WI: Less-oppressive Church against the pre-science communities in the Middle Ages?

Well otherwise your comments were pretty accurate.

But Scholastic thought is highly nuanced, and very very different from the Classical thought it was influenced by. By the high middle ages, Aristotelians were only broadly Aristotelian. They had a lot of different opinions that Aristotle. Even from the very beginning of the middle ages, people were disagreeing with Aristotle on a variety of points, and these things just sort of kept piling up until medieval Aristotelianism had only broad similarities with classical Aristotelianism, with the specifics wildly different.

Also of note is that the Geocentric model was indeed modified due to Galileo's writings. But only with the things that were absolutely proven at the time, like the moons of Jupiter. These sorts of modifications happened all the time. As somebody else has suggested, the church didn't like to throw away centuries of established fact without a lot of pondering and fact checking, and were perfectly amiable to new scientific ideas which could be shown to actually be true.
 
Atrium, I just read that story posted, and it is fantastic. I can see why it's up for a Nebula. A bit wankish, but still well written and engaging.
 
It's hard science fiction, which is personally my favourite sort of science fiction. Though I recognise hard science fiction is not to everyone's taste. I'm glad to hear someone enjoyed it beyond the alternate history aspect.

I think it's only wankish only in that everyone made several very lucky observations in a short span of time. Otherwise it was totally possible.

Which was the point, I think. The author seems to have written the story to disprove the notion that the middle ages were times of scientific backwardness.

If you're further interested, in the issue of Analog that story came in, right after the story the author did a little dialectic entry about the position, where he further elaborates on those things. Again it is relevant to this thread.
 
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