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The theory that the Earth was the center of the universe dates from at least the time of Ancient Greece and is probably more ancient. There's nothing Christian

The theory that the Earth was the center of the universe dates from at least the time of Ancient Greece and is probably more ancient. There's nothing Christian about it, in fact Christian scholars probably took the idea from Ancient Greeks, whom they revered (particularly the Platonists). There were certainly heliocentric models of the universe proposed before Copernicus, but Copernicus' one was the more well-developed. In some cases we don't even have a model, as such, just some third-hand accounts mentioning that someone thought the sun must be in the center of the universe. I suspect the most famous example of that is Aristarchos of Samos, for whose heliocentric theory we only know via a very brief and poorly detailed passage in Archimedes' The Sand Reckoner: You [King Gelon] are aware that "universe" is the name given by most astronomers to the sphere, the centre of which is the centre of the earth, while its radius is equal to the straight line between the centre of the sun and the centre of the earth. This is the common account (τά γραφόμενα), as you have heard from astronomers. But Aristarchus brought out a book consisting of certain hypotheses, wherein it appears, as a consequence of the assumptions made, that the universe is many times greater than the "universe" just mentioned. His hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the sun remain unmoved, that the earth revolves about the sun on the circumference of a circle, the sun lying in the middle of the orbit, and that the sphere of the fixed stars, situated about the same centre as the sun, is so great that the circle in which he supposes the earth to revolve bears such a proportion to the distance of the fixed stars as the centre of the sphere bears to its surface. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliocentrism#Aristarchus_of_Samos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliocentrism#Aristarchus_of_S... So it's not that there weren't heliocentric models of the universe before Copernicus, just that they didn't really catch on, I guess.

TheBlight 5y ago
>There's nothing Christian about it My point was maybe this had something to do with why it "didn't really catch on." Given how viciously the idea was attacked by the Roman Inquisition as being heretical it was probably not the first time the church encountered the concept. IIRC, monks were the predominant scribes in the western world pre-printing press. If intellectual ideas didn't conform to religious canon they could've theoretically been nearly completely erased via censorship only to be "newly discovered" by Copernicus etc.
- jsrjenkins 5y ago
  Copernicus himself was a Catholic priest and a Canon. The first opposition to his works was actually from Protestant thinkers.
  - TheBlight 5y ago
    Right. So he would've been acutely aware of the implications of his work and how it might be received. Maybe that's why he didn't publish his book until 2 months prior to his death over a decade after completing the first manuscript. AFAIK Protestants are Christians.
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  Oh, sorry, I misunderstood. Yes, I think on that you're probably right. See what they did to Gallileo, after all (and maybe also Giordano Bruno, though that's not clear). I don't reckon it was an easy job to be an astronomer in those days...
- ogogmad 5y ago
  It's more complicated than that. The Church didn't so much "attack" it, as not accept it as a proven fact, and not allow it to be presented as such. They favoured the mathematically equivalent model of Tycho Brahe (which is just a coordinate change from the Copernicus model, unlike earlier geocentric models). They did allow heliocentrism to be presented as an unproven hypothesis. The heliocentrism model was only proven by the successive efforts of Kepler and Newton. Kepler made it more accurate by formulating his laws of motion (which allow for an elliptical motion and eliminate the last need for epicycles), and Newton showed how Kepler's laws of motion could be derived from F = GMm/d^2. Kepler was a contemporary of Galileo, and Newton came later. Regarding the treatment of Galileo, Galileo was on very good terms with the Roman Church until he openly insulted geocentrism proponents in a book, and presented the heliocentrism theory as a proven fact. The book is also notable for presenting an incorrect theory of tides, not giving credit to his contemporaries, omitting the more accurate and profound theory of Kepler, and attacking a strawman that nobody was defending (in the sense that the favoured model of the time was Brahe's, and not the complicated epicycles model that Galileo was attacking).
throw0101a 5y ago
> The theory that the Earth was the center of the universe dates from at least the time of Ancient Greece and is probably more ancient. There's nothing Christian about it, in fact Christian scholars probably took the idea from Ancient Greeks, whom they revered (particularly the Platonists). It should be noted that the Ancient Greeks did consider the idea of the Earth moving, but there was no empirical evidence for it. Specifically no parallax as even Aristotle wrote in De Caelo (II.14): > Again, everything that moves with the circular movement, except the first sphere, is observed to be passed, and to move with more than one motion. The earth, then, also, whether it move about the centre or as stationary at it, must necessarily move with two motions. But if this were so, there would have to be passings and turnings of the fixed stars. Yet no such thing is observed. The same stars always rise and set in the same parts of the earth. * http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/heavens.2.ii.html http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/heavens.2.ii.html * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Heavens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Heavens Bradley noticed 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.
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  Very good point. In general, the way I understand it is that most of what the ancients believed about the universe was based on empirical observations. They didn't just come up with some arbitrary theory, they had observations and they were trying to explain them. The epicyclical model persisted all the way to Copernicus (whose model also had epicycles) just because it was so good at predicting future observations. I think their main axiomatic assumption that was based on their metaphysical beliefs, rather than actual observations, was the assumption that the luminaries must move on circular orbits. Again, to my understanding, they had a mechanistic view of the universe that demanded order and symmetry, and they just couldn't imagine how a planet would move in any other orbit than a circle- hence why they were mystified by the apparent "retrograde" motion of the planets and had to come up with epicycles to model it. The combination of their axiomatic belief in a mechanistic universe and the limited observations they could make with the naked eye conspired to keep them from a better model.

TheBlight 5y ago

>There's nothing Christian about it My point was maybe this had something to do with why it "didn't really catch on." Given how viciously the idea was attacked by the Roman Inquisition as being heretical it was probably not the first time the church encountered the concept. IIRC, monks were the predominant scribes in the western world pre-printing press. If intellectual ideas didn't conform to religious canon they could've theoretically been nearly completely erased via censorship only to be "newly discovered" by Copernicus etc.

jsrjenkins 5y ago
Copernicus himself was a Catholic priest and a Canon. The first opposition to his works was actually from Protestant thinkers.
- TheBlight 5y ago
  Right. So he would've been acutely aware of the implications of his work and how it might be received. Maybe that's why he didn't publish his book until 2 months prior to his death over a decade after completing the first manuscript. AFAIK Protestants are Christians.
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
Oh, sorry, I misunderstood. Yes, I think on that you're probably right. See what they did to Gallileo, after all (and maybe also Giordano Bruno, though that's not clear). I don't reckon it was an easy job to be an astronomer in those days...
ogogmad 5y ago
It's more complicated than that. The Church didn't so much "attack" it, as not accept it as a proven fact, and not allow it to be presented as such. They favoured the mathematically equivalent model of Tycho Brahe (which is just a coordinate change from the Copernicus model, unlike earlier geocentric models). They did allow heliocentrism to be presented as an unproven hypothesis. The heliocentrism model was only proven by the successive efforts of Kepler and Newton. Kepler made it more accurate by formulating his laws of motion (which allow for an elliptical motion and eliminate the last need for epicycles), and Newton showed how Kepler's laws of motion could be derived from F = GMm/d^2. Kepler was a contemporary of Galileo, and Newton came later. Regarding the treatment of Galileo, Galileo was on very good terms with the Roman Church until he openly insulted geocentrism proponents in a book, and presented the heliocentrism theory as a proven fact. The book is also notable for presenting an incorrect theory of tides, not giving credit to his contemporaries, omitting the more accurate and profound theory of Kepler, and attacking a strawman that nobody was defending (in the sense that the favoured model of the time was Brahe's, and not the complicated epicycles model that Galileo was attacking).

throw0101a 5y ago

> The theory that the Earth was the center of the universe dates from at least the time of Ancient Greece and is probably more ancient. There's nothing Christian about it, in fact Christian scholars probably took the idea from Ancient Greeks, whom they revered (particularly the Platonists). It should be noted that the Ancient Greeks did consider the idea of the Earth moving, but there was no empirical evidence for it. Specifically no parallax as even Aristotle wrote in De Caelo (II.14): > Again, everything that moves with the circular movement, except the first sphere, is observed to be passed, and to move with more than one motion. The earth, then, also, whether it move about the centre or as stationary at it, must necessarily move with two motions. But if this were so, there would have to be passings and turnings of the fixed stars. Yet no such thing is observed. The same stars always rise and set in the same parts of the earth. * http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/heavens.2.ii.html http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/heavens.2.ii.html * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Heavens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Heavens Bradley noticed 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.

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
Very good point. In general, the way I understand it is that most of what the ancients believed about the universe was based on empirical observations. They didn't just come up with some arbitrary theory, they had observations and they were trying to explain them. The epicyclical model persisted all the way to Copernicus (whose model also had epicycles) just because it was so good at predicting future observations. I think their main axiomatic assumption that was based on their metaphysical beliefs, rather than actual observations, was the assumption that the luminaries must move on circular orbits. Again, to my understanding, they had a mechanistic view of the universe that demanded order and symmetry, and they just couldn't imagine how a planet would move in any other orbit than a circle- hence why they were mystified by the apparent "retrograde" motion of the planets and had to come up with epicycles to model it. The combination of their axiomatic belief in a mechanistic universe and the limited observations they could make with the naked eye conspired to keep them from a better model.