3 ms·

I understood that. My point is that they aren't irrelevant, they help drive the new theory forward. Galileo's initial results could not predict many things th

by KK7NIL 2y ago

I understood that. My point is that they aren't irrelevant, they help drive the new theory forward. Galileo's initial results could not predict many things that the old geo-centric models could predict for centuries. This is almost inevitable with a groundbreaking new framework, but the skeptics aren't wrong to point it out, it's up to the supporters to show it can do what old model can do and more, which Galileo was never quite able to show in his lifetime, if I recall correctly. Again, it's easy to look back and talk about how these "irrelevant nitpicks" of tectonic plates and helio-centrism were "wrong" or "irrelevant", but that's just not how science works, you don't get to skip over the details when you present a theory that undermines everything we know, that's just crackpot behavior.

rcxdude 2y ago
Indeed. Galileo was up against a model that was much more useful and matched better with the available evidence and understanding: Often it's described as Copernicus vs Ptolemy, but while Galileo's observations conclusively destroyed Ptolemy by showing the other planets rotated around the sun, Brahe had a model where that was true, but the sun revolved around the earth, and it was functionally identical to the Copernican model except that it didn't require the earth to rotate and it was easier to calculate because it used fewer epicycles. It was Kepler that actually fixed the problem (before telescopes, even!) with epicycle-based models by making the paths ellipses, and it took the modern understanding of velocity, acceleration, and momentum which Newton perfected (neatly deriving Kepler's ellipses as well), along with experiments by a few other scientists demonstrating the coriolis effect on dropped objects to actually produce direct evidence of the earth's rotation and address the objections of Galileo's detractors (And Foucault hammered it home with his pendulum). Some of Galileo's contemporaries attempted similar experiments but failed because the effect was too small.

by KK7NIL 2y ago

rcxdude 2y ago

Indeed. Galileo was up against a model that was much more useful and matched better with the available evidence and understanding: Often it's described as Copernicus vs Ptolemy, but while Galileo's observations conclusively destroyed Ptolemy by showing the other planets rotated around the sun, Brahe had a model where that was true, but the sun revolved around the earth, and it was functionally identical to the Copernican model except that it didn't require the earth to rotate and it was easier to calculate because it used fewer epicycles. It was Kepler that actually fixed the problem (before telescopes, even!) with epicycle-based models by making the paths ellipses, and it took the modern understanding of velocity, acceleration, and momentum which Newton perfected (neatly deriving Kepler's ellipses as well), along with experiments by a few other scientists demonstrating the coriolis effect on dropped objects to actually produce direct evidence of the earth's rotation and address the objections of Galileo's detractors (And Foucault hammered it home with his pendulum). Some of Galileo's contemporaries attempted similar experiments but failed because the effect was too small.