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> Copernicus saw that heliocentrism led to a simpler model that fit observation better. That's not true, he didn't. Geocentric model of the time was a better
by srean 2y ago
> Copernicus saw that heliocentrism led to a simpler model that fit observation better.
That's not true, he didn't.
Geocentric model of the time was a better fit of the data than the Copernican model. What Copernican model had was simplicity (at some cost to observational data fidelity).
Making the heliocentric model approach (and breach) the accuracy obtained by the geocentric model took a lifetime of work by many people.
As a kinematic model (description of the geometry of motions) as observed from Earth's reference frame geocentric is still pretty darn accurate. There's a reason why it is so. Compositions of epicycles are a form of Fourier analysis -- they are universal approximators. They can fit any 'reasonably well behaved' function. The risk is, and it's the same risk with ML, deep neural nets, that one (i) could overfit and (ii) it could generate a model with high predictive accuracy without being a causal model that generalises.
Heliocentric model was proposed much much earlier than Copernicus but the counterarguments were non-ignorable. Reality, it turned out was very surprising and unintuitive.
- simpaticoder 2y agoTruth be told, I don't know much about Copernicus. He may indeed have been right but for the wrong reasons! If so, he's a very good example against my point that observation must precede successful revolution. It seems strange that the Catholic church took him so seriously if his claim was supported by his enthusiasm and not observation. It's definitely something I'd like to learn more about - any book recommendations?
- srean 2y agoThis history is absolutely fascinating. Let me find a blog post by Baez that covers a lot of that history. I don't think this history says anything against your point -- sometimes the time is just not right for the idea -- and even classical science can be very unintuitive and weird, so much so that common sense seems like very strong counter arguments against what eventually turn out to be better models. I of course learned this over many books, but the mind blanks out over which one to suggest. I think biographies of Copernicus and Kepler would be good places to start. Edit: you may find this interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42347533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42347533 HN do you know what happened to John Baez's blog that listed his multiparty blog posts ? They are a treasure trove that I do not want to lose. Azimuthproject too seems to have disappeared
- somenameforme 2y agoAs a tangential hit on this issue, the relationship between the Catholic Church and science [1] is an interesting read. It's nowhere near as antagonistic as contemporary revisionary takes would suggest. In particular the most famed example of this is with Galileo (whose name is mentioned no less than 146 times on that fairly short page...) yet that was far more interpersonal issues than his concepts being an affront to theology. He wrote a book calling the Pope (at the time very much one of his supporters) through hardly veiled proxy, a simple minded idiot. Burning bridges is bad enough, but burning one you're standing on is lunacy. If one does genuinely believe in a God then the existence of science need not pose a threat to that, since there's nothing preventing one from believing that God also then created the sciences and rationality of the universe. The classical 'gotchas' like 'Can God create a stone so heavy that he could not lift it?' were trivial to answer by simply accepting that omnipotence does not extend to things which are logically impossible, like a square circle. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_the_Catholic_Church https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_the_Catholic_Churc...
- lanstin 2y agoLLM could have kept the geocentric theory alive for another hundred or more years! Awesome.