
- DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
  Seems to me that their invocations of God were parts of logical arguments. It's just that those arguments were extremely sloppy.
drjesusphd 8y ago
That's interesting about the "giant star" hypothesis. I never knew that, and it makes sense based on what Kepler knew at the time. Today, we know that the apparent size of stars is an illusion due to diffraction. In principle, even if stars actually were infinitesimal points of light, they would still appear as disks in optical instruments. Smaller apertures (like our eyes) make the disks larger. Only in recent decades with special techniques can we resolve the actual apparent size of a star.
- eesmith 8y ago
  "Only in recent decades with special techniques can we resolve the actual apparent size of a star." More specifically, the first was Betelgeuse in 1920. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betelgeuse#Diameter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betelgeuse#Diameter
chicob 8y ago
I wanted to read the article, but unfortunately it requires me to activate cookies or to subscribe. I was about to create an exception for nautil.us but I had a Wait-Why-Should-I moment. Now I find that request unacceptable, really. They're blocking my access to some article because "Nautilus uses cookies to manage your digital subscription and show you your reading progress. It's just not the same without them." Yes, it is. It is exactly the same. If nautil.us can't go without a cookie, I can go without reading their articles.
- dlisboa 8y ago
  Without cookies they can't log you in so if you have a paid subscription it'd not work. From what I see they also store on cookies where you've stopped so if you return to the article it's on the same point. In that sense it's not the same experience without them. And it's not unimaginable that they track how many articles you've read a month so they can show you a modal to interest you in a subscription. I can see how you'd not want to be tracked as a visiting user, but even then it's not really sensible to complain when the other option (paying for the content) requires you to activate cookies anyway. Honestly, I don't think it's reasonable to expect (or find it odd) that websites need cookies to function inside a browser in this day and age.
  - chicob 8y ago
    I think that they have the right to ask for whatever they want to ask, just as much as I have the right not to concede them what they're asking. I know I need to activate cookies in order to login. I do have a lot of cookie exceptions. But in my opinion, this is not one of thoses cases. One does not require cookies to read HN, for instance. Or many other websites. If they use cookies as a base for their business model - which is perfectly acceptable - at least they could have the decency of saying so clearly. I dislike being treated as too ignorant to understand, and the "user experience" card is getting old.
- jaclaz 8y ago
  I just accessed the site with javascript disabled (my default setting) and read the article just fine (no cookies, no messages to the effect you reported).
nyc111 8y ago
>That dynamism stands in contrast to the usual tales we are told about the birth of science, stories portraying the debates around the Copernican theory as occasions when science was suppressed by powerful, entrenched establishments. Stories of scientific suppression, rather than scientific dynamism, have not served science well. Well, this doesn't make sense. Galileo was executed by the Inquisition, an institution inside the Catholic Church. The church was not interested in debating rival scientific theories. They only debated heliocentric theory and their own earth-centric dogma. Once they identified the heliocentric model to be against their dogma they supressed and punished anyone who advocated heliocentric notions. But this does not mean the church was ignorant of astronomy. The church was the main supporter of astronomy because of their interest in maintaining an accurate calendar. Christoph Scheiner mentioned in the article was a Jesuite astronomer respected by Galieleo and the two corresponded. The title of the article must have been decided by an editor who did not read the article. He wanted to write something like “The popular stories we are told about the beginning of scientific thinking have been wrong.” The word “creation” is totally wrong. Astronomy was not created in the 17th century.
- philipov 8y ago
  Galileo was put under house arrest, not executed.
- watwut 8y ago
  Galileo is not even mentioned in that article.
  - ConceptJunkie 8y ago
    Yeah, but he always comes up. Always.
- cvoss 8y ago
  I didn't read the phrase "creation story" as literally referring the start of astronomy. It's a punchy allusion that fits well with the themes and thesis of the article.
gcthomas 8y ago
I'm not convinced that the author is as knowldegeable as he thinks he is. quote: "We might expect to see some stars growing brighter throughout the spring on account of Earth approaching them, and then growing dimmer throughout the fall. There is a name for this sort of effect: parallax. But no one could see any parallax." Dimmer and brighter through relative motion is parallax now?
- danielvf 8y ago
  Article is totally wrong about parallax. It’s relative apparently motion, nothing to do with brightness.
  - btilly 8y ago
    I have no idea why anyone would vote this correct statement down. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_parallax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_parallax for verification.
  - skybrian 8y ago
    Parallax does come in separately, in the part about the relative size of the earth's orbit compared to the distance to the stars.
  - joshumax 8y ago
    I had something of a double-take on this part too. A difference in apparent magnitude throughout the year isn't the same as stellar parallax by any means, and is something of a misnomer.
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  Objects definitely do get brighter* when coming towards you and dimmer when going away from you, but this is special relativity, not parallax. It certainly wasn't known at that time. * The light becomes more energetic, anyway, thanks to blue shift. Whether you count this as brighter depends on how you define brightness.
- abiox 8y ago
  i found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photometric_parallax_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photometric_parallax_method > The photometric parallax method is a method of data analysis used in astronomy that uses the colours and apparent brightnesses of stars to infer their distances.
ericnyamu 8y ago
GOD CREATED THE WORLD. anythingselse is just useless garbage
jankotek 8y ago
It is just semantics, related to philosophy, but not astronomy. Planets do not even orbit around sun, but center of gravity which is outside of sun.
- 24gttghh 8y ago
  >Planets do not even orbit around sun, but center of gravity which is outside of sun. That's...semantics also. The barycenter (center of mass, not gravity) of the solar system can very much be within Sol's limb. For all intents and purposes the planets do orbit the highest center of mass which is within or at least very close to the surface of Sol.
sandworm101 8y ago
This article doesn't understand the word "star". We use it to mean a particular class of object, things like our sun. For Copernicus a "star" was anything other than the known planets. The term "fixed stars" is needed to differentiate between what we call stars and all the other moving things that today we call comets, shooting stars. The "fixes stars" included galaxies, nebula, and all the other non-star things that seem fixed to the celestial sphere. May of these were indeed as large as a "universe". Galaxies are big enough to be so described. Star also often mean a sign, symbol or temporary object. The "star" in the Christmas story was likely an alignment of planets. Such stars could appear and disappear on a nightly basis. Before criticizing the ideas in old texts we need to make sure we understand the actual words.
imh 8y ago
I love this kind of story about the history of science and understanding. Does anyone have pointers to other good ones? Or even better books of them?
- lolc 8y ago
  Sure, look for The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown[1]. It's about the same period but in much finer detail, more accurate, and much more entertaining to read. [1] http://tofspot.blogspot.ch/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-table-of.html http://tofspot.blogspot.ch/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-smack...
- dwaltrip 8y ago
  The Magic Furnace is a great book about the history of how we came to understand atoms and where they come from. It shows a lot of the missteps and twisty turns along the way. I also love learning about how scientific understanding actually developed over time. It's a messy, fascinating process.
candiodari 8y ago
All you need to do to kill someone's belief in the Big Bang theory is tell the entirety of it. You know, a little more than just the very beginning. Once you get to point out that a part of the theory says that a solar system sized ball of "fire" suddenly expanded to the size of our galaxy in <2 seconds for no reason whatsoever (ie. inflation, or should we say "the second inflation", and yes seriously, that was a pure coincidence according to the accepted-but-don't-ask theory) people start going "what ?". And then go on to explain why it's utterly impossible for space to be 3 dimensional, or for gravity to exist (the standard model argument against gravity) or for gravity to not exist (relativity, as well as obvious experience). And this is probably the right reaction. There's more, like why weren't the electrical, gravitational, magnetic, ... forces between matter and antimatter in that small ball enough to do lots of things. Create a black hole, for instance. Annihilate for instance. I mean there's answers for these questions, but I assure you, whilst they work in the equations (sort-of), they will not reduce the WTF-rate. Just because this is the best theory we have does not mean it's a particularly sensible one. I mean it is, it's just a matter of perspective. When it comes to "intuitive", I contend the actual big bang theory scores pretty damn bad.

110 points by dustfinger 8y ago

dhimes 8y ago

This is not about the birth of the universe, but rather the birth of the science of Astronomy.

ItsMe000001 8y ago
In particular (you can take this as a TL;DR summary), it is about the myth that some people were stupid (for example, to oppose ideas of Kepler or Galileo), while others were smart. They were all pretty smart, and the opposition to new ideas actually had math and data (that were available at the time!) on its side. Kepler's model, for example, required a believe in gigantic stars (all starts are the size of Betelgeuse or even larger), based on data available at the time, which today we know was wrong. Somewhere else I read about Galileo, as far as I remember apparently his telescope was pretty bad and it wasn't that other astronomers refused to look through it, as our modern myth about their "stupidity" goes, but that what could be seen was not conclusive. I may be wrong about the last one, this is from what I read long ago elsewhere, the Kepler theory is a main theme in the linked article though. Another document: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0903/0903.3429.pdf https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0903/0903.3429.pdf > How Marius Was Right and Galileo Was Wrong Even Though Galileo Was Right and Marius Was Wrong -- or, how telescopic observations in the early 17th century supported the Tychonic geocentric theory and how Simon Marius realized this. Sometimes scientists who followed their instincts were right, and those who followed the available facts/data were not. Sometimes. Or in other words: Things are not that simple.
- mannykannot 8y ago
  It should be noted that Brahe's model was not the classical Ptolemaic geocentric / epicyclic model: "It is conceptually a geocentric model: the Earth is at the center of the universe, the Sun and Moon and the stars revolve around the Earth, and the other five planets revolve around the Sun." [1] The Popperian model of science suggests that it steps from one empirically-sound but falsifiable position to another, but that is the view with hindsight - what happens at the leading edge is much more fluid, and having the right sort of instincts about where the evidence is leading is not just a matter of luck. Heliocentricity was generally accepted well before stellar parallax was observed. It appears to me that MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics) seems to be going the way of Brahe's model - it fitted the initial data, but does not seem to work consistently for the general case. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonic_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonic_system
- DanAndersen 8y ago
  "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown" [0] also provides information to this effect. Yes, as the link you provide mentions, there's an optical phenomenon known as the Airy disk that suggests an incorrect apparent size of stars when looking through such old telescopes. It wasn't until the 1800s that this phenomenon was understood. [0] http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown.html http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smac... (part 1)
  - acqq 8y ago
    And still, the whole "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown" is based on false arguments: The author claims: "the reaction at the time was "WTF? Which heresy are you talking about here?" But the exact heresy was explicitly and very clearly stated both in the sentence by the Inquisition: http://hti.osu.edu/sites/hti.osu.edu/files/documents_in_the_case_of_galileo.pdf http://hti.osu.edu/sites/hti.osu.edu/files/documents_in_the_... "the above-mentioned Galileo, because of the things deduced in the trial and confessed by you as above, have rendered yourself according to this Holy Office vehemently suspected of heresy, namely of having held and believed a doctrine which is false and contrary to the divine and Holy Scripture: that the sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west, and the earth moves and is not the center of the world, and that one may hold and defend as probable an opinion after it has been declared and defined contrary to Holy Scripture." And in Galileo's Abjuration: http://www.creatinghistory.com/galileo-galileis-abjuration-22-june-1633/ http://www.creatinghistory.com/galileo-galileis-abjuration-2... "after having been judicially instructed with injunction by the Holy Office to abandon completely the false opinion that the sun is the center of the world and does not move and the earth is not the center of the world and moves, and not to hold defend, or teach this false doctrine in any way whatever, orally or in writing; and after having been notified that this doctrine is contrary to Holy Scripture; I wrote and published a book in which I treat of this already condemned doctrine and adduce very effective reasons in its favor, without refuting them in any way" The premise of the whole series by that author is also wrong, approximately, that because the parallax wasn't observed until around 1750 Galileo couldn't prove in 1633 that the Earth is not standing still, therefore the Church was right and it wasn't a matter of faith but a personal thing. It's obviously a completely invalid argument.
- Florin_Andrei 8y ago
  The epicycle theory was pretty clever and complex, and fully supported by data at the time.
  - 8bitsrule 8y ago
    fully supported by data at the time. Not so much; people who -could see- the phases of Venus were in possession of -conclusive- data that it was not moving in a circle between the Earth and Sun. "Although the extreme crescent phase of Venus has been observed with the naked eyes, there are no indisputable historical pre-telescopic records of it being observed." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_Venus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_Venus There may be no records, but that might not have stopped ANYone with keen eyesight from knowing (including the Greeks back to Aristarchus, or even the Babylonians). For 2000 years, the 'authorities' (e.g. Aristotle) were wrong.
    - Florin_Andrei 8y ago
      No, I don't think that would have been considered solid data in any time period. It's almost the definition of "things only very few people claim to see". There are no records of it from the ancient world, and "Venus with horns" could mean anything. > For 2000 years, the 'authorities' (e.g. Aristotle) were wrong. Careful to not let desires and personal aspirations cloud your judgment there.
- gmiller123456 8y ago
  The author of that article (Graney) on Galileo's observations teaches at a nearby university, and I was able to attend a lecture he gave about the effect. The tl;dr is that when you look through a telescope today stars are pinpoints. You can magnify them as much as you want, and they still appear pinpoints. Brighter stars might appear larger than smaller ones, but their size doesn't change with magnification. Galileo's telescope had such a small aperture that diffraction distorted the image, and the size of the disk of a star did change with magnification. Since they didn't understand diffraction at the time, they thought they were seeing the star's disk. Since there was no measurable parallax on stars at the time, they knew they had to be very far away, and thus unbelievable enormous in order to have a disk visible in a telescope.
8bitsrule 8y ago
Exactly. Title is misleading in a very 'click-baity' way.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

nyc111 8y ago

Thanks for posting. Great article. A word of caution about Kepler's discovery of elliptical orbits. We usually encounter this topic in physics textbooks who illustrate the ellipticity of planetary orbits with highly eccentric ellipses of probably 0.7 or more ecentricity. But, as an example, the eccentricity of Venus' orbit is 0.0068! So if you draw such an ellipse on letter size (or A4) paper you cannot tell it apart from a circle.

dustfinger 8y ago
Thanks! I am glad that folks here found it engaging :-). Plus, I have learned a lot reading the comments. Thank you all for your contributions.
acqq 8y ago
That the modern illustrations are wrong doesn't diminish what Brache correctly measured and Kepler carefully figured out by his calculations.
- nyc111 8y ago
  I agree. It's not their fault. What interests me is this: If the eccentricity of planetary orbits is so small, I wonder if we can still uphold the circularity of orbits, but place the sun slightly off center? Will this geometry save the observations?

tpeo 8y ago

>Copernicans like Thomas Digges, Christoph Rothmann, and Philips Lansbergen, spoke of the giant stars in terms of God’s power, or God’s palace, or the palace of the Angels, or even God’s own warriors. [...] The anti-Copernicans were unpersuaded. If you aren't the guy to be in some way off put by the way science and religion were rubbing together in this instance or by the sort of historical baggage implied in it, then this is perhaps one of the funniest things -- as in genuinely funny -- about Early Modern science and philosophy. That's what I think, at least. Everyone kept invoking God as if that were an argument, but whenever tables turned and people went through the same motions on the listening side they just went "... yeah, nah, I don't think so."

DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
Seems to me that their invocations of God were parts of logical arguments. It's just that those arguments were extremely sloppy.

drjesusphd 8y ago

That's interesting about the "giant star" hypothesis. I never knew that, and it makes sense based on what Kepler knew at the time. Today, we know that the apparent size of stars is an illusion due to diffraction. In principle, even if stars actually were infinitesimal points of light, they would still appear as disks in optical instruments. Smaller apertures (like our eyes) make the disks larger. Only in recent decades with special techniques can we resolve the actual apparent size of a star.

eesmith 8y ago
"Only in recent decades with special techniques can we resolve the actual apparent size of a star." More specifically, the first was Betelgeuse in 1920. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betelgeuse#Diameter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betelgeuse#Diameter

chicob 8y ago

I wanted to read the article, but unfortunately it requires me to activate cookies or to subscribe. I was about to create an exception for nautil.us but I had a Wait-Why-Should-I moment. Now I find that request unacceptable, really. They're blocking my access to some article because "Nautilus uses cookies to manage your digital subscription and show you your reading progress. It's just not the same without them." Yes, it is. It is exactly the same. If nautil.us can't go without a cookie, I can go without reading their articles.

dlisboa 8y ago
Without cookies they can't log you in so if you have a paid subscription it'd not work. From what I see they also store on cookies where you've stopped so if you return to the article it's on the same point. In that sense it's not the same experience without them. And it's not unimaginable that they track how many articles you've read a month so they can show you a modal to interest you in a subscription. I can see how you'd not want to be tracked as a visiting user, but even then it's not really sensible to complain when the other option (paying for the content) requires you to activate cookies anyway. Honestly, I don't think it's reasonable to expect (or find it odd) that websites need cookies to function inside a browser in this day and age.
- chicob 8y ago
  I think that they have the right to ask for whatever they want to ask, just as much as I have the right not to concede them what they're asking. I know I need to activate cookies in order to login. I do have a lot of cookie exceptions. But in my opinion, this is not one of thoses cases. One does not require cookies to read HN, for instance. Or many other websites. If they use cookies as a base for their business model - which is perfectly acceptable - at least they could have the decency of saying so clearly. I dislike being treated as too ignorant to understand, and the "user experience" card is getting old.
jaclaz 8y ago
I just accessed the site with javascript disabled (my default setting) and read the article just fine (no cookies, no messages to the effect you reported).

nyc111 8y ago

>That dynamism stands in contrast to the usual tales we are told about the birth of science, stories portraying the debates around the Copernican theory as occasions when science was suppressed by powerful, entrenched establishments. Stories of scientific suppression, rather than scientific dynamism, have not served science well. Well, this doesn't make sense. Galileo was executed by the Inquisition, an institution inside the Catholic Church. The church was not interested in debating rival scientific theories. They only debated heliocentric theory and their own earth-centric dogma. Once they identified the heliocentric model to be against their dogma they supressed and punished anyone who advocated heliocentric notions. But this does not mean the church was ignorant of astronomy. The church was the main supporter of astronomy because of their interest in maintaining an accurate calendar. Christoph Scheiner mentioned in the article was a Jesuite astronomer respected by Galieleo and the two corresponded. The title of the article must have been decided by an editor who did not read the article. He wanted to write something like “The popular stories we are told about the beginning of scientific thinking have been wrong.” The word “creation” is totally wrong. Astronomy was not created in the 17th century.

philipov 8y ago
Galileo was put under house arrest, not executed.
watwut 8y ago
Galileo is not even mentioned in that article.
- ConceptJunkie 8y ago
  Yeah, but he always comes up. Always.
cvoss 8y ago
I didn't read the phrase "creation story" as literally referring the start of astronomy. It's a punchy allusion that fits well with the themes and thesis of the article.

gcthomas 8y ago

I'm not convinced that the author is as knowldegeable as he thinks he is. quote: "We might expect to see some stars growing brighter throughout the spring on account of Earth approaching them, and then growing dimmer throughout the fall. There is a name for this sort of effect: parallax. But no one could see any parallax." Dimmer and brighter through relative motion is parallax now?

danielvf 8y ago
Article is totally wrong about parallax. It’s relative apparently motion, nothing to do with brightness.
- btilly 8y ago
  I have no idea why anyone would vote this correct statement down. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_parallax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_parallax for verification.
- skybrian 8y ago
  Parallax does come in separately, in the part about the relative size of the earth's orbit compared to the distance to the stars.
- joshumax 8y ago
  I had something of a double-take on this part too. A difference in apparent magnitude throughout the year isn't the same as stellar parallax by any means, and is something of a misnomer.
CydeWeys 8y ago
Objects definitely do get brighter* when coming towards you and dimmer when going away from you, but this is special relativity, not parallax. It certainly wasn't known at that time. * The light becomes more energetic, anyway, thanks to blue shift. Whether you count this as brighter depends on how you define brightness.
abiox 8y ago
i found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photometric_parallax_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photometric_parallax_method > The photometric parallax method is a method of data analysis used in astronomy that uses the colours and apparent brightnesses of stars to infer their distances.

ericnyamu 8y ago

GOD CREATED THE WORLD. anythingselse is just useless garbage

jankotek 8y ago

It is just semantics, related to philosophy, but not astronomy. Planets do not even orbit around sun, but center of gravity which is outside of sun.

24gttghh 8y ago
>Planets do not even orbit around sun, but center of gravity which is outside of sun. That's...semantics also. The barycenter (center of mass, not gravity) of the solar system can very much be within Sol's limb. For all intents and purposes the planets do orbit the highest center of mass which is within or at least very close to the surface of Sol.

sandworm101 8y ago

This article doesn't understand the word "star". We use it to mean a particular class of object, things like our sun. For Copernicus a "star" was anything other than the known planets. The term "fixed stars" is needed to differentiate between what we call stars and all the other moving things that today we call comets, shooting stars. The "fixes stars" included galaxies, nebula, and all the other non-star things that seem fixed to the celestial sphere. May of these were indeed as large as a "universe". Galaxies are big enough to be so described. Star also often mean a sign, symbol or temporary object. The "star" in the Christmas story was likely an alignment of planets. Such stars could appear and disappear on a nightly basis. Before criticizing the ideas in old texts we need to make sure we understand the actual words.

imh 8y ago

I love this kind of story about the history of science and understanding. Does anyone have pointers to other good ones? Or even better books of them?

lolc 8y ago
Sure, look for The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown[1]. It's about the same period but in much finer detail, more accurate, and much more entertaining to read. [1] http://tofspot.blogspot.ch/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-table-of.html http://tofspot.blogspot.ch/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-smack...
dwaltrip 8y ago
The Magic Furnace is a great book about the history of how we came to understand atoms and where they come from. It shows a lot of the missteps and twisty turns along the way. I also love learning about how scientific understanding actually developed over time. It's a messy, fascinating process.

candiodari 8y ago

All you need to do to kill someone's belief in the Big Bang theory is tell the entirety of it. You know, a little more than just the very beginning. Once you get to point out that a part of the theory says that a solar system sized ball of "fire" suddenly expanded to the size of our galaxy in <2 seconds for no reason whatsoever (ie. inflation, or should we say "the second inflation", and yes seriously, that was a pure coincidence according to the accepted-but-don't-ask theory) people start going "what ?". And then go on to explain why it's utterly impossible for space to be 3 dimensional, or for gravity to exist (the standard model argument against gravity) or for gravity to not exist (relativity, as well as obvious experience). And this is probably the right reaction. There's more, like why weren't the electrical, gravitational, magnetic, ... forces between matter and antimatter in that small ball enough to do lots of things. Create a black hole, for instance. Annihilate for instance. I mean there's answers for these questions, but I assure you, whilst they work in the equations (sort-of), they will not reduce the WTF-rate. Just because this is the best theory we have does not mean it's a particularly sensible one. I mean it is, it's just a matter of perspective. When it comes to "intuitive", I contend the actual big bang theory scores pretty damn bad.