11 ms·

The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown: From Plausible to Proven (2013)

86 points by telotortium 3y ago

asimpletune 3y ago
Basically the church wasn’t as crazy or evil as they’re portrayed now with their persecution of Galileo: he didn’t actually have convincing evidence because the real theory took hundreds of years later to be accepted. It’s important and satisfying to see our ancestors weren’t simply superstitious mystical fools, just people who were behaving somewhat reasonably with the information they had at the time. The incentives around them played a role but didn’t consume every facet of their decision making. Great article.
- bombcar 3y ago
  The amount of "made major discovery, never published or told anyone, found in his files after death" that keeps happening also shows an entirely different outlook on science that we don't really have anymore, I feel. Sure, some may have been trying to build some grand unified theory and keeping everything close to their chest (and then died), but I suspect a majority were just doing this stuff because it was damn amazing and they really didn't feel the need to tell anyone about it in particular.
  - SiempreViernes 3y ago
    Many probably didn’t want to risk being publicly shown they were wrong I suppose.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    "Science" didn't really exist for another couple centuries. This was just wealthy dudes having a fun hobby. The same way people of means today have "charitable organizations" to play around with, wealthy people back then liked to dabble in "natural philosophy"
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - shjake 3y ago
    A lot of those discoveries couldn’t be proven for many years after the deaths of their authors. So it was hard to tell how significant they were. A lot of the things that Galileo said couldn’t be proven either. In fact some were outright wrong and some could be directly disproven based what was know at the time (e.g. reconciling the size and distance of stars). So either they couldn’t tell anyone because nobody would believe them, they weren’t sure about how significant it was or maybe it was just irrelevant at the time (e.g. the Ancient Greek steam engine)
- kerkeslager 3y ago
  > Basically the church wasn’t as crazy or evil as they’re portrayed now with their persecution of Galileo: he didn’t actually have convincing evidence because the real theory took hundreds of years later to be accepted. Sorry, what? They put him under house arrest for having an astronomy theory they disagreed with. That's absolutely crazy. "Evil" isn't a word I generally use, but if I had to apply it to something, it could reasonably be applied to this as well. Whether or not there was adequate evidence for his theories at the time is irrelevant: you don't imprison someone for an astronomy theory.
  - karpierz 3y ago
    > They put him under house arrest for having an astronomy theory they disagreed with. No, they put him under house arrest because he wrote a book about for the Pope is a moron for not agreeing with him, after the Pope explicitly asked him to write a factual account of the theories at the time. Tyrannical? Sure, like any monarchy. But not anti-science.
    - pelasaco 3y ago
      One of the biggest issues in our history, was to call the middle ages "Dark ages" and what came next "Renaissance". Thomas Aquinas, Boethius were such great writers, for instance, among many others[1], they contested their faith and believes all the time. [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/medieval-philosophy/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/medieval-philosophy/
      - lliamander 3y ago
        Only the early middle ages were actually the "dark ages" (roughly 500AD to 1000AD, I think). They are called that only because of the relative lack of written material we have from that time.
        pelasaco 3y ago
        Is that your interpretation, or you read it somewhere? I'm not saying that you are wrong, just that you find others interpretations - those that I was mentioning and that concerns me - everywhere. stuff like, "The Middle Ages are often said to be dark because of a supposed lack of scientific and cultural advancement. During this time, feudalism was the dominant political system" is pretty common, even Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  They burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for hypothesizing that the sun was a star. Anyone willing to do that over an astronomy disagreement is evil.
  - lliamander 3y ago
    That's not why they burned him at the stake. If anything it was because of his hermeticism.
    - throw0101b 3y ago
      There's a whole bunch of stuff that would have ruffled feathers: > While Bruno began as a Dominican friar, during his time in Geneva he embraced Calvinism.[5] Bruno was later tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition on charges of denial of several core Catholic doctrines, including eternal damnation, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and transubstantiation. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno
- sharikone 3y ago
  The church defended a scientific assertion based on theology and used their (absolute) political power to curb other worldviews. Even assuming that Galileo could not prove beyond reasonable doubt heliocentrism as a physical model, and that the Church accepted that the Ptolemaic model wasn't valid - the Church took an active part in asserting that "heliocentrism is heresy". They could have said it's not their own matter to pontificate about and they instead went after Galileo asserting that he overstepped his boundaries. It's very possible that Galileo (and the stories about him in later epochs) was not 100% in his assertions and his arguments. And it's important to look at the history from an objective point of view. However if you look at it as a battle for freedom to do experiment-based research, yes, the church was evil at that time.
  - shjake 3y ago
    > the Church accepted that the Ptolemaic model wasn't valid - the Church took an active part in asserting that "heliocentrism is heresy". It was not that straightforward. The Tychonic model was already accepted and generally the church was quite tolerant (by premodern standards) towards scientific debate and the heresy decision was mainly an outcome of political/personal squables. The next pope, Urban VIII had no issues with allowing measured debate of heliocentrism. What landed Galileo in house arrest was him writing a book which directly mocked the people (at least everyone thought that it did). > However if you look at it as a battle for freedom to do experiment-based research, yes, the church was evil at that time. Which disregards the fact that it didn’t have much issue with other scientists doing that. In fact generally the Catholic church and its affiliated institutions were almost the only places where any scientific research was done at all for quite a while..
- peterfirefly 3y ago
  Sure, but we are still talking about an uppity sect of superstitious people (with great learning in their superstition but not much else). They had no business locking people up at all, no matter how much the Pope didn't like being called Simplicio.
- oh_sigh 3y ago
  Galileo didn't have evidence of his theory? Surely he had a little and didn't just pull it out of thin air. How much evidence was there for the Ptolemaic system?
ummonk 3y ago
Am I the only one who finds this post impossible to read? Like it seems to be in dire need of a thesis statement, transition verbs, meaningful section titles, etc.
- rootw0rm 3y ago
  It was a bit difficult to read, but pretty great overall
- GolfPopper 3y ago
  The link the OP submitted is the last of a 9-part series of posts. Here's a table of contents for the site author's posts on this topic: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/search?q=Great+Ptolemaic+Smackdown http://tofspot.blogspot.com/search?q=Great+Ptolemaic+Smackdo...
  - throw0101b 3y ago
    Actual table of contents post: * https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-table-of.html https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...
- polotics 3y ago
  I find it pleasant, snappy.
- ggeorgovassilis 3y ago
  Probably not the only one, but I enjoyed the post tremendously (it's morning in my time zone, first read of the day accompanied by an espresso). I understand why one might find that style annoying, though.
bambax 3y ago
> Christie, Galileo’s great bluff 2010 A search for this returns only this article. Anyone knows what it is? Is it a book, an article, a scholarly publication...?
- pneumonic 3y ago
  It seems to be a blog post titled "Galileo’s great bluff and part of the reason why Kuhn is wrong." by Thony Christie dated Nov. 12, 2010, at https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/galileo%E2%80%99s-great-bluff-and-part-of-the-reason-why-kuhn-is-wrong/ https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/galileo%E2%80%99s-gr... Google led me there.
- harry8 3y ago
  https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/galileo%E2%80%99s-great-bluff-and-part-of-the-reason-why-kuhn-is-wrong/ https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/galileo%E2%80%99s-gr... I guess...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- isidor3 3y ago
  If you scroll down to the bottom of the post, there is a references section with a link to it.
AbhiAmbad 3y ago
thanks for sharing
lifeisstillgood 3y ago
I think this is the same writer as interviewed on the amazing "subject to change" podcast - cannot find the link ATM
timaios 3y ago
The author looks knowledgeable, and the text is certainly interesting to read, but I really dislike the slang here and there.. You know, people of whom you talk, were more refined than the bums on today's tv screen.. I suppose it is the author's "sense of humour". Or the absence of mine, but still..
- coldtea 3y ago
  Probably the latter. Some audiences can be very prudish.
pelasaco 3y ago
> John Lukacs used to tell us is that we "must consider the battle of Salamis as if the Persians might still win." Meaning that you want to understand what happens in 1633, you can't consider things learned in 1687 or 1803. The mid-17th century had no clear concept of inertia, of gravitation, of forces, etc.; So basically we should avoid to do any kind of anachronism, which people do as well, while interpreting historical events or even worse historical figures.
bigbillheck 3y ago
This person seemed like someone with a lot of axes to grind, and on investigation they co-wrote one of the worst science fiction books I've ever read ('Fallen Angels').
throw0101b 3y ago
The able of contents for the entire weblog post series is at: * https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-table-of.html https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...
mannykannot 3y ago
As far as I can tell, this is an excellent summary of the issues, but this caught my attention (my emphasis): If the earth were whipping around the sun, we should see parallax among the fixed stars, but do not. The Copernicans answered, "Well, yeah, but maybe the stars aren't just far away but really really far away." But you cannot save an unproven hypothesis by asserting a second unproven hypothesis. The stars had to be relatively close because otherwise their observed diameters would mean they were ginormous entities. Some Copernicans embraced this and said "Goddidit!" Who cared how enormous the stars were, since God was infinite. You can 'save' a hypothesis as a hypothesis by showing that the objection is incomplete, and this is what happened here: the stars are indeed so far away that parallax was not then observable. The apparent corollary, that the stars must therefore be enormous, turned out to be false for a reason not suspected by either side: the apparent angular size of stars as observed by telescope is due to diffraction (the Airy disc.) The author picks up this thread in the comments, saying ...it was not evident at the time which model was more true nor even why one model ought to be more true. That was the contribution of Newton's theory of universal gravitation... Stellar parallax was not observed, however, until 1832, and the Airy disc was not explained until 1834, while Newton's gravitational explanation became widely known in 1686. Furthermore, neither Newton nor any of his contemporaries explained gravitation (Newton himself saying that he "brooked no hypothesis" in that regard), or presented any evidence independent of astronomical observations (i.e. the phenomena to be explained) for either its universality or that it follows an inverse-square law. It turned out, therefore, that what was arguably the strongest objection to heliocentricity was put aside, not because it had been explained away, but because it paled into relative insignificance in comparison to the explanatory power of Newton's theory. In this view, Galileo, for all his faults, was not just a self-aggrandizing promoter who happened to latch on to what turned out to be a correct theory; he was a respectable scientist of his day who had what turned out to have good (mostly) intuitions about which ideas were on the right track. For a more general moral, it is probably this just this: read Kuhn - and probably also Popper, who, at least according to David Deutsch, presents explanation as the ultimate goal of science.

86 points by telotortium 3y ago

Basically the church wasn’t as crazy or evil as they’re portrayed now with their persecution of Galileo: he didn’t actually have convincing evidence because the real theory took hundreds of years later to be accepted. It’s important and satisfying to see our ancestors weren’t simply superstitious mystical fools, just people who were behaving somewhat reasonably with the information they had at the time. The incentives around them played a role but didn’t consume every facet of their decision making. Great article.

bombcar 3y ago
The amount of "made major discovery, never published or told anyone, found in his files after death" that keeps happening also shows an entirely different outlook on science that we don't really have anymore, I feel. Sure, some may have been trying to build some grand unified theory and keeping everything close to their chest (and then died), but I suspect a majority were just doing this stuff because it was damn amazing and they really didn't feel the need to tell anyone about it in particular.
- SiempreViernes 3y ago
  Many probably didn’t want to risk being publicly shown they were wrong I suppose.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  "Science" didn't really exist for another couple centuries. This was just wealthy dudes having a fun hobby. The same way people of means today have "charitable organizations" to play around with, wealthy people back then liked to dabble in "natural philosophy"
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- shjake 3y ago
  A lot of those discoveries couldn’t be proven for many years after the deaths of their authors. So it was hard to tell how significant they were. A lot of the things that Galileo said couldn’t be proven either. In fact some were outright wrong and some could be directly disproven based what was know at the time (e.g. reconciling the size and distance of stars). So either they couldn’t tell anyone because nobody would believe them, they weren’t sure about how significant it was or maybe it was just irrelevant at the time (e.g. the Ancient Greek steam engine)
kerkeslager 3y ago
> Basically the church wasn’t as crazy or evil as they’re portrayed now with their persecution of Galileo: he didn’t actually have convincing evidence because the real theory took hundreds of years later to be accepted. Sorry, what? They put him under house arrest for having an astronomy theory they disagreed with. That's absolutely crazy. "Evil" isn't a word I generally use, but if I had to apply it to something, it could reasonably be applied to this as well. Whether or not there was adequate evidence for his theories at the time is irrelevant: you don't imprison someone for an astronomy theory.
- karpierz 3y ago
  > They put him under house arrest for having an astronomy theory they disagreed with. No, they put him under house arrest because he wrote a book about for the Pope is a moron for not agreeing with him, after the Pope explicitly asked him to write a factual account of the theories at the time. Tyrannical? Sure, like any monarchy. But not anti-science.
  - pelasaco 3y ago
    One of the biggest issues in our history, was to call the middle ages "Dark ages" and what came next "Renaissance". Thomas Aquinas, Boethius were such great writers, for instance, among many others[1], they contested their faith and believes all the time. [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/medieval-philosophy/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/medieval-philosophy/
    - lliamander 3y ago
      Only the early middle ages were actually the "dark ages" (roughly 500AD to 1000AD, I think). They are called that only because of the relative lack of written material we have from that time.
      - pelasaco 3y ago
        Is that your interpretation, or you read it somewhere? I'm not saying that you are wrong, just that you find others interpretations - those that I was mentioning and that concerns me - everywhere. stuff like, "The Middle Ages are often said to be dark because of a supposed lack of scientific and cultural advancement. During this time, feudalism was the dominant political system" is pretty common, even Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
They burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for hypothesizing that the sun was a star. Anyone willing to do that over an astronomy disagreement is evil.
- lliamander 3y ago
  That's not why they burned him at the stake. If anything it was because of his hermeticism.
  - throw0101b 3y ago
    There's a whole bunch of stuff that would have ruffled feathers: > While Bruno began as a Dominican friar, during his time in Geneva he embraced Calvinism.[5] Bruno was later tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition on charges of denial of several core Catholic doctrines, including eternal damnation, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and transubstantiation. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno
sharikone 3y ago
The church defended a scientific assertion based on theology and used their (absolute) political power to curb other worldviews. Even assuming that Galileo could not prove beyond reasonable doubt heliocentrism as a physical model, and that the Church accepted that the Ptolemaic model wasn't valid - the Church took an active part in asserting that "heliocentrism is heresy". They could have said it's not their own matter to pontificate about and they instead went after Galileo asserting that he overstepped his boundaries. It's very possible that Galileo (and the stories about him in later epochs) was not 100% in his assertions and his arguments. And it's important to look at the history from an objective point of view. However if you look at it as a battle for freedom to do experiment-based research, yes, the church was evil at that time.
- shjake 3y ago
  > the Church accepted that the Ptolemaic model wasn't valid - the Church took an active part in asserting that "heliocentrism is heresy". It was not that straightforward. The Tychonic model was already accepted and generally the church was quite tolerant (by premodern standards) towards scientific debate and the heresy decision was mainly an outcome of political/personal squables. The next pope, Urban VIII had no issues with allowing measured debate of heliocentrism. What landed Galileo in house arrest was him writing a book which directly mocked the people (at least everyone thought that it did). > However if you look at it as a battle for freedom to do experiment-based research, yes, the church was evil at that time. Which disregards the fact that it didn’t have much issue with other scientists doing that. In fact generally the Catholic church and its affiliated institutions were almost the only places where any scientific research was done at all for quite a while..
peterfirefly 3y ago
Sure, but we are still talking about an uppity sect of superstitious people (with great learning in their superstition but not much else). They had no business locking people up at all, no matter how much the Pope didn't like being called Simplicio.
oh_sigh 3y ago
Galileo didn't have evidence of his theory? Surely he had a little and didn't just pull it out of thin air. How much evidence was there for the Ptolemaic system?

ummonk 3y ago

Am I the only one who finds this post impossible to read? Like it seems to be in dire need of a thesis statement, transition verbs, meaningful section titles, etc.

rootw0rm 3y ago
It was a bit difficult to read, but pretty great overall
GolfPopper 3y ago
The link the OP submitted is the last of a 9-part series of posts. Here's a table of contents for the site author's posts on this topic: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/search?q=Great+Ptolemaic+Smackdown http://tofspot.blogspot.com/search?q=Great+Ptolemaic+Smackdo...
- throw0101b 3y ago
  Actual table of contents post: * https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-table-of.html https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...
polotics 3y ago
I find it pleasant, snappy.
ggeorgovassilis 3y ago
Probably not the only one, but I enjoyed the post tremendously (it's morning in my time zone, first read of the day accompanied by an espresso). I understand why one might find that style annoying, though.

bambax 3y ago

> Christie, Galileo’s great bluff 2010 A search for this returns only this article. Anyone knows what it is? Is it a book, an article, a scholarly publication...?

pneumonic 3y ago
It seems to be a blog post titled "Galileo’s great bluff and part of the reason why Kuhn is wrong." by Thony Christie dated Nov. 12, 2010, at https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/galileo%E2%80%99s-great-bluff-and-part-of-the-reason-why-kuhn-is-wrong/ https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/galileo%E2%80%99s-gr... Google led me there.
harry8 3y ago
https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/galileo%E2%80%99s-great-bluff-and-part-of-the-reason-why-kuhn-is-wrong/ https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/galileo%E2%80%99s-gr... I guess...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
isidor3 3y ago
If you scroll down to the bottom of the post, there is a references section with a link to it.

AbhiAmbad 3y ago

thanks for sharing

lifeisstillgood 3y ago

I think this is the same writer as interviewed on the amazing "subject to change" podcast - cannot find the link ATM

timaios 3y ago

The author looks knowledgeable, and the text is certainly interesting to read, but I really dislike the slang here and there.. You know, people of whom you talk, were more refined than the bums on today's tv screen.. I suppose it is the author's "sense of humour". Or the absence of mine, but still..

coldtea 3y ago
Probably the latter. Some audiences can be very prudish.

pelasaco 3y ago

> John Lukacs used to tell us is that we "must consider the battle of Salamis as if the Persians might still win." Meaning that you want to understand what happens in 1633, you can't consider things learned in 1687 or 1803. The mid-17th century had no clear concept of inertia, of gravitation, of forces, etc.; So basically we should avoid to do any kind of anachronism, which people do as well, while interpreting historical events or even worse historical figures.

bigbillheck 3y ago

This person seemed like someone with a lot of axes to grind, and on investigation they co-wrote one of the worst science fiction books I've ever read ('Fallen Angels').

throw0101b 3y ago

The able of contents for the entire weblog post series is at: * https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-table-of.html https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...

mannykannot 3y ago

As far as I can tell, this is an excellent summary of the issues, but this caught my attention (my emphasis): If the earth were whipping around the sun, we should see parallax among the fixed stars, but do not. The Copernicans answered, "Well, yeah, but maybe the stars aren't just far away but really really far away." But you cannot save an unproven hypothesis by asserting a second unproven hypothesis. The stars had to be relatively close because otherwise their observed diameters would mean they were ginormous entities. Some Copernicans embraced this and said "Goddidit!" Who cared how enormous the stars were, since God was infinite. You can 'save' a hypothesis as a hypothesis by showing that the objection is incomplete, and this is what happened here: the stars are indeed so far away that parallax was not then observable. The apparent corollary, that the stars must therefore be enormous, turned out to be false for a reason not suspected by either side: the apparent angular size of stars as observed by telescope is due to diffraction (the Airy disc.) The author picks up this thread in the comments, saying ...it was not evident at the time which model was more true nor even why one model ought to be more true. That was the contribution of Newton's theory of universal gravitation... Stellar parallax was not observed, however, until 1832, and the Airy disc was not explained until 1834, while Newton's gravitational explanation became widely known in 1686. Furthermore, neither Newton nor any of his contemporaries explained gravitation (Newton himself saying that he "brooked no hypothesis" in that regard), or presented any evidence independent of astronomical observations (i.e. the phenomena to be explained) for either its universality or that it follows an inverse-square law. It turned out, therefore, that what was arguably the strongest objection to heliocentricity was put aside, not because it had been explained away, but because it paled into relative insignificance in comparison to the explanatory power of Newton's theory. In this view, Galileo, for all his faults, was not just a self-aggrandizing promoter who happened to latch on to what turned out to be a correct theory; he was a respectable scientist of his day who had what turned out to have good (mostly) intuitions about which ideas were on the right track. For a more general moral, it is probably this just this: read Kuhn - and probably also Popper, who, at least according to David Deutsch, presents explanation as the ultimate goal of science.