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> Heliocentric is a refinement of geocentric. This is very much stretching it in my opinion. The cycles and epicycles didn't need to be adjusted--the epicycle

> Heliocentric is a refinement of geocentric. This is very much stretching it in my opinion. The cycles and epicycles didn't need to be adjusted--the epicycles were the adjustment--they needed to be completely thrown out. There aren't any teachers who are like: "Well, we used to think that the Sun was this smallish thing orbiting the Earth, but actually it's only slightly different. The Sun is 3*10^5 times the mass of the Earth, and actually the Earth revolves around it. No big deal! Please turn to Chapter 2 of your astro book, where we will be exploring slight deviations from how the cosmos orbits the Earth."

cgriswald 6y ago
If it wasn’t a big deal it wouldn’t have been a paradigm shift. However, it was just a refinement. You’re adding things (relative masses) that weren’t part of this shift, they were later refinements. The reasons this was a big deal were entirely human. It wasn’t religion: If you can accept the universe as a miracle it doesn’t much matter how God did it; God is just as glorious. It was power: the Church claimed the simpler model was The Truth and saw the new model as revealing a mistake and threatening their power; rather than seeing it as just a model.
- abernard1 6y ago
  And I maintain this was not a refinement of a model. As a challenge: name one piece of geocentric math that can still be modified by today's practicioners to provide a sensible astrophysical answer. Static mass is still a useful fact in a world of relativistic physics. But we have not tabulated any facts from geocentric concepts in the last few centuries. No one would even know where to begin or what words to use to even describe them. That material produced from Kuhnian "normal science" under geocentrism had to be thrown out, as there was no way of fitting them in with the new paradigm.
  - cgriswald 6y ago
    You're shifting the goalposts something crazy. I'd like to point out the original poster talked about refinement in the output of the models, not the models themselves. However, having said that, the heliocentric model is still a refinement (and further refinements, which came later) of the geocentric model. We didn't jump right from geocentrism to Kepler's three laws of planetary motion. The Copernican model still had heavenly spheres as a concept: a concept we don't use today. What you're thinking of as heliocentrism is a refinement of previous heliocentrism which itself was a refinement of geocentrism.

cgriswald 6y ago

If it wasn’t a big deal it wouldn’t have been a paradigm shift. However, it was just a refinement. You’re adding things (relative masses) that weren’t part of this shift, they were later refinements. The reasons this was a big deal were entirely human. It wasn’t religion: If you can accept the universe as a miracle it doesn’t much matter how God did it; God is just as glorious. It was power: the Church claimed the simpler model was The Truth and saw the new model as revealing a mistake and threatening their power; rather than seeing it as just a model.

abernard1 6y ago
And I maintain this was not a refinement of a model. As a challenge: name one piece of geocentric math that can still be modified by today's practicioners to provide a sensible astrophysical answer. Static mass is still a useful fact in a world of relativistic physics. But we have not tabulated any facts from geocentric concepts in the last few centuries. No one would even know where to begin or what words to use to even describe them. That material produced from Kuhnian "normal science" under geocentrism had to be thrown out, as there was no way of fitting them in with the new paradigm.
- cgriswald 6y ago
  You're shifting the goalposts something crazy. I'd like to point out the original poster talked about refinement in the output of the models, not the models themselves. However, having said that, the heliocentric model is still a refinement (and further refinements, which came later) of the geocentric model. We didn't jump right from geocentrism to Kepler's three laws of planetary motion. The Copernican model still had heavenly spheres as a concept: a concept we don't use today. What you're thinking of as heliocentrism is a refinement of previous heliocentrism which itself was a refinement of geocentrism.