No Geocentric Model

Stephen

Banned
Well I di say a GENIUS!:D Some basics like the conservation of momentum can be figured out with some fairly simple experiments and observations.
 
Well I di say a GENIUS!:D Some basics like the conservation of momentum can be figured out with some fairly simple experiments and observations.

Well, Newton was a genius...big-time (I mean, he's probably one of the most genius geniuses who ever lived), but he still needed all those centuries of prior development. As he said, "If [he] had seen a little further, it was by standing on the shoulders of giants". So if you plop Isaac Newton down in mid-5th century BC Athens...he probably becomes super-Socrates, rather than inventing physics.
 
Until then, they're not going to figure out heliocentrism except as a curiosity--geocentrism seems so much more obvious, and doesn't have any apparent evidence against it.
Which is why a recent poll found that a significant percentage of Americans believe the sun goes round the earth.
 

Cook

Banned
Let's see, he said that objects fall at different speeds, and went further to say that their speed was proportional to their weight. He just said it, didn't even bother to test it. All anybody had to do was drop a small rock and a big rock from the same height, and they would have discreditted him.


But as would said above, this thread isn't about the merits of science over nonsense.

Drop a brick, a plank of wood and a feather off the top of a building ant the brick will hit the ground first, followed by the plank, and followed by the feather.
It was millenia until someone with true genius thought through the problem far enough to even ask is there was anything wrong with the answer.

Stop using 20/20 hindsight and claiming it was obvious.
 

Stephen

Banned
The invention of the telescope was a factor in building up evidence for heliocentrism as with a telescope you can see the phases of the planets. So when a plaet is half full for example you know it forms a right angle in a triangle with the Earth and the Sun and use trigonometry to figure out there relative distances. When you record the phases of the other planets the circling of the Sun becomes pretty obviouse.
 
He invented heliocentrism centuries before Nicolaius Copernicus did. ;)

Yes, but as pointed out elsewhere, without far better observational evidence there will be obvious issues (stellar parallax, feelings of motion, what force is causing this, so on and so forth) with any heliocentric model. The only reason geocentrism ended up falling out of favor was that so much evidence accumulated that it was irrefutable--I mean, geocentrism is the obvious way things are, after all.
 

Stephen

Banned
But geocentrism has the planets moving with unexplainable forces also and they dont orbit the Earth but dancing epicycle points all copernicus did was put the all around the same epicycle point near the sun.
 
He invented heliocentrism centuries before Nicolaius Copernicus did. ;)

Irrelevant. There was no good evidence for his assertions, and the possibility for evidence was non-existent given the time he lived.

But geocentrism has the planets moving with unexplainable forces also and they dont orbit the Earth but dancing epicycle points all copernicus did was put the all around the same epicycle point near the sun.

Aristotelian geocentrism explained its forces to the satisfaction of pretty much everybody at the time. Just replacing the Earth at the centre with the Sun causes problems to the model, as has been stated before.
 

The Sandman

Banned
And Galileo disproved that by... dropping things.

And, oddly enough, by not having instruments of modern sophistication. Because I suspect that, what with air resistance and so on, the two balls he dropped did not in fact hit at exactly the same time; at the height from which he was dropping them, however, they would have appeared to do so, and there's no way for them to have observed the tiny fraction of time between the first and second balls hitting the ground.
 
This is all nice and dandy, but let's say that Aristotle did in fact somehow bypass the apparatus of his time, and came to the conclusion that an object's weight does not determine falling speed. What happens?

Nothing. In the 6th century John Philoponus did indeed figure this out. And after a while Aristotle's mechanics were modified with the theory of Impetus. In fact, I still have no idea what the exact difference is between medieval Impetus and modern Momentum is, other than different words are used.

Clearly, this modification did nothing to change Geocentrism as the dominant scientific position.
 
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