Firstly, I was hoping to spare you the “aggro” from the latter part of this thread.
Back at BioLogos, you and I have already discussed Galileo. And before that we discussed Bruno. And I had to “submit to the superior logic” deployed on poor Bruno’s demise.
Technically speaking, Bruno had a lot of opinions, but he didn’t really have much more than anecdotal evidence. And so that was a problem. But the clincher was not really being able to “read minds” via the charges against Bruno. Secretly, down deep, who knows? Maybe one of the Archbishops really didn’t like the discussion of other worlds. And so I had to hang my head a little… and just watch Bruno “burn for being a heretic” … rather than for being a martyr to science.
But the facts are not the same for Galileo. And while he might have been quite the irritating fellow, I don’t think @PdotdQ has succeeded in confirming one of his earlier assertions, that Galileo was being non-scientific, or emotional, because he couldn’t prove his case.
And that’s when I was goaded into joining this grim thread. I apologize for me, and on @PdotdQ’s behalf as well, that the gyrations within this thread have been at times tedious.
I would certainly never challenge an Astrophysicist (as indicated in PdotdQ’s profile) to say to him that he was insufficiently grounded in the questions at hand. But this didn’t prevent him from grandly deciding (and saying) that I don’t have the history chops to discuss the issues with him.
This is when I had to point out that every time I had to check one of his outrageous statements, I had to play “catch up” to see if what you threw-down on the discussion table made sense in view of the background material I could locate on short notice.
In the link @PdotdQ provides, he gives this summation:
I thought this was a pretty unfair assessment. @PdotdQ makes it sound like Galileo was just “making stuff up”.
How do I mean this?
A. As PDQ says himself, instrumentation to detect parallax wasn’t made possible until the 1800s!
“The first successful measurements of stellar parallax were made by Friedrich Bessel in 1838 for the star 61 Cygni using a heliometer.[6]”
Who knows how long it might have taken if Galileo hadn’t begun his work to improve telescopes for astronomical purposes?
B. As for “one of the theories has a hole” in it, presumably meaning that Galileo mis-calculated the distance between the Earth and the Sun. But Tycho would go on to make his own analysis, and used the conservative premise that the parallax was just small enough to not be noticeable and produced measurements from the sun from there. So rather than a hole in the parallax, the hole that disturbed people was that the stars would be quite massive… much larger than the Earth’s sun. And this point was rejected by geocentrists. On scientific grounds? Hardly.
It seems to be obvious that Galileo continued to press on improving measurements and equipment and observations to continue to gather evidence supporting heliocentrism. This, my good sirs, is the fundamental nature of science.
@PdotdQ presents Galileo like he was Bruno … making stuff as he goes along… with no real science to back him up and so forth.
And what are the Geocentrists doing IN CONTRAST to the purportedly amateur rantings of Galileo? They continued to distance themselves from
Well, one of the things they were doing was finishing the disposal of the old Ptolemaic models! And it was because of what Galileo had uncovered.
Nine years after the death of Galileo, Giovanni Battista Riccioli wrote a seminal work, the New Almagest, which included a very long analysis of the motion of the Earth and/or the Sun!:
To Riccioli the question was not between the geocentric world system of Ptolemy and the heliocentric world system of Copernicus, for the telescope had unseated the Ptolemaic system; it was between the geo-heliocentric world system developed by Tycho Brahe in the 1570s [[29]]
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Nine years a
A substantial portion of the New Almagest (Book 9, consisting of 343 pages) is devoted to an analysis of the world system question: Is the universe geocentric or heliocentric? Does the Earth move or is it immobile? . . .
(Giovanni Battista Riccioli - Wikipedia) in his opinion apparently superseding even Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems — Ptolemaic and Copernican. Indeed, one writer has recently described Book 9 as “the book Galileo was supposed to write”.[[28]]
[[Too bad that Galileo was compelled to disavow all his belief in heliocentrism!]]
(Giovanni Battista Riccioli - Wikipedia) Within Book 9 Riccioli discusses 126 arguments concerning Earth’s motion—49 for and 77 against.
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Since Copernicus was the first to publish heliocentrism, there’s never been any question about what Galileo’s role was: he was the first to use a telescope to study the night sky, and he used the telescope to produce mathematical and observational evidence that Copernicus was right and that Geocentrism was wrong.
Since the Church defended Tycho’s blend of Geo-Heliocentrism well into the 1800’s, expecting Galileo’s work to be uniformly convince all the world that Heliocentrism alone was correct is just plain “pie in the sky”.
However, the fact that even the Jesuits had to reject Geocentrism and move to Tycho’s theories demonstrates that Galileo’s work was real science, and not just the passionate rantings of a man who had luck on his side:
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**"The Aristotelian physics of the time (modern Newtonian physics was still a century away) offered no physical explanation for the motion of a massive body like Earth, whereas it could easily explain the motion of heavenly bodies by postulating that they were made of a different sort substance called aether that moved naturally. So Tycho said that the Copernican system "… expertly and completely circumvents all that is superfluous or discordant in the system of Ptolemy. On no point does it offend the principle of mathematics. **
Yet . . . Tycho took issue with the vast distances to the stars that Aristarchus and Copernicus had assumed in order to explain the lack of any visible parallax. Tycho had measured the apparent sizes of stars (now known to be illusory – see stellar magnitude), and used geometry to calculate that in order to both have those apparent sizes and be as far away as heliocentrism required, stars would have to be huge (much larger than the sun; the size of Earth’s orbit or larger).
The Jesuit astronomers in Rome were at first unreceptive to Tycho’s system [combining features of both Geocentrism and Heliocentrism]… [the Jesuit…] Clavius, commented that Tycho was “confusing all of astronomy, because he wants to have Mars lower than the Sun.”
However, after [Galileo’s use…] of the telescope showed problems with some geocentric models (by demonstrating that Venus circles the Sun, for example), the Tychonic system and variations on that system became popular among geocentrists…"