> It wasn't until Kepler showed that the orbits were elliptical, with varying speeds, that the predicted positions better matched reality, and Newton's maths ex

> It wasn't until Kepler showed that the orbits were elliptical, with varying speeds, that the predicted positions better matched reality, and Newton's maths explained the effects (but not the mechanisms) of gravity. And while all of them had nice/elegant math, none had empirical evidence that anything of what they said matched reality. Things came close with Bradley and stellar aberration in ~1728: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bradley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bradley Giuseppi Calandrelli finally directly measures parallax in α-Lyrae in 1806.