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In science being right is nowhere close to enough, otherwise it's speculative fiction, a fairy tale, you have to provide convincing reasons, you have to demonstrate that you have considered alternative explanations (hypotheses) and after this process there remains one standing.

Sadly, Aristarchus's hunch was way ahead of his times and one could not convincingly explain the absence of screaming winds, absence of stellar paradox, could not convincingly explain why weights dropped from a height were not left behind as the Earth below spun away at fantastic speed.

In this duel of ideas I think the critics of Aristarchus's idea's were great scientists as measured by current standards, although they were wrong, they were wrong for the right reasons.





To add to this: I think that what appears to us to be stagnation in scientific interest was due to the fact that Ptolemaios was so brilliant. Contrary to popular belief, the empirical quality of his cosmology in terms of predictability was not surpassed by Copernicus, but only by Kepler about 100 years later.

There were some minor discrepancies, that bothered experts in the late middle ages, which let to Copernicus. But even he could not convincingly solve them. (In his theory the Sun is not at the center, but the mean Sun, as is the center of Ptolemaios deferent not exactly the Earth.)

With Ptolemaios, however, cosmology had stabilised to such an extent that the fundamental questions had found their answers and astronomers turned their attention to practical issues and refinements, such as calendars and the related problem of the very odd movements of the moon. (You need Newton and gravitation to solves this, more or less.)


I often wonder if Quantum Mechanics is a "Ptolomaic" understanding of the sub atomic world.



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