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Galileo Was Wrong The Church Was Right
The Evidence from Modern Science

This volume is dedicated to:
Albert Einstein
…who invented Special Relativity to counter experiments revealing that the Earth was motionless
in space, which then led him to General Relativity that forced him to accept a motionless Earth as a
viable and worthy cosmological system
iv

Table of Contents

About the Authors

ix

Endorsements

x

Notes Concerning Terminology

xiii

Introduction

1

Chapter 1 The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism 11

Galileo’s Conversion to Geocentrism

12

Copernicanism’s Procrustean Bed

16

Ancient Origins of the Heliocentric/Geocentric Debate

30

The Basic Framework: Crystalline Spheres

31

The Greek Heliocentrists

34

The Geocentric Victory

36

The Real Truth about Copernicus’ Solar System

43

Copernicus: More Epicycles than Ptolemy

56

The Real Truth about Kepler’s Solar System

68

Kepler verses Tycho

70

Ptolemy, Copernicus and Kelper in Perspective

80

Why No System is Completely Accurate

95

What was the Attraction to Copernicanism?

101

Is There a Copernican Conspiracy?

109

Chapter 2 Answering Common Objections about Geocentrism 125

1) Doesn’t the Smaller Always Revolve Around the Larger? 125

2) Doesn’t Stellar Parallax Prove the Earth is Moving?

147

3) Doesn’t Stellar Aberration Prove the Earth Revolves?

158

4) Doesn’t the Foucault Pendulum Prove Earth Rotates?

168

5) Doesn’t the Bulge of the Equator Prove Earth Rotates?

180

6) Doesn’t a Geosynchronous Satellite Prove Earth Rotates? 182

7) Don’t Space Probes Show the Earth Rotates?

183

8) Doesn’t Retrograde Motion Prove Earth is Moving?

184

9) Doesn’t Star Streaming Prove Earth is Moving?

187

10) Doesn’t the Doppler Effect Prove Earth is Moving?

187

11) Is Geocentrism’s Geometry More Complicated?

190

12) Do the Planets Revolve Around the Sun or the Earth?

192

v

13) Don’t the Four Seasons Prove the Earth Revolves?

192

14) Do Earthquakes and Tsunamis Retard Earth’s Rotation? 201

15) Doesn’t NASA Use the Heliocentrism for Space Probes? 206

16) Don’t the Phases of Venus Disprove Ptolemy?

209

17) Didn’t Einstein Do Away with Ether?

214

18) Isn’t Impossible for the Stars to Travel so Fast?

220

19) Doesn’t Redshift Contradict a Small?

230

20) Doesn’t the GPS Prove Relativity?

232

21) Doesn’t Dark Matter Prove the Earth Isn’t Special?

239

22) Doesn’t Dark Energy Prove the Universe is Expanding? 247

23) Didn’t WMAP Prove the Big Bang?

261

24) Doesn’t the Speed of Light Contradict Genesis 1

269

25) Doesn’t a Rotating Universe Cause the Earth to Rotate? 286

Chapter 3 Evidence that Earth is the Center of the Universe 293

Edwin Hubble’s “Intolerable” Observations

293

Big Bang Dilemma: Dark Energy or Geocentrism?

315

The Discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Radiation

321

CMB Anisotropy and Earth-Centeredness

331

The 2001 Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe

337

NASA’s Interpretation of the WMAP Data

368

The 2009 Planck Probe

378

Correlation between the CMB and Preferred Spin Axis

383

Distant Radio Sources Non-Copernican

388

CMB Displays Small Spherical Universe

388

The Hall of Mirrors Effect

390

Correlation between Stonehendge and the CMB

393

Gamma-Ray Bursts: The Copernican Dilemma

397

Quasars: Spheres Around the Earth

403

Violation of the Copernican Principle in Radio Sky

416

Galaxies: Spheres of Stars around the Earth as Center

417

The 2005 Sloan Digital Sky Survey

422

Concentric Circles in WMAP Anisotropies

434

Geocentrically Oriented Spectroscopic Binaries

435

Quantized Planetary Orbits

438

The Last Copernican Frontier: The Multiverse

439

“The View from the Center of the Universe”

452

vi

Chapter 4 Experimental Evidence Earth is Motionless in Space 457

Einstein’s “Unthinkable” Alternative

457

The Significance of the Michelson-Morley Experiment

464

Einstein’s Concern for the Fizeau and Airy Experiments

465

The Experiments of Dominique Arago

469

The Experiments of Augustin Fresnel

471

The Experiments of Armand Fizeau

475

The Experiments of James Bradley and George Airy

479

The Experiments of Martinus Hoek

489

The Experiments of Eleuthère Mascart

491

The 1881 Michelson Experiment

492

The 1887 Michelson-Morley Experiment

498

Fitzgerald/Lorentz’s Incredible Shrinking Machine, Phase I 504

Albert Einstein Enters the Fray

527

The Ether Entrainment Option

540

Einstein and the Incredible Shrinking Machine, Phase II

542

Herbert Dingle’s Critique of Einstein

568

Martin Gardner and the Inherent Flaws of Relativity

574

The Dead Ends of Relativity for Modern Cosmology

577

The Case of the μ-meson

587

Einstein Admits Speed of Light is Not Constant

590

Einstein Reinterprets Maxwell

595

Chapter 5

More Experiments Point to Geocentrism

609

Interferometer Experiments Subsequent to 1905

614

The Geocentrism Connection

621

What about the Copernican Non-Relativists?

622

How to Correctly Interpret an Interferometer

623

Sagnac 1913 Exp: Rediscovery of Absolute Motion

627

The Michelson-Gale Exp: Sidereal Relative Rotation

637

The Dayton Miller Experiments

644

Recent Ether-Drift Experiments

663

The Results of Sapphire Oscillators

667

vii

Chapter 6

What is Space in the Geocentric Universe?

673

Einstein Goes Back to Ether

678

Candidates for Material Ether

694

The Ether of Quantum Mechanics and String Theory

705

String Theory: Seeking to Bridge Einstein and Quantum

714

Can Man Live in the World he has Created?

718

The Copenhagen Perspective

721

The Demise of Relativity Theory

725

Newton’s Absolute Space and Spinning Water Bucket

731

The “Space” of Diggs, Bruno, and Descartes

735

The “Space” of Leibniz, Euler, and Kant

738

Ernst Mach, Albert Einstein and Modern Philosophy

742

Mach’s Interpretation of Newton’s Bucket

747

Einstein’s Interpretation of Newton’s Bucket

749

The Inherent Problems of Newton and Einstein’s Physics

754

Are There Universal Connections in Space?

760

The Geocentric Connection

771

viii

About the Authors
Robert A. Sungenis, Ph.D., is the founder of
Catholic Apologetics International Publishing, Inc., a non-profit corporation. He holds advanced degrees in Theology and Religious Studies and was a physics major in college. His 700-page doctoral dissertation defended geocentric cosmology from scientific, theological and historical perspectives. He is the author of over twenty books on religion, politics, science and culture. He is also the managing partner of Stellar Motion Pictures, LLC in Los Angeles, which specializes in producing movies on science and religion. He is the executive producer of the recently released movie, The Principle. He has appeared on radio and television, including programs on CNN, the BBC and EWTN. He has authored all the chapters and appendices for Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right: The Evidence from Modern Science, except for Chapter 10. .
Robert J. Bennett, Ph.D., holds a
doctorate in Physics from Stevens Institute of Technology with a thesis on General Relativity titled “Relativistic Rigid Body Motion.” He served as a physics instructor at Manhattan College and Bergen Community College from 1967-1983, and is presently doing private tutoring in physics and mathematics. Dr. Bennett has written Chapter 10, a detailed, technical and mathematical explanation of the various arguments for Geocentrism. He has served as a consultant for the entire Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right: The Evidence from Modern Science project.
ix

Endorsements
A truly magnificent work. There exists no better exposition of the history and science of geocentrism. Very highly recommended and a must for all those interested in the issues surrounding geocentrism today. The animations of the CD are excellent. They illustrate the daily and yearly motions of the sun and planets about the earth, the seasons, retrograde motion, and parallax in a uniform way. The authors have done a very admirable job all around. At long last their book provides the solution to all the “dark” fudging and dead-ends in modern Big Bang cosmology – a solution that no one dared voice until an accumulation of evidence over the last two hundred years forced them to do so.
Gerardus Bouw, Ph.D.
Astronomy, Case-Western University, Author of Geocentricity
Drs. Sungenis and Bennett make a convincing case for the special and central position of the earth in the cosmos, both physically and spiritually. This is radically at odds from what everyone is taught from childhood; everyone “knows” the earth revolves around the sun. However, from time to time, like the little girl in Andersen’s tale The Emperor’s New Clothes, accepted “wisdom” is challenged; and what everyone “knows” to be true turns out to be merely a concocted fantasy. They make a powerful case that the “truths” of heliocentric and acentric cosmologies aiming to describe the “fabric” of space-time may in fact be constructed out of the same type of “cloth” as the outfit of the Emperor.
Vincent J. Schmithorst, Ph.D., Physics
This book shatters the mythology of the modern mind. Galileo and Einstein go the way of Zeus, as the truth ascends to reclaim man's destiny. It will change the world more dramatically than Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and Einstein combined.
Gerald Benitz, M.A., Ph.D. Mathematics/Electrical Engineering
In their book, Robert Sungenis and Robert Bennett have provided an excellent synopsis of a field of science that most people today have probably not even heard about. It is not a regurgitation of some ancient, debunked theory. Neither is this a lightweight paperback, in the vein of so many publications by scientists who have lost the dividing line between science and science fiction. Rather, this book is a work of monumental proportion which ranks, in my opinion, on a par with the meticulous observations of the Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe, and the tireless efforts of Walter van der Kamp who almost single-handedly raised
x

geocentrism from the ashes in the 1970s and 80s….This book is a scholarly piece of work that should thus be welcomed by any thinking person, and that provides ample food for thought on our place within God’s universe.”
Neville Thomas Jones, Ph.D. Physics, Imperial College, London
Now that the Enlightenment is over, it was inevitable that the system upon which it was based should come in for the powerful critique which Sungenis and Bennett provide. Not inevitable, however, was the brilliant way they provide it. Their book exposes the ideological underpinnings of the system that failed at the time of the Michelson-Morley experiments, got revived by Einstein, and is still causing mischief today.
E. Michael Jones, Ph.D. History, Temple Univ., Editor: Culture Wars
In their book, Sungenis and Bennett examine the ‘anomalies’ that arise from the Copernican model, anomalies that are swept under the rug by the same scientists who assume the earth is immobile in order to ‘simplify’ complex problems. A must read for those who can set aside prejudices and a priori assumptions. Human civilization is poised to undergo a colossal multi-faceted shift in perception, philosophy, science and metaphysics that is simply unprecedented in recorded history.
Joseph A. Strada, Ph.D., Aerospace Engineer, NRO
This book forcefully addresses the history, science, theological, philosophical, and worldview implications of our place in the universe. It is virtually a one-volume encyclopedia on geocentrism. After the science has been discussed and the history has been told, it is a powerful reminder of the worldview struggle that faces Christians today.
Russell T. Arndts, Ph.D., Chemistry, L.S.U.
Many works of art and science in the past have been claimed as “game-changers” or “paradigm shifts,” only to be revealed later as only superficially different from the status-quo. This book may look like just another “new” and “improved” intellectual product, but it’s the real thing.
Thaddeus J. Kozinski, Ph.D. Philosophy, Wyoming Catholic College
It is with pleasure that I remand this volume into the hands of the reader, whether he or she is an atheistic scoffer, a Roman Catholic inquirer, a Protestant polemicist, an Evangelical skeptic, or is otherwise motivated to re-open an issue heretofore thought, wrongly, to have been settled nearly four centuries ago. This is all the more remarkable, insofar
xi

as the present volume exposes the dark, seamy underside of modern science and its Janus-like propensity for speaking out of both sides of its mouth simultaneously.
Martin G. Selbrede, Vice President, The Chalcedon Foundation
This book takes a critical look at the thesis that the Earth is flying through space. Here you will find a thorough review of the scientific observations along with a review of the scientists themselves. You will have the evidence to make up your mind for yourself. Robert Sungenis and Robert Bennett have done a great service to science and to men of good will. Those who see the universe as the handiwork of God need no longer be subservient to fairy tales.
Anonymous, Ph.D. (name withheld by request)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This is an amazing work which opened my mind to many things in the field of astronomy and cosmology. I am grateful to Robert Sungenis and his co-author Robert Bennett for this lucid, philosophically powerful and meticulously documented work.
Caryl Johnston, M. Ed., M.L.S.
Jefferson Medical College, Author: Consecrated Venom
The very mention that the earth is motionless at the center of the universe, with the sun and universe revolving about it each day, as outlined and defended from physics and astronomy in this book, elicits a profound initial disbelieving shock. This is not a matter of belief but of evidence and of demanding study. Accumulated evidence justifies the rational claim of the text.
John Domen, MS, Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
From Quasars to Gamma-Ray Bursts, from Parallax to Red Shifts, and from Michelson-Morley to Sagnac, Drs. Sungenis and Bennett’s book meticulously applies the scientific mortar to the theological bricks of geocentrism, producing a compelling structure that brings Catholic teaching and modern science to a crossroads. If the Earth is really the center of the universe, then modern man must face his biggest fear – that there is a Creator who put it there, and man is subject to His rule and authority.
John Salza, Esquire, Author: Masonry Unmasked
xii

Notice Concerning Terminology and Physics
This book is written for both layman and scientist. The main text of the book seeks to explain the scientific information in a simple and entertaining way. The footnotes contain the technical information and sources for the scientist and scholar. We employ the term “geocentrism” to represent the scientific position that the Earth is motionless in space at the center of the universe with neither diurnal rotation nor translational movement. We have adopted the term “heliocentrism” to represent the views of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, even though there are various differences among them, including the acentrism of Einstein. Others employ “geocentricity” or “geostatism” to represent the motionless Earth, and employ “geokineticism” or “antigeostatism” to represent a moving Earth. The term “geocentrism” will stand for any scientific theory that holds the Earth is the center of the universe and/or motionless in space. The term “heliocentrism” will stand for any scientific theory that holds that the Earth is not in the center, or that the sun is the center, or that there is no center of the universe, and that the Earth is in constant motion. In addition to the above, we have adopted the spelling “ether” rather than “aether,” since most scientific texts have employed the former. We have adopted to capitalize titles such as Special Relativity, General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, the Big Bang, String Theory, etc., in order to emphasize that a particular but controversial theory is being discussed. The word “Earth” has been consistently capitalized in distinction to “sun,” “moon,” “stars” or “universe” which have been left in the lower case. The cosmic microwave background radiation is abbreviated with the acronym “CMB.” So as to limit the confusion often inherent in the words rotation and revolution, these volumes use word “rotation” to refer to the turning of an object upon its own axis, including the turn of the entire universe around the north-south axis of the Earth; whereas “revolution” refers to the angular movement of one object around another wherein both are separated by space, as in saying “Mercury revolves around the sun.”
We make use of Newtonian, Machian, Lorentzian, Einsteinian, Quantum, LCDM (Big Bang) and other mathematical systems of physics but do not endorse any of them as having the correct physical representation of reality. We use these models to demonstrate that the geocentric universe can be substantiated by one or more of these models, but that none of them can provide the correct physical model of the universe. At times we will demonstrate how their limited view of reality has been used to obscure geocentric cosmology from the public, and at other times show how the logical conclusions of their own systems supports geocentric cosmology.
xiii

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
Arthur Schopenhauer1
“Scientists...are used to dealing with doubt and uncertainty. All scientific knowledge is uncertain….Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers in the preceeding generation….Learn from science that you must doubt the experts…Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
Richard Feynman2
“Sometimes the first obligation of intelligent men is to restate the obvious.”
George Orwell3
“Many people believe they are thinking when they are only rearranging their pre-existing prejudices.”
Martin Selbrede4
“The Copernican revolution outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes.”
Herbert Butterfield5
“The fool on the hill sees the sun going down and the eyes in his head see the world spinning round.”
Lennon and McCartney6
1 Attributed, not verified. 2 Richard, Feynman, The Meaning of it All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist, 1998, p. 26; Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, 1999, p. 188; ibid., p. 187. 3 Attributed, not verified. 4 Interview for the scientific documentary, The Principle, 2012. 5 Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, 2nd edition, Wesleyan University Press, 1988, pp. 50-51. 6 From the song, The Fool on the Hill, recorded 1967.
xiv

Introduction

This book, Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right: The Evidence from Modern Science, will, at the least, be viewed as an unusual book by the world at large. In modern times, everyone is

taught from early childhood through old age that the Earth rotates on its

axis and revolves around the sun. It is considered a bedrock of truth so

firmly established that only the insane or perhaps members of the Flat

Earth Society, would doubt or question so

sanctified a truth of modern man.

Unbeknownst to almost the entire

human race, however, is the fact that no one

in all of history has ever proven that the

Earth moves in space. Despite his

protestations to the contrary, the historical

record reveals that Galileo Galilei had no

proof for his controversial assertions. What

he purported as proof in his day would be

laughed out of science classrooms today.

Galileo merely began a myth, a myth that

eventually took on a life of its own and

Galileo Galilei 1564 – 1642

became the status quo of popular thinking. But this is not merely Galileo’s burden.
In fact, as we will see in Chapter 1, a year

before he died Galileo renounced, quite dramatically, all his claims that the

Earth went around the sun – a fact of history which has been kept well

under wraps by the reigning powers of academia. The burden is now on

modern science, since some three hundred years after Galileo, like him, it

has also deprived us of proof that the Earth moves. As one honest scientist

put it in a book endorsed by Einstein: “…nor has any physical experiment

ever proved that the Earth actually is in motion.”7 Modern scientists freely

admit that heliocentrism is merely the preferred model of cosmology, and

the choice to believe it is made purely on philosophical grounds, not

scientific ones. Although various scientists and historians have certainly

made it appear as if many and varied proofs exist for heliocentrism, and

thereby they have convinced a rather naïve public, in reality, modern

7 Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein, p. 73. 1

Introduction
science is actually covering up the fact that it has no proof for its cherished view of cosmology.
As Albert Einstein himself once admitted, reliance on the doctrine of Copernicus is not nearly as strong as we were once led to believe:
Since the time of Copernicus we have known that the Earth rotates on its axis and moves around the sun. Even this simple idea, so clear to everyone, was not left untouched by the advance of science. But let us leave this question for the time being and accept Copernicus’ point of view.8
Stephen Hawking, the next most famous physicist after Einstein, said something very similar:
So which is real, the Ptolemaic or the Copernican system? Although it is not uncommon for people to say that Copernicus proved Ptolemy wrong, that is not true. As in the case of our normal view versus that of the goldfish, one can use either picture as a model of the universe, for our observations of the heavens can be explained by assuming either the earth or the sun to be at rest.9
8 Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics, 1938, 1966, pp. 154-155. Thus, Einstein could say: “The four men who laid the foundation of physics on which I have been able to construct my theory are Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, and Lorentz” (“Einstein, too, is Puzzled; It’s at Public Interest,” Chicago Tribune, April 24, 1921, p. 6). 9 The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, 2010, pp. 41-42. Hawking adds: “Despite its role in philosophical debates over the nature of our universe, the real advantage of the Copernican system is simply that the equations of motion are much simpler in the frame of reference in which the sun is at rest.” Hawking is referring to Ptolemy’s epicycles and equants. As we will see later, however, Ptolemy was seeking to account for the real motions of the planets as opposed to mere circular orbits. Copernicus desired to keep Aristotle’s circular orbits but later was forced to add his own epicycles to account for the actual
2

Introduction
Modern science has, indeed, been very happy to follow Einstein’s prescription to “accept Copernicus’ point of view” even though it has been made very clear that “the advance of science” has revealed it is an unprovable assumption. As one of Einstein’s staunch supporters and a much admired physicist in his own right, Sir Arthur Eddington, admitted about the question:

Which is right?....Or are both the victims of illusion?....No one knows which is right. No one will ever know, because we can never find out which, if either, is truly at rest in the aether….The bulge of the Earth’s equator may be attributed indifferently to the Earth’s rotation or to the outward pull of the centrifugal force introduced when the Earth is regarded as non-rotating.10

A very famous experiment took place in 1887 to

Arthur Eddington
1882-1944

answer the above question – the MichelsonMorley experiment. The results were shocking to say the least. Based on the then current science,

the experiment demonstrated the Earth wasn’t moving through space. In a

book endorsed by Einstein, theoretical physicist James Coleman admitted:

….The easiest explanation was that the earth was fixed in the ether and that everything else in the universe moved with respect to the earth and the ether….Such an idea was not considered seriously, since it would mean in effect that our earth occupied the omnipotent position in the universe, with all the other heavenly bodies paying homage by moving around it.11

Lincoln Barnett says much the same:

The Michelson-Morley experiment confronted scientists with an embarrassing alternative. On the one hand they could scrap the ether theory which had explained so many things about

motion of the planets, and thus his system was not “much simpler” than Ptolemy’s. 10 Space, Time and Gravitation: An Outline of the General Relativity Theory, 1923, pp. 24, 41. Eddington adds: “Some would cut the knot by denying the aether altogether. We do not consider that desirable” (ibid., p. 39). 11 James A. Coleman, Relativity for the Layman, p. 37. Of Coleman’s book Einstein wrote: “Gives a really clear idea of relativity” (front cover 1954 edition).
3

Introduction
electricity, magnetism, and light. Or if they insisted on retaining the ether they had to abandon the still more venerable Copernican theory that the earth is in motion. To many physicists it seemed almost easier to believe that the earth stood still than that waves – light waves, electromagnetic waves – could exist without a medium to sustain them. It was a serious dilemma and one that split scientific thought for a quarter century. Many new hypotheses were advanced and rejected. The experiment was tried again by Morley and by others, with the same conclusion; the apparent velocity of the earth through the ether was zero.12
After a quarter century of turmoil, a choice had to be made. Either mankind could retain its then present knowledge of physics but admit the Earth was motionless in space, or it could reinvent physics with all new concepts and formulas to keep the Earth moving. Needless to say, the latter option was chosen. The one to lead them in this new venture was Albert Einstein. In a word, Einstein was forced to turn science upside down in order to keep Copernicus enshrined in the hearts of men. In turn, Einstein’s supporters have followed him and his theories with almost godlike devotion, developing what is, for lack of a better term, the ‘cult of Einstein.’ As his major biographer said it:
A new man appears abruptly, the ‘suddenly famous Doctor Einstein.’ He carries the message of a new order in the universe. He is a new Moses come down from the mountain to bring the law and a new Joshua controlling the motion of heavenly bodies….The new man who appears at that time represents order and power. He becomes the qei:oV ajnhvr, the divine man, of the twentieth century.13
The reality is quite different, however. The theory of Relativity, by its very nature, brings Copernican cosmology under great suspicion and ultimately forces it into becoming just one perspective among others. By design, these stark implications of Relativity theory have been
12 Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein, p. 44. 13 Abraham Pais, Subtle is the Lord, 1982, 2005, p. 311. The phrase qei:oV ajnhvr is the Greek for “divine man.” As another physicist put it: “Too often students believe that Moses, or rather Newton or Einstein, came down from a physical Mt. Sinai with his laws engraved on tablets of stone” (Ronald Newburgh, “Inertial forces, absolute space, and Mach’s principle: The genesis of relativity,” American Journal of Physics, 75(5), May 2007, p. 427).
4

Introduction
systematically ignored and the science community has decided to “leave this question for the time being” hoping that few people will be bold enough to follow the implications to their logical conclusion and ask, indeed, what right mankind has to “accept Copernicus’ point of view.” It is just a matter of time before books and articles like the one you are reading will begin to reveal this information to the public. Up until now almost all of it has been hidden from their eyes. Little is revealed at the university level, and virtually none of it has been divulged in the secondary curriculum, and we certainly haven’t read it on the pages of Time or USA Today, except perhaps for the occasional ridiculing of “fundamentalists” and their offshoots for even broaching such subjects. There is a good reason why such reticence exists – there is simply too much at stake. The mere thought of having to tell the world that it might have to turn back the clock and admit that science took a wrong turn when it accepted the Copernican theory as a scientific fact is, as Einstein’s biographer once put it, “unthinkable.”14
We can sympathize with their plight. Think of the sheer embarrassment modern science would face if it were forced to apologize for 500 years of propagating one of the biggest blunders since the dawn of time. This is not the Middle Ages, a time in which mistakes can be excused due to primitive scientific tools and superstitious notions. This is the era of Newton, Maxwell, Faraday, Darwin, Einstein, Edison, Planck, Hubble, Hawking, and scores of other heroes of science. If Copernicus is wrong, how could modern science ever face the world again? How could it ever hold to the legacy left by these scientific giants if it were forced to admit it was wrong about one of its most sacrosanct and fundamental beliefs? Admitting such a possibility would put question marks around every discovery, every theory, every scientific career, and every university curriculum. The very foundations of modern life would crumble before their eyes. Not only would Earth literally become immobile, but it would figuratively come to a halt as well, for men would be required to revamp their whole view of the universe, and consider the most frightening reality of all – that a supreme Creator actually did put our tiny globe in the most prestigious place in the universe, since only fools would dare to conclude that Earth could occupy the center of the universe by chance. Most of all, science would be compelled to hand the reins of power and influence back to the Church and to Scripture, since it is from these sources alone that the teaching of a motionless Earth originated.
Although we can all agree that modern science certainly has more sophisticated instruments today that allows it to gather thousands of bits of
14 Ronald Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times, 1984, p. 110.
5

Introduction
data about the universe, the problem is that scientists are at a loss how to interpret that information correctly and put it into a coherent and comprehensive understanding of the universe. Knowledge is plentiful, but wisdom is severely lacking. As one astronomer admitted: “Perhaps it is time for astronomers to pause and wonder whether they know too much and understand too little.”15 Hence, the first two volumes of Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right will be devoted mainly to the scientific evidence concerning cosmology. Since modern science has made itself into such an imposing authority on the minds of men today, no study of this kind could possibly be adequate until the scientific assertions are thoroughly addressed and rebutted. We have compiled the most comprehensive scientific treatise on the issue ever offered to the public. The third volume will be devoted mainly to the scriptural, ecclesiastical and patristic evidence supporting the cosmology of geocentrism. We only ask that you, the reader, contemplate the issue with an open mind. All too often when controversial subjects of this nature arise, those who wish to protect the status quo are quick to demonize their opponents, choosing instead to associate them with such institutions as the “Flat earth society,” or characterize them as geeks who don tinfoil hats and receive messages from outer space. Hopefully, you will not fall into that trap of bigotry and censorship. Rest assured, the authors of this book do not fill any of the above caricatures, but are dedicated solely to the cause of truth, both scientific and theological, and will seek to do their task in the face of any opposition.
The world today has lost sight of its purpose for existence. Corruption, apathy and decadence have penetrated almost every level of society. Consequently, the human soul desperately needs a refresher course on the meaning of life. Only a few have realized what a large part Copernicanism has played in the overall deterioration of society. The poet Johann von Goethe once wrote:
But among all the discoveries and corrections probably none has resulted in a deeper influence on the human spirit than the doctrine of Copernicus…. Possibly mankind has never been demanded to do more, for considering all that went up in smoke as a result of realizing this change: a second Paradise, a world of innocence, poetry and piety: the witness of the senses, the conviction of a poetical and religious faith. No wonder his contemporaries did not wish to let all this go and offered every possible resistance to a doctrine which in its converts authorized
15 Herbert Friedman, The Amazing Universe, National Geographic, 1975, p. 180.
6

Introduction and demanded a freedom of view and greatness of thought so far unknown indeed not even dreamed of.”16 Barring a conversion to geocentric cosmology, our modest goal is, whoever reads these volumes will not leave without realizing that what he has been taught about the Earth’s annual journey around the sun is not so certain after all, and that similar to the rationale for deciding verdicts in a court of law, one should realize that there is enough evidence supporting geocentrism to cause a reasonable doubt in the minds of intelligent people. As even one of the leading science magazines recently stated: “When an author puts himself on the line by embracing an unfashionable idea, even though he is guaranteed to generate scorn or indifference, this should somehow be recognized” (Discover, December 2006).
Robert Sungenis December 2012
16 Zur Farbenlehre, Materialien zur Geschichte der Farbenlehre, Frankfurt am Main, 1991, Seite 666.
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For it is He who gave me unerring knowledge of what exists, to know the structure of the world
and the activity of the elements; the beginning and end and middle of times,
the alternations of the solstices and the changes of the seasons,
the cycles of the year and the constellations of the stars… I learned both what is secret and what is manifest, for wisdom, the fashioner of all things, taught me.
Wisdom 7:17-19, 21
8

“I have come to believe that the motion of the Earth cannot be detected by any optical experiment.”
Albert Einstein17

“…to the question whether or not the motion of the Earth in space can be made perceptible in terrestrial experiments. We have already remarked…that all attempts of this nature led to a negative result. Before the theory of relativity was put forward, it was difficult to become reconciled to this negative result.”
Albert Einstein18

“Briefly, everything occurs as if the Earth were at rest…” Henrick Lorentz19

“There was just one alternative; the earth’s true velocity through

space might happen to have been nil.”

Arthur Eddington20

“The failure of the many attempts to measure terrestrially any effects

of the earth’s motion…”

Wolfgang Pauli21

“We do not have and cannot have any means of discovering whether or not we are carried along in a uniform motion of translation.”
Henri Poincaré22

“A great deal of research has been carried out concerning the influence of the Earth’s movement. The results were always negative.”
Henri Poincaré23

17 Speech titled: “How I Created the Theory of Relativity,” delivered at Kyoto University, Japan, Dec. 14, 1922, as cited in Physics Today, August, 1982. 18 “Relativity – The Special and General Theory,” cited in Stephen Hawking’s, A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion, 2007, p. 169. 19 Lorentz’s 1886 paper, “On the Influence of the Earth’s Motion of Luminiferous Phenomena,” in A. Miller’s Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, p. 20. 20 Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, 1929, pp. 11, 8. 21 Wolfgang Pauli, The Theory of Relativity, 1958, p. 4. 22 From Poincaré’s lecture titled: “L’état actuel et l’avenir de la physique mathematique,” St. Louis, Sept. 24, 1904, Scientific Monthly, April, 1956. 23 From Poincaré’s report La science et l’hypothèse (“Science and Hypothesis”)1901, 1968, p. 182. L. Kostro’s, Einstein and the Ether, 2000, p. 30.
9

“This conclusion directly contradicts the explanation…which presupposes that the Earth moves.”
Albert Michelson24 “The data were almost unbelievable… There was only one other possible conclusion to draw — that the Earth was at rest.”
Bernard Jaffe25 “…nor has any physical experiment ever proved that the Earth actually is in motion.”
Lincoln Barnett26 “Thus, even now, three and a half centuries after Galileo…it is still remarkably difficult to say categorically whether the earth moves...”
Julian B. Barbour27 "…there must be no favored location in the universe, no center, no boundary; all must see the universe alike. And, in order to ensure this situation, the cosmologist postulates spatial isotropy and spatial homogeneity.…"
Edwin Hubble28
24 Albert A. Michelson, “The Relative Motion of the Earth and the Luminiferous Ether,” American Journal of Science, Vol. 22, August 1881, p. 125, said after his interferometer experiment did not detect the movement of ether against the Earth. 25 Bernard Jaffe, Michelson and the Speed of Light, 1960, p. 76. Jaffe adds this conclusion to the above sentence: “This, of course, was preposterous.” 26 Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein, 2nd rev. edition, 1957, p. 73. 27 Julian Barbour, Absolute or Relative Motion, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 226. 28 Edwin Hubble, The Observational Approach to Cosmology, 1937, p. 63.
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Chapter 1
The New Galileo & the Truth about Copernicanism
Galileo was wrong?! How could modern men from the twenty-first century dare to name a book with such a title? No doubt, almost every book written about cosmology in modern times begins with the premise that Copernicus’ and Galileo’s cosmology was correct and the Catholic Church that condemned them was very mistaken. Typical remarks in a book about Galileo begin with very stern and foreboding words. The reader is simply not permitted to entertain any other possibility as to the construction and movements of the cosmos. As one author put it: “Galileo…who produced the irrefutable proofs of the Sun-centered system…came into direct and disastrous conflict with the Church.”29 Another says: “Readers, who know quite well that the Earth goes around the sun…”30 Yet another says:
Who better than Galileo to propound the most stunning reversal in perception ever to have jarred intelligent thought: We are not the center of the universe. The immobility of our world is an illusion. We spin. We speed through space. We circle the Sun. We live on a wandering star.31
The reader, not knowing any differently, doesn’t give the author’s assertion a second thought for all his life he has been taught that the Earth revolves around the sun, and he has placed himself under the edict that this particular teaching of modern science is no more to be doubted than the fact that fish swim or that birds fly.
29 Ivan R. King, The Unfolding Universe, 1976, p. 132, emphasis added. Ivan King was professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. 30 Giorgio de Santillana, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The Crime of Galileo, 1962, editor’s preface, pp. viii-ix. De Santillana’s major thesis is stated very early in the book: “…the tragedy was the result of a plot of which the hierarchies themselves turned out to be the victims no less than Galileo – an intrigue engineered by a group of obscure and disparate characters in strange collusion who planted false documents in the file, who later misinformed the Pope and then presented to him a misleading account of the trial for decision” (p. xx). Suffice it to say, our book will show that it is Santillana who has been the victim of an intrigue engineered by a group of prominent and influential scientists in collusion, who made false conclusions from scientific experiments and then presented a misleading account to the public. 31Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter, 1999, p. 153.
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism As the typical author begins from the unquestioned premise that Galileo’s sun-centered world has been indisputably proven, he will postulate various reasons why the Catholic Church did not accept this new and improved model of the universe. The suggestions are many and varied, ranging from “ecclesiastical bureaucracy,” “deliberate chicanery,” “religious fundamentalism,” “corporate interests” to “unfair tactics,”32 but there is little doubt that virtually all the biographers and historians will invariably dismiss the possibility that Galileo could have been wrong.
Galileo Galilei: 1564 – 1642
Galileo’s Conversion to Geocentrism
Although it will certainly come as a shock to most people, one very important reason we argue against heliocentrism is that we are revealing the wishes of none other than Galileo himself.33 Unbeknownst to almost every modern reader, and even most historians, is the fact that just one year prior to his death Galileo made it very clear to his former allies where he now stood on the subject of cosmology. On the 29th of March 1641,
32 These are some of the various reasons given for the Church’s rejection of Galileo’s theory in the opening pages of Giorgio Santillana’s The Crime of Galileo (pp. ix, xv, xx), a very terse and satirically worded account of the Galileo affair which is highly critical of the Catholic Church’s role and very favorable to Galileo. 33 Galileo Galilei was also Latinized to Galileus Galileus, which was often the way Galileo signed his name, as for example in his exchange of letters with Kelper in 1597. He was also called Galileo Galilei Linceo.
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism
Galileo responded to a letter that he received from his colleague Francesco Rinuccini, dated the 23rd of March 1641, containing discoveries made by the astronomer Giovanni Pieroni concerning the parallax motion of certain stars, from which both Rinuccini and Pieroni believed they had uncovered proof of the heliocentric system. Rinuccini writes to Galileo:
Your Illustrious Excellency, Signor Giovanni Pieroni has written to me in recent months telling how he had clearly observed with an optical instrument the movement of a few minutes or seconds in the fixed stars, but with just that level of certainty that the human eye can attain in observing a degree. All this afforded me the greatest pleasure - witnessing such a conclusive argument for the validity of the Copernican system! However, I have felt no little confusion because of something I read a few days ago in a bookshop. I happened to look at a book that is just now on the verge of being published. According to the author, if it were true that the sun is the center of the universe, and that the Earth travels around it once every year, it would follow that we would never be able to see half of the whole sky by night, because the line passing through the center and the horizons of the Earth, touching the periphery of the great orb, is a cord of a piece of the arc of the circle of the starry heavens, the diameter of which passes through the center of the sun. And since I have always believed it to be true - not having personally witnessed it - that the first [star] of Libra rises at the same moment as the first [star] of Aries sets, my limited intelligence has been unable to arrive at a solution. I therefore implore you, in your very great kindness, to remove this doubt from my mind. I will be very greatly obliged to you. Reverently kissing your hand, etc. Francesco Rinuccini.” 34
Galileo, not being particularly moved by the assertions, writes this surprising response to Rinuccini:
The falsity of the Copernican system should not in any way be called into question, above all, not by Catholics, since we have the unshakeable authority of the Sacred Scripture, interpreted by the most erudite theologians, whose consensus gives us certainty
34 Le Opere Di Galileo Galilei, Antonio Favaro, reprinted from the 1890-1909 edition by Firenze, G. Barbèra – Editore, 1968, vol. 18, p. 311, translated from the original Italian by Fr. Brian Harrison.
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism
regarding the stability of the Earth, situated in the center, and the motion of the sun around the Earth. The conjectures employed by Copernicus and his followers in maintaining the contrary thesis are all sufficiently rebutted by that most solid argument deriving from the omnipotence of God. He is able to bring about in different ways, indeed, in an infinite number of ways, things that, according to our opinion and observation, appear to happen in one particular way. We should not seek to shorten the hand of God and boldly insist on something beyond the limits of our competence…. D’Arcetri, March 29, 1641. I am writing the enclosed letter to Rev. Fr. Fulgenzio, from whom I have heard no news lately. I entrust it to Your Excellency to kindly make sure he receives it.”35
Search as one might, few today will find Galileo’s retraction of Copernicanism cited in books or articles written on the subject of his life and work. Fewer still are those in public conversation about Galileo who have ever heard that he recanted his earlier view. The reason is, quite simply, that the letter has been obscured from the public’s eye for the last four centuries. As Galileo historian Klaus Fischer has admitted: “The ruling historiographers of science cannot be freed from the reproach that they have read Galileo’s writings too selectively.”36 Fortunately, Galileo’s retraction managed to escape censorship and find its way among the rest of his letters in the twenty-volume compendium Le Opere di Galileo Galilei finally published in 1909 with a reprint in Florence in 1968. Centuries
35 Ibid, p. 316, translated from the original Italian by Fr. Brian Harrison. A note added by the editor states: “Bibl. Naz. Fir. Banco Rari, Armadio 9, Cartella 5, 33. – Orginale, di mano di Vincenzio Vivani.” This means that the letter is stored in the rare archives of the National Library at Florence in the rare books department, in cabinet #9, folder #5, 33 and written in the original hand of Vincenzio Viviani, since Galileo was blind in both eyes in 1641. Viviani was Galileo’s last pupil and first biographer. NB: Viviani had performed the first Foucault-type pendulum experiment in 1661. Galileo’s letter to Rinuccini was translated into English by Fr. Brian Harrison upon request. Stillman Drake contains a similar translation in Galileo At Work: His Scientific Biography, 1978, p. 417. 36 Klaus Fischer, Galileo Galilei, Munich, Germany, Beck, 1983, p. 114.
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism
prior to its publication, there was a concerted effort by either Rinuccini or someone behind the scenes to cover up the fact that the letter was, indeed, written and sent by Galileo. We know this to be the case since a rather obvious attempt was made to erase Galileo’s name as the signatory of the letter. The compiler of the original letter makes this startling notation: “The signature ‘Galileo Galilei’ has been very deliberately and repeatedly rubbed over, with the manifest intention of rendering it illegible.”37 Stillman Drake, one of the top Galileo historians, noticed the subterfuge:
Among all Galileo’s surviving letters, it is only this one on which his name at the end was scratched out heavily in ink. I presume that Rinuccini valued and preserved Galileo’s letters no matter what they said, but did not want others to see this declaration by Galileo that the Copernican system was false, lest he be thought a hypocrite.38
Judging from the contents of his letter to Rinuccini, for quite some time it seems that Galileo had been contemplating the problems inherent in the Copernican system, as well as his desire to convert back to an Earthcentered cosmology. The wording in his letter is rather settled and direct as it does not reflect someone who is confused or equivocating. It holds the convictions of a man who has been swept off his feet by a more convincing position. Hence, far from being a hero of modern cosmology, shortly before his death Galileo had become its worst adversary – a fact of history that has been either quietly ignored or deliberately suppressed.
What has also been suppressed is the spiritual reason Galileo had a change of heart. In the new book Galileo: Watcher of the Skies, author David Wootton makes a substantial case that prior to 1639, three years before his death, Galileo was not a true Christian but merely a nominal Catholic who was a member of a secret society that actually rejected major Catholic doctrines. These doctrinal aberrations, coupled with his immoral life, strongly suggest that Galileo’s quest to advance Copernicanism was motivated by a very strong anti-Church sentiment, as was the case with many other scientists in history. By 1641, it seems to be the case that Galileo’s newfound faith led him to accept fully the Church’s historic geocentric cosmology as a divine revelation.39
37 Original Italian: “La firma ‘Galileo Galilei’ è stata accuratissimamente coperta di freghi, con manifesta intenzione di renderla illeggibile” (Le Opere Di Galileo Galilei, vol. 18, p. 316, footnote #2). Translated by Fr. Brian Harrison. 38 Stillman Drake, Galileo At Work: His Scientific Biography, 1978, p. 418. 39 See Volume III, Chapter 16 for the details of Galileo’s conversion. David Wootton, Galieo: Watcher of the Skies, New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 2010.
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism
Copernicanism’s Procrustean Bed
Opposed to the repentant and converted Galileo, most of today’s scientists impose on us a belief, according to Carl Sagan (d. 1996), that “we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people,” and all of which popped into existence, by chance, “billions and billions” of years ago.40

Carl Sagan 1934 – 1996

Stephen Gould 1941 – 2002

This glum picture of our place in the universe is, in the estimation of its most cherished icons, the springboard of all modern science. In the words of one of its leading figures, Stephen Jay Gould:

40 Carl Sagan, Cosmos, New York: Random House, 1980, p. 193. “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation of a distant memory, as if we were falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries” (ibid., p. 4). “The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity” (“Scientists & Their Gods,” U.S. News & World Report Vol. 111 (1991); “Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever it has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?” Interview with Charlie Rose (1996).
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism
“…the common component of all major scientific revolutions…revolutions that smash [the] pedestals…of our cosmic arrogance…[has been] the cosmological shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric universe, ‘when [humanity] realized that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable.’…. Revolutions are…consummated when people…grasp the meaning of this reconstruction for the demotion of human status in the cosmos.41
There is probably no statement better than Gould’s that sums up the motivations, aspirations, and convictions of the modern scientific community. All of modern science, in one form or another, is based on the Copernican premise that the Earth revolves around the sun. To posit otherwise is, as one scientist put it, “a depressing thought.”42 In brief, heliocentrism has served as the quintessential catapult to release science from the so-called ‘constraints of religion,’ and it has never looked back. Gould continues the same theme in another book:
Galileo was not shown the instruments of torture in an abstract debate about lunar motion. He had threatened the Church’s conventional argument for social and doctrinal stability: the static world order with planets circling about a central earth, priests subordinate to the Pope and serfs to their Lord. But the Church soon made its peace with Galileo’s cosmology. They had no choice; the earth really does revolve around the sun.43
41 Stephen Jay Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History, 1996, p. 325. The quotation is Gould’s citation of Sigmund Freud, who adds: “Humanity has…had to endure…great outrages upon its naïve self-love.” Gould is convinced that “we have truly discovered – as a fact of the external world, not a preference of our psyches – that the earth revolves around the sun…” (ibid., p. 93). In other works, he is not so self-assured: “These are two things that we can’t comprehend. And yet theory almost demands that we deal with it. It’s probably because we’re not thinking about them right. Infinity is a paradox within Cartesian space, right? When I was eight or nine I used to say, ‘Well, there’s a brick wall out there.’ Well, what’s beyond the brick wall? But that’s Cartesian space, and even if space is curved you still can’t help thinking what’s beyond the curve, even if that’s not the right way of thinking about it. Maybe all of that’s just wrong! Maybe it’s a universe of fractal expansions! I don’t know what it is. Maybe there are ways in which this universe is structured we just can’t think about” (Interview with John Horgan, cited in The End of Science, 1996, p. 125). 42 Donald Goldsmith, The Evolving Universe, 1985, p. 140. 43 Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 1981, 1996, p. 54.
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism
Of course, the other side of the story is, if Gould and his colleagues are wrong, then “the most important scientific revolution” of all time waits to be restored to its rightful place. Earth, as the center of the universe, motionless in space wherein all other celestial bodies revolve around it, would destroy, in one mortal blow, the theories of evolution, paleontology, cosmology, cosmogony, relativity, and many other modern disciplines, placing them all on the dust heap of history. If Earth is in the center of the universe, it means, with little argument from the science community, that Someone placed it there by design. Gould realized that fact better than anyone else. But with all due respect to Gould, it is not “arrogance” that leads one to see the Earth as the center of the universe. Rather, humility guides the human soul to recognize that there is Someone much higher than we Who has esteemed Earth so much that He put it in a most unique place in the universe to be the apple of His eye. Arrogance is on the side of those who would seek to remove that Someone from our immediate purview by throwing the Earth into the remote recesses of space. As Galileo historian Arthur Koestler concluded:
The notion of limitlessness or infinity, which the Copernican system implied, was bound to devour the space reserved for God….This meant, among other things the end of intimacy between man and God. Homo sapiens had dwelt in a universe enveloped by divinity as by a womb; now he was being expelled from the womb. Hence Pascal’s cry of horror.44
Not far behind Gould’s sentiment is another science icon, Stephen Hawking:
[We have moved] from the revolutionary claim of Nicolaus Copernicus that the Earth orbits the sun to the equally revolutionary proposal of Albert Einstein that space and time are curved and warped by mass and energy. It is a compelling story because both Copernicus and Einstein have brought about profound changes in what we see as our position in the order of
44 Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe, 1959, 1979, p. 222. Koestler is referring to Blaise Pascal (d. 1662), a Catholic (Jansenist) philosopher who was unsure of God’s existence and desperately tried to fill the void. He is noted as saying: “I am terrified by the emptiness of these infinite spaces” (Pensées sur la religion, 1669). Echoing similar sentiments, Edmund Burke stated in 1757: “Infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror…” A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, pp. 129, 431.
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism things. Gone is our privileged place at the center of the universe, gone are eternity and certainty, and gone are absolute space and time.45
Stephen Hawking b. 1942
So not only does science wish to remove Earth from the center, the demotion also dictates that the things we have always held as reliable guideposts to our lives are suddenly torn away from us. An Earth set adrift will invariably make everything else relative and thus, as Hawking admits, will turn the notions of “certainty” and “absolutes” into mere figments of our imagination.
Curiously, Gould and Hawking don’t seem bothered by such upheaval and unsettling of our world. In fact, they seem rather predisposed to it. They would have surely been opposed to Galileo’s conversion (which Galileo based on his Catholic faith), and the reason, perhaps, has something to do with their self-attested atheism and their allegiance to rationalism and materialism. They know deep down in their souls that if they can keep the Earth in the outer recesses of space there is no longer clear evidence that the Someone exists, and they can live their lives happily ever after.
45 On the Shoulders of Giants, ed., Stephen Hawking, 2002, p. ix. 19

Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism
Paul C. W. Davies, b. 1946 Thus, the message of modern man, enshrined as it is in the gospel of Nicolaus Copernicus, has literally, and figuratively, turned the world upside down. Copernicanism is the foundation for modern man’s independence from God, a connection that was recognized by the editor of the world’s most prestigious scientific journal. When confronted in the late 1970s with the new model of cosmology invented by the well-known physicist George F. R. Ellis (a cosmology that proposed the Earth was in a central position in the universe), Paul C. W. Davies, the editor of Nature, was forced to reply: “His new theory seems quite consistent with our astronomical observations, even though it clashes with the thought that we are godless and making it on our own.”46
46 P. C. W. Davies, “Cosmic Heresy?” Nature, 273:336, 1978. In the same article Davies admits: “…as we see only redshifts whichever direction we look in the sky, the only way in which this could be consistent with a gravitational explanation is if the Earth is situated at the center of an inhomogeneous Universe.” Confirming Davies’ agnosticism is a letter he wrote to me on August 9, 2004, stating: “I have long argued against the notion of any sort of God who resides within time, and who preceded the universe.” Davies, however, is honest enough to admit he cannot lightly dismiss Ellis’ science or mathematics that connect the Earth with the center of the universe. As for Ellis, although he realizes the geocentric evidence for the universe, he opts to describe it as a spherical dipole universe in which the Earth is the south pole position or “anticenter,” while the point at which the Big Bang exploded is the north pole or “center.” The diameter between the center and anticenter is the longest distance in the universe. The center contains a supermassive black hole from which light is so redshifted that it appears as 2.73 Kelvin temperature by the time it reaches earth. As such, his model merely takes the singularity from the past and puts it in the present. As he
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism
Albert Einstein, whose theory of Relativity sought to eliminate the possibility of having only one point in the cosmos serve as a center, knew instinctively, however, that the choice between a heliocentric or geocentric system was, from both a scientific and philosophical point of view, totally arbitrary. From the scientific viewpoint he enlightens us with these words:
The struggle, so violent in the early days of science, between the views of Ptolemy and Copernicus would then be quite meaningless. Either coordinate system could be used with equal justification. The two sentences: “the sun is at rest and the Earth moves,” or “the sun moves and the Earth is at rest,” would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different coordinate systems.47
Others have noted the same about Einstein’s Relativity:
According to Einstein, the argument over whether the earth turns around or the heavens revolve around it, is seen to be no more than an argument over the choice of reference frames. There is no frame of reference from which an observer would not see the
says in another paper: “In the FRW [Friedmann-Robertson-Walker] universes [i.e., the Big Bang], the singularity is hidden away inaccessibly in the past; in these universes, it is sitting ‘over there’ (in a sense, surrounding the Universe), where it can influence, and be influenced by, the Universe continually…for this continuing interaction might be envisaged as the process which keeps the Universe in existence” (“Ellis, Maartens and Nel, “The Expansion of the Universe,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1978, p. 447). Ellis presented his radical view in a 1979 essay contest sponsored by the Gravity Research Foundation. Our point here, however, is not to condone Ellis’ model of the universe, but only to show that even a hint of Earth’s centrality prompts scientific philosophers such as Davies to recognize its divine implications. 47 The Evolution of Physics: From Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta, Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, 1938, 1966, p. 212. In another sense, Relativity has no basis making such judgments, for as Einstein himself notes: “The theory of relativity states: ‘The laws of nature are to be formulated free of any specific coordinates because a coordinate system does not conform to anything real’” (Annalen der Physik 69, 1922, 438, in The Expanded Quotable Einstein, p. 244).
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism
effects of the flattening of the poles. Thus in frame number 1 (the earth turns round while the sky is at rest), the centrifugal force is a consequence of the earth’s motion (uniform acceleration) relative to the heavens. This causes the flattening. In the latter frame, number 2 (the sky rotate and the earth stands still), the centrifugal force should be understood as being an effect of “the rotating heavens,” which is generating a gravitational field that causes the flattening of the poles. The two explanations are equivalent as there is equivalence between inertial and gravitational mass.48
Consequently, Einstein concludes:
When two theories are available and both are compatible with the given arsenal of facts, then there are no other criteria to prefer one over the other except the intuition of the researcher. Therefore one can understand why intelligent scientists, cognizant both of theories and of facts, can still be passionate adherents of opposing theories.49
As it is with many scientists, Einstein had his biases that led him to choose which of the two relativistically equivalent systems he would endorse. Much of his bias came from his disdain for theology in general and the Catholic Church in particular. For Einstein, Galileo was
…a representative of rational thinking against the host of those who, relying on the ignorance of the people and the indolence of teachers in priest’s and scholar’s garb, maintain and defend their positions of authority” wherein Galileo had the will to “overcome the anthropocentric and mythical thinking of his contemporaries and lead them back to an objective and causal attitude toward the cosmos.50
Copernicus used a similar bias against Ptolemy when he decided to reintroduce the world to heliocentric cosmology. He knew by the sheer
48 “Einstein’s Ether: D. Rotational Motion of the Earth,” Galina Granek, Department of Philosophy, Haifa University, Mount Carmel, Haifa 31905, Israel, Apeiron, Vol. 8, No. 2, April 2001, p. 61. 49 “Induction and Deduction in Physics,” Berliner Tageblatt, December 25, 1919. Cited in The Expanded Quotable Einstein, p. 237. 50 Albert Einstein’s foreword in Stillman Drake’s translation of Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 2001, p. xxiii.
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism
principle of relativity that there are at least two viable ways of looking at celestial movements. He states in his De revolutionibus:
And why not admit that the appearance of daily revolution belongs to the heavens but the reality belongs to the Earth? And things are as when Aeneas said in Virgil: ‘We sail out of the harbor, and the land and the cities move away.’51
But, at best, relativity will produce a draw between the heliocentrism and geocentrism. What was it, precisely, that led Copernicus and his followers to opt for one over the other? In light of this question, scientific historian Noel M. Swerdlow believes that
…in his commentary on the Commentariolus that Copernicus probably discovered the Tychonic [geocentric] system at the same time as his own Copernican system. Why, Swerdlow wondered, did Copernicus choose his own system in preference to the Tychonic one, which avoids all the dynamical problems of terrestrial mobility, to say nothing of the theological problems? Swerdlow con-cluded…that Copernicus was strongly swayed by purely mechanical considerations to do with his acceptance of the theory that the planets are carried by material spheres. For in the Tychonic system Mars would have to pass at some points in its motion through the sphere of the sun, and Swerdlow believed that Copernicus must have found this an insuperable difficulty, therefore opting for the intellectually much more daring heliocentric system with a mobile earth.52
If true, the sheer irony is that by employing a later-to-be-discredited Aristotelian theory of planets orbiting the sun by being attached to rotating crystal spheres, Copernicus was led to deny the perfectly viable and less complicated geocentric model for the much riskier “terrestrial mobility” of heliocentrism. It was precisely for these kinds of haphazard developments
51 On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Chapter 8, para. 4, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis, 1995, p. 17. 52 Julian B. Barbour, Absolute or Relative Motion, p. 255-256. Although Barbour doesn’t necessarily agree that Swerdlow’s thesis about the spheres is what motivated Copernicus to reject the Tychonic model; and although Barbour agrees that Copernicus did, indeed, use Aristotle’s crystalline spheres, he admits that “Copernicus seems to be on the point of advancing the Tychonic system as an explicit possibility…” but turns against it because of “Neoplatonic sympathies to see the center of the planetary system as an ideal location for the sun.”
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism
that critic Arthur Koestler titled his book, “The Sleepwalkers,” since the record showed numerous examples that the history of science was comprised of one serendipitous thought process after another, whether good or bad.
Be that as it may, the geocentrists likewise appealed to relativity to answer the relativity of the Copernicans. As Barbour notes:
It is another irony that the post-Copernican defenders of Aristotelian cosmology in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in fact pushed the principle of optical relativity to its extreme; for just as Copernicus invoked the principle of relativity to show that the earth could move, even if it seemed to be at rest, they argued that the same principle implied equally well that the earth could be at rest and the remainder of the universe in motion. They took refuge in the impartiality of relativity.53
Physicist Herbert Dingle, one of Einstein’s most vehement critics, understood the implications very well. He writes:
But velocity has no meaning apart from an accepted standard of rest, and the principle of relativity is the principle that there is no such standard fixed by nature but that you may adopt any standard you wish.54
We, of course, offer a return to an immobile Earth as the “accepted standard of rest,” which, of course, will terminate any dependence on Relativity theory. Still, even though Relativity theory, if followed to its logical conclusion will not allow anyone to rest his case with Copernicus, most of the world will cling to it, either from sentiment or personal preference. Einstein knew this, too. From a more philosophical point of view he admits that we pick the universe with which we are most emotionally comfortable:
Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world: he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of
53 Barbour, Absolute or Relative Motion, pp. 254-255. 54 Herbert Dingle, The Special Theory of Relativity, 1961, p. vii. Dingle adds: “That makes ‘length’ of a body indefinite, and that means that all other physical measurements that are definitely related to length (i.e. all other physical measurements) must share that indefiniteness.”
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism
experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientists do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way peace and security that he can not find within the alltoo-narrow realm of swirling personal experience.55
Until these admissions were afforded to us, however, the dawn of Copernicanism faced mankind with a revolution in human thinking unsurpassed by any single event, save Noah’s flood and the advent of Jesus Christ. As Alexander Koyré understood it:
The dissolution of the Cosmos…this seems to me to be the most profound revolution achieved or suffered by the human mind since the invention of the Cosmos by the Greeks. It is a revolution so profound and so far-reaching that mankind – with very few exceptions, of whom Pascal was one – for centuries did not grasp its bearing and its meaning; which, even now, is often misvalued and misunderstood. Therefore what the founders of modern science, among them Galileo, had to do, was not to criticize and to combat certain faulty theories, and to correct or to replace them by better ones. They had to do something quite different. They had to destroy one world and to replace it by another. They had to reshape the framework of our intellect itself, to restate and reform its concepts, to evolve a new approach to Being, a new concept of knowledge, a new concept of science – and even to replace a pretty natural approach, that of common sense, by another which is not natural at all.56
55 Said in honor of Planck’s 60th birthday. Albert Einstein, Creator and Rebel, 1972, p. 222, Viking Press reprint. 56 Alexandre Koyré, “Galileo and Plato,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 4, no. 4, Oct. 1943. Koyré adds elsewhere: “I need not insist on the overwhelming scientific and philosophical importance of Copernican astronomy, which, by removing the earth from the center of the world and placing it among the planets, undermined the very foundation of the traditional cosmic world-order…as we know, the immediate effect of the Copernican revolution was to spread skepticism and bewilderment….At the end we find nihilism and despair….The infinite Universe of the New Cosmology, infinite in Duration as well as in Extension, in which eternal matter in accordance with eternal and necessary laws moves endlessly and aimlessly in eternal space, inherited all the ontological attributes of Divinity. Yet only those – all the others the departed God took away with Him” (Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, 1968, pp. 29, 43, 276).
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism
Arthur Koestler says it this way:
The new philosophy destroyed the mediaeval vision of an immutable social order in a walled-in universe together with its fixed hierarchy of moral values, and transformed the European landscape, society, culture, habits and general outlook as thoroughly as if a new species had arisen on this planet.57
James Burke adds:
The work, published in 1543, was called On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres. It stated that the center of the universe was a spot somewhere near the sun…The scheme met the requirements of philosophical and theological belief in circular motion. In every other respect, however, Copernicus struck at the heart of Aristotelian and Christian belief. He removed the Earth from the center of the universe and so from the focus of God’s purpose. In the new scheme man was no longer the creature for whose use and elucidation the cosmos had been created. His system also placed the Earth in the heavens, and in doing so removed the barrier separating the incorruptible from the corruptible.58
Owen Barfield, in his penetrating book on human thought, suggests that the Copernican revolution dwarfs any other:
The real turning-point in the history of astronomy and of science in general was… when Copernicus…began to think, and others, like Kepler and Galileo, began to affirm that the heliocentric hypothesis not only saved the appearances, but was physically true. It was this, this novel idea that the Copernican (and therefore any other) hypothesis might not be a hypothesis at all but the ultimate truth, that was almost enough in itself to constitute the “scientific revolution,” of which Professor Butterfield has written: “it outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom”….It was not simply a new theory of the nature of the celestial movements that was feared,
57 Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, p. 13. 58 James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed, p. 135.
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism

but a new theory of the nature of theory; namely, that, if a hypothesis saves all the appearances, it is identical with truth.59

Although Barfield does not give the citation, he is referring to the quote in Herbert Butterfield’s book The Origins of Modern Science: 13001800.60 Yet he left out the more significant of Butterfield’s words:

Since it [the Copernican Revolution] changed the character of men’s habitual mental operations even in the conduct of the nonmaterial sciences, while transforming the whole diagram of the physical universe and the very texture of human life itself, it looms so large as the real origin both of the modern world and of the modern mentality, that our customary periodisation of European history has become an anachronism and an encumbrance.61

E. A. Burtt adds that after the Copernican revolution…

Man begins to appear for the first time in the history of thought as an irrelevant spectator and insignificant effect of the great mathematical system which is the substance of reality.62

Friedrich Engels, co-author with Karl Marx of the Communist Manifesto, reveals that the Copernican revolution was the beginning of modern man’s humanistic religion, and for added flavor, he describes its advancement in Newtonian terms:

What Luther’s burning of the papal Bull

was in the religious field, in the field of

natural science was the great work of

Friedrich Engels 1820 – 1895

Copernicus… from then on the development of science went forward in great strides, increasing, so to speak,

proportionately to the square of the distance in time of its point

of departure…63

59 Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, 2nd ed., 1988, pp. 50-51. 60 Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science: 1300-1800, 1957, p. 7. 61 Ibid., pp. 7-8. 62 E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, p. 90.

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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism

C. S. Lewis adds:

“Go out on a starry night and walk alone for half an hour, resolutely assuming that the pre-Copernican astronomy is true. Look up at the sky with that assumption in your mind. The real difference between living in that universe and living in ours will then, I predict, begin to dawn on
you.”64

Clive Staples Lewis 1898 – 1963

The nihilist Friedrich Nietzsche, after seeing what the scientific revolution did to mankind, despondently concluded: “God is dead.” What is even more significant is why Nietzsche proffered such sentiments. He writes:

“Where has God gone?” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have

killed him – you and I. We are his

murderers. But how have we done

this? How were we able to drink up

the sea? Who gave us the sponge to

wipe away the entire horizon? What

did we do when we unchained the

Earth from its sun? Whither is it

moving now? Whither are we

moving now? Away from all suns?

Are we not perpetually falling?

Backward, sideward, forward, in all

directions? Is there any up or down

Friedrich Nietzsche 1844 – 1900

left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel

the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not

more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns

be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise

63 Nicholas Rescher, Scientific Progress, Oxford, United Kingdom, 1978, pp. 123124. It is commonly admitted by historians that the Copernican Revolution spawned both the French and Bolshevik Revolutions. Marx said he was indebted to Copernicus. 64 C. S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, 1966, p. 47.
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism
of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves?”65
The references to “What did we do when we unchained the Earth from its sun?” or “Is there any up or down left?” show that Nietzsche is speaking about none other than the Copernican revolution and the cataclysmic upheaval it ignited in the hearts of men. Many moderns have repeated Nietzsche’s quote with the interpolation “God is dead…Our science has killed him,” but few have noticed that the science to which Nietzsche was referring is Copernicanism and its offshoots, regardless of whether Nietzsche agreed or disagreed with heliocentric cosmology. The poet John Donne expressed a similar sentiment:
And new philosophy calls all in doubt The element of fire is quite put out
The sun is lost, and th’ Earth, and no man’s wit Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world’s spent, When in the planets and the firmament
They seek so many new; they see that this Is crumbled out again to his atomies ‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone66
65 “The Gay Science” in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885). The above quote is not chosen to suggest that Nietzsche had any sympathies or sentiments towards God or religion, but only that, in his inimitable way, he saw the obvious truth that, to whatever degree, Copernicanism separated man from God. Rest assured, many other quotes reveal Nietzsche’s negative feelings about God and religion: “I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.” “After coming in contact with a religious man, I always feel that I must wash my hands.” Nietzsche eventually contracted syphilis and committed suicide. 66 John Donne (d. 1631). These lines extracted from a 238-line poem titled, An Anatomy of the World written in 1611, some say as an elegy for 15-year-old Elizabeth Drury whose death Donne saw as a symbol of the world’s decay, while her heaven bound soul gave hope for regeneration. Others see included in it Donne’s commentary on Galilean cosmology, since it came only a year after Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius published in 1610 (per Cohen, Revolution in Science, p. 498). Donne was born into Catholicism but joined the Anglican church in the 1590s, not caring much for the papacy. A poem written a year before, Ignatius His
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism
The Ancient Origins of the Heliocentric/Geocentric Debate
The heliocentric versus geocentric debate did not originate with Galileo, or even with Copernicus or Ptolemy. Long before Galileo met his match with the Catholic Church, the battle was between the sun-centered model of the Babylonians and the earth-centered model of the Hebrews described in Genesis.67 The Babylonians were avid astronomers who believed that the sun god controlled the world, and naturally the sun
occupied the center of the universe. They discovered the saros, which they
used in predicting lunar eclipses. In fact, many centuries later the Greek astronomer Hipparchus published a star catalogue taken from the Babylonians but written as if it were made from his own observations.68
The next combatants were the Indian cosmologists versus the continuing Hebrew tradition, specifically from the book Joshua, although the Indians had both geocentrists and heliocentrists in their tradition.69 By the time of the Greeks, cosmology was much more sophisticated as mathematics, philosophy, and experimentation were added to the debate.
Conclave, satirized the Jesuits. Ignatius of Loyola is ejected from hell and commanded to colonize the moon, a place in which he will not cause much harm. 67 As Tycho Brahe said to Jewish astronomer David Gans: “Your sages were wrong to submit to the non-Jewish scholars. They assented to a lie for the truth lay with the Jewish sages” (André Neher, Jewish Thought and the Scientific Revolution of the Sixteenth Century: David Gans (1541-1613) and His Times, translated from the French by David Maisel, 1986, p. 218). 68 G. J. Toomer, “Ptolemy,” Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 1975, p. 191. 69 Some evidence of heliocentrism is found in the Vedic Sanskrits, the main text of Hinduism and most likely the oldest surviving religious texts. The word “Veda” means “knowledge” and/or “sacred book.” Subhash Kak writes: “The theory that the sun was the ‘lotus’ [the central point] of the sky and that it kept the worlds together by its ‘strings of wind’ may have given rise to the heliocentric tradition in India.” The Shatapatha Brahmana from the Upanishad era in the 9th century B.C., states: “The sun strings these worlds, [the earth, the planets, the atmosphere], to himself on a thread. This thread is the same as the wind” (8:7:3:10). (Astronomy Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Astronomy, ed., Helaine Selin, 2000, p. 328). Kak also points out, however, that the earlier Indian astronomers adopted geocentrism: “The concepts of śīghrocca and mandocca cycles indicate that the motion of the planets was fundamentally around the sun, which, in turn, went around the earth….The śīghrocca maps the motion of the planet around the sun to the corresponding set of points around the earth. The sun, with its winds that holds the solar system together, goes around the earth” (ibid., p. 329). The model in which the planets revolve around the sun but the sun revolves around the Earth would be the same model propounded by Tycho Brahe.
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism
The Basic Framework: Crystalline Spheres
No adequate understanding of cosmology is possible without first understanding the Greek concept of the crystalline spheres. It is the fundamental structure upon which all cosmology would either adhere or depart. As noted earlier, the very reason Copernicus rejected the simpler geocentric model (later to be demonstrated by Tycho Brahe) was that it required him to reject the Greek’s concept of crystalline spheres, even though he had already rejected their geocentrism. Apparently, the spheres were very important to Copernicus. One reason is that spheres are essentially extended circles, and Copernicus believed, as a fundamental scientific fact, that all celestial motion had to occur by means of circles. As noted, he rejected Ptolemy’s non-circular model based on that very premise.
Aristotle’s Crystalline Spheres70 The Greeks, especially after their model was refined by Aristotle, believed that the whole cosmos was structured upon dozens of transparent spheres. Each sphere had an inner and an outer wall. Attached to the inner wall were various celestial bodies. For example, Mars would be embedded into the wall of a sphere and the whole sphere rotated around the earth and
70 See CDROM for animation of Aristotle’s Crystalline Spheres. 31

Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism
thus carried Mars with it, but since the sphere was transparent, it looked as though Mars was revolving around the earth by itself. These spheres were permitted to exist far away from the earth and rotate freely because they were composed of the fifth element, aether (the other four elements were: air, water, fire and earth), which was the lightest or most rarified element of the five.71 Most important is the fact that any extensions in the planets’ movement caused by epicyclic or eccentric variations were permitted in the space between the inner and outer wall of the sphere. Further, Aristotle believed that each sphere rotated around the earth because it was being pushed by one of the gods – who was the “unmoved mover.” The medievals who later used an Aristotelian framework (but did so through Ptolemy’s model) rejected the polytheistic cosmos and replaced it with only one Prime Mover who moved the outermost sphere which in turn moved the rest of the spheres.
Prior to Aristotle, the Greek school of astronomy was introduced by Anaximander (d. 546 BC) who believed that the Earth was like the central hub of a spoked wheel. The rim of the wheel rotated around the earth and carried the sun, moon and planets. The moon’s rim was 19 times as big as the earth, while the sun’s rim was 27 times as big. He believed that the sun and moon were composed of fire but that we saw them only through small openings, as if they were at the open end of a trumpet.72 He did not believe the earth was spherical. It was a cylinder with a height three times its width and that we lived on the flat side at the top. The earth was suspended in space unsupported by anything and was in the exact center of the universe. He held that each star was carried by the rim of a wheel and that all of the thousands of rims coalesced into a giant spherical shell around the earth, although he held that the universe was originally a sphere.73 His
71 There were seven basic spheres, one for each of the following: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. More elaborate systems have the seven spheres incorporating secondary spheres. An eighth sphere outside Saturn was filled with all the stars and they were attached to that sphere. Some add a ninth sphere for the precession of the equinoxes; a tenth for their trepidation; and an eleventh for the variations in the obliquity of the ecliptic. 72 Hippolytus says of Anaximander: “The heavenly bodies come into being as a circle of fire, separated off from the fire in the world and enclosed by air. There are certain tubular channels or breathing holes through which the heavenly bodies appear; hence eclipses occur when the breathing holes are blocked, and the moon appears sometimes waxing and sometimes waning according to whether the channels are blocked or open” (Refutation of All Heresies, I). 73 Pseudo Plutarch writes: “Anaximander maintains that the eternally productive cycles of hot and cold separated off in the generation of this world and formed a spherical shell of fire surrounding the Earth and its atmosphere like the bark around a tree. When this sheath of fire finally tore up and divided into various
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism
student, Anaximenes (d. 528 BC) followed him but with variations between the movement of the planets and the stars, the latter being attached to their crystal sphere but the former moving freely as if on air. Parmenides (d. 450 BC) added that the spheres around the Earth were evenly spaced. Xenophanes (d. 475 BC) said that the stars moved rectilinearly. Empedocles (d. 435 BC) believed the sphere of the stars was infinite. Plato (d. 347 BC) in his famous Timaeus continued the concept of spheres and specified that they were perfect shapes, but he proposed that the planets were spherical bodies set in rotating rings rather than the wheel rims of Anaximander. Eudoxus (d. 350 BC) has no extant works but we know his cosmology from Aristotle’s Metaphysics.74 He held that the sun, moon and planets moved within 27 spheres. With these additional spheres he was the first to attempt an explanation of the retrograde motion of the planets. He understood the revolution of the sun around the earth to be 365 days and 6 hours long, which is very close to our present understanding.
Callippus (d. 300 BC) added more spheres to Eudoxus’ model, employing five spheres for the sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars, while giving four spheres for Jupiter and Saturn, making 33 total spheres. As was the case with his predecessors, each planet was attached to the sphere which carried it around the earth. Aristotle (d. 322 BC), using Eudoxus’ model, created a more elaborate system of spheres. With earth in the center, the planets revolved around it by the interweaving motion of at least 47 but no more than 55 spheres. Distinguishing his from that of Eudoxus and Callippus, Aristotle had the spheres interconnected, but each sphere was moved by a separate “unmoved mover,” which corresponded to one god for each sphere who moves it because he “loves” it.
wheel-shaped stripes, the sun, moon and the stars were created from it” (Stromateis 2). 74 “Eudoxus supposed that the motion of the sun or of the moon involves, in either case, three spheres, of which the first is the sphere of the fixed stars, and the second moves in the circle which runs along the middle of the zodiac, and the third in the circle which is inclined across the breadth of the zodiac; but the circle in which the moon moves is inclined at a greater angle than that in which the sun moves. And the motion of the planets involves, in each case, four spheres, and of these also the first and second are the same as the first two mentioned above (for the sphere of the fixed stars is that which moves all the other spheres, and that which is placed beneath this and has its movement in the circle which bisects the zodiac is common to all), but the poles of the third sphere of each planet are in the circle which bisects the zodiac, and the motion of the fourth sphere is in the circle which is inclined at an angle to the equator of the third sphere; and the poles of the third sphere are different for each of the other planets, but those of Venus and Mercury are the same” (Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Ch. 8, Bk 12).
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism
There were other developments to the geocentric school from Theaetus (d. 369 BC), Heraklides (d. 310 BC), Euclid (d. 265 BC), Hipparchus (d. 120 BC) and Apollonius (d. 190 BC). Of these, Heraklides made the earth rotate on its axis, but put it at the center of the world. Mercury and Venus were made to revolve around the sun in epicycles, but the sun and the remaning planets revolved around the earth.75 In fact, because of his somewhat unique combination of the geocentric and heliocentric models, historian Giovanni Schiaparelli (d. 1910) believes that Heriklides is the precursor of both Copernicus’ heliocentric model and Tycho Brahe’s geocentric model.76
As time went on, Apollonius extended Heraklides’ epicycles beyond Mercury and Venus and applied them to the outer planets, and had the earth rotating. Hipparchus also used a system of epicycles as well as eccentricities, which improved on Apollonius’ model. As Barbour notes:
Hipparchus’s work is to be see as a most significant step forward in the Greek program of finding geometrokinetic explanations for why the observed motions of the sun, moon, and planets did not fit the divine paradigm of perfect uniform circular motion….the problems the astronomers faced were of quite a different kind and had very much to do with the specific eccentricities of the various planetary orbits.77
The Greek Heliocentrists
Pythagoras (d. 495 BC), famous for his geometry theorems, formed the Pythagorean school of heliocentrists, or what we might call semiheliocentrists or anti-geocentrists, which included such names as: Philolaus (d. 385 BC) who put the earth in one of a number of spheres of the sun and planets circling a fiery mass. The central fire could not be seen because the populated portion of the earth was always facing away from it.
75 Heraklides’ was used again by Martianus Capella in the 5th century AD; and again, with modifications, by Giovanni Riccioli in 1651 who included Mars in an orbit around the sun. The model of Tycho Brahe had all the planets revolving around the sun, while the sun revolved around a fixed earth. Riccioli had posited seventy-seven arguments against heliocentrism (See C. M. Graney at http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.3778). 76 I precursori di Copernico nell’ Antichild, as cited by W. Carl Rufus in The Astronomical System of Copernicus, 1923, p. 512, available from Maria Mitchell Observatory. 77 Julian B. Barbour, Absolute or Relative Motion, Vol. 1, The Discovery of Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 118, 127.
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism
The speed of revolution was dependent on their “harmonic” distances such that the nearer bodies to the fire traveled slower then the outer because of their “lower tone.” For Philolaus, the sun was merely a spherical mirror that reflected the light and heat of the central fire. Hiketas (d. 450 BC) and Ekphantus (d. 450 BC) disfavored Philolaus’ model and opted for a version in which the sun, moon and planets were fixed, while the earth rotated from west to east.78 Aristarchus (d. 230 BC), who was from the same city, Samos, as Pythagorus, is usually credited with having the first full-blown heliocentric system. None of Aristarchus’ writings are extant, but his cosmological model was described by his contemporary, Archimedes (who was himself a heliocentrist). He stated that Aristarchus’ “hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the sun remain unmoved, that the earth revolves about the sun in the circumference of a circle, the sun lying in the middle of the orbit.”79 Based on his estimates, Aristarchus believed the sun had seven times the diameter of the earth and was hundred-folds more voluminous. Some believe this huge discrepancy in size led him to put the earth in orbit around the sun. Others hold that it was his claim to have finally detected a parallax of the sun by measuring it against the first and third quarter’s of the moon’s phases. A lack of parallax for the sun was apparently Aristotle’s chief objection to heliocentrism. We know today, however, the same solar parallax can be shown from a geocentric system; and perhaps the reason Aristarchus’ heliocentric model did not
78 See J. L. E. Dreyer, A History of Astronomy from Thales to Kepler, originally under the 1905 title: History of Planetary Systems from Thales to Kepler, Dublin, Ireland; Olaf Pederson, A Survey of the Almagest, Odense, Denmark, Odense University Press, 1974; Pierre Dunhem, To Save the Phenomena: An Essay on the Idea of Physical Theory from Plato to Galileo, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969; W. Carl Rufus, “The Astronomical System of Copernicus,” Popular Astronomy, 1923. 79 The complete citation is as follows: “You King Gelon are aware the ‘universe’ is the name given by most astronomers to the sphere the center of which is the center of the Earth, while its radius is equal to the straight line between the center of the Sun and the center of the Earth. This is the common account as you have heard from astronomers. But Aristarchus has brought out a book consisting of certain hypotheses, wherein it appears, as a consequence of the assumptions made, that the universe is many times greater than the ‘universe’ just mentioned. His hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the Sun remain unmoved, that the Earth revolves about the Sun on the circumference of a circle, the Sun lying in the middle of the orbit, and that the sphere of fixed stars, situated about the same center as the Sun, is so great that the circle in which he supposes the Earth to revolve bears such a proportion to the distance of the fixed stars as the center of the sphere bears to its surface” The Sand Reckoner (Greek: Αρχιμήδης Ψαµµίτης, Archimedes Psammites) in Arenarius, 1, 4-7.
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism

become popular was that his contemporaries knew such to be the case. Aristarchus also believed the stars were at huge distance from earth and that the earth rotated on its axis. Another heliocentrist was Seleucus (b. 190) who adopted Aristarchus’ model.

The Geocentric Victory

We might say that the centuries long battle

between the heliocentric and geocentric models

was finally won by the geocentrists when

Claudius Ptolemy, the Greek astronomer from

Alexandria, Egypt, introduced his very refined

model. His model was so successful that Islamic

astronomers created various versions to help

improve his accuracy. As Kak notes: “The

geometrical structure of the universe conceived

by Muslim astronomers of the early Islamic

period (ca. 800-1050) is more or less that

Claudius Ptolemy 90 – 168 BC

expounded in Ptolemy’s Almagest, with the system of eight spheres being regarded essentially as mathematical models.” 80

Essentially, Ptolemy extended the use of epicycles begun by Heraklides

and Apollonius.

Epicycle comes from the Greek epi, which means “added on,” and

cycle, which refers to a circle or something continuing in the same motion.

In other words, Ptolemy added a smaller circle onto an already existing

80 “Kak also says: “Other significant Islamic modifications to Ptolemaic planetary models, devised to overcome the philosophical objections to the notion of an equant and the problem of the variation in lunar distance inherent in Ptolemy’s lunar model, belong to the later period of Islamic astronomy. There were two main schools…in the thirteenth century (notably with al-Tūsī and his colleagues) and Damascus in the fourteenth (with Ibn al-Shāţir), and the other developed in the late twelfth century (with al-Biţrūjī) (Astronomy Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Astronomy, ed., Helaine Selin, 2000, pp. 588-589). Consult the CDrom for animations of the models of al-Tūsī, Ibn al-Shāţir, and al-Biţrūjī. Prior to these developments were the heliocentric efforts of Āryabhata (476-550 A.D.) Kak adds: “It is not certain that Āryabhata was the originator of the rotation of the earth. It appears that the rotation of the earth is inherent in the notion that the sun never sets that we find in the Aitareya Brāhmana 2:7: “The sun never really sets or rises. In that they think of him ‘He is setting,’ having reached the end of the day, he inverts himself; thus he makes evening below, day above….He never sets, indeed, he never sets” (ibid., p. 368).
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism larger circle. The larger circle was called a deferent; the smaller an epicycle. The reason Ptolemy did so was that the Greek’s, mainly through the work of Hipparchus, had discovered that the planets and the sun did not move in perfect regularity. For example, the sun did not stay the same length of time in each of the four seasons. Spring was 94.5 days; summer 92.5 days; autumn 88.8 days; winter 90.8 days. This was due to the fact that the whole system was a bit off-center. In order to compensate for the resulting irregular movements, Ptolemy used the epicycle quite ingeniously.
But the epicycle was not what ultimately separated Ptolemy from his predecessors, since they had also used more primitive epicycles in one form or another. Ptolemy was distinguished because he broke with the tradition that the sun and planets had to revolve around the earth at uniform speed. Ptolemy made them move non-uniformly and thus he answered why the sun spent more time in one quadrant of its orbit than another.
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The device that allowed him to accomplish this victory was the equant, or what we might better describe as an “equalizer.” In order to account for the off-centeredness of the orbits, Ptolemy created an imaginary point inside their orbits that was off-center. Barbour calls it “the crowning achievement of Hellenistic astronomy” but also an “ad hoc introduction made in extermis when all traditionally accepted means to reconcile the data had failed.”81 In brief, as Ptolemy moved the center of the orbit a little off-center, he created a point from which the planet would consequently move at a uniform speed from the equant’s point of view, but move at a non-uniform speed from the center’s point of view.
82
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Ptolemy’s equant is that it was essentially the basis upon which Kepler, over fourteen centuries later, would also solve the problem of irregular orbits, although he would do so
81 J. Barbour, Absolute or Relative Motion, pp. 163, 171, 208. Dennis Rawlins believes that Ptolemy commandeered the equant from his Greek predecessors, namely, Hipparchus, since it appears that Ptolemy took a lot of other material from them, especially the orbit of Mars. Although Rawlins has no hard evidence of the equant before Ptolemy, he retorts: “To suppose that no astronomer before Claudius Ptolemy’s time came up with a theoretical model that could eliminate this glaringly monstrous inadequacy of the eccentric model is to imagine that the ancients were a lot less resourceful than is suggested by the elegant remnants we possess of third century BC mathematics (e.g., Archimedes and Apollonios) 440 years before Ptolemy.” Rawlins believes that Ptolemy was heavily influenced by his geocentric commitments. (“Ancient heliocentrists, Ptolemy, and the equant,” Dennis Rawlins, Physics Dept., Loyola College, Baltimore, American Journal of Physics 55 (3), March, 1987, pp. 235-239). 82 (1) the sun, moving clockwise around the Earth (5) inside a crystalline sphere (2) whose center is the equant (6), which is off-center from the complimentary space (3) but centered on complimentary space (4)
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism for the heliocentric system. By using elliptical orbits and foci and adjusting them as needed for each planet, Kepler could make them go faster in their orbits at the perihelion point (closet to the sun) as opposed to the aphelion (farthest from the sun). But Kepler’s use of two foci in an ellipse was virtually the same as Ptolemy placing the equant and the Earth on opposite sides of the center. As Kepler could change the distance between the foci and the center to give greater eccentricity, Ptolemy could change the distance between the equant and the Earth to achieve whatever degree of non-uniform movement required. As a result, both Ptolemy’s and Kepler’s planets would sweep out the same area per unit time, but Ptolemy’s discovery of this principle antedated Kepler by almost a millennium and a half.83 The reason Kepler is so adulated is that he was the first one to apply it to the heliocentric system, whereas Ptolemy had used it exclusively for the geocentric.
All in all, the equant allowed Ptolemy’s system to work very well. A problem came, however, when minor discrepancies in the positions and speeds of the planets (due to their own perturbations from their mutual gravitational attraction) became quite noticeable as they added themselves up over the centuries, thus throwing off the Julian calendar by weeks and even months. As we will see, it was this problem with the calendar that would eventually lead Copernicus to believe that Ptolemy’s model had to be rejected rather than adjusted.
83 See CDROM for the animation comparing Ptolemy’s equant and Kepler’s elliptical orbits.
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The other major problem for Ptolemy was that neither he nor his Greek predecessors knew the distances between the earth, the sun and the planets. Thus, among other difficulties, he didn’t know how big to make Venus’ deferent or even its epicycle, but he did decide to make it smaller than the deferent of the sun. Although this accounted for the position of Venus, it did not account for the phases of Venus. As Kitty Ferguson puts it:
In Ptolemaic astronomy, Venus always lay between the Earth and the Sun. For that reason, if Venus sheds no light of its own but only shines with reflected sunlight, observers on Earth should never see the face of Venus anywhere near fully lit. In other words, it should never be equivalent to a full Moon.84 This was a discrepancy that eventually made Galileo believe he was on the right track in rejecting Ptolemy’s system. Ferguson adds that the problem would have persisted “even if Venus’ epicycle had been miscalculated and was actually on the other side of the Sun from the Earth….Finally, Galileo had found persuasive observational evidence that Ptolemaic astronomy was inferior to Copernican astronomy.” But is this true? Was Ptolemy trapped by putting Venus inside the sun’s orbit? Perhaps, but Ptolemy could have put the sun on an epicycle and put Venus on an epicycle around the sun but, of course, he, having no telescope with
84 Kitty Ferguson, Measuring the Universe, p. 92. 40

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which to view Venus as Galileo did, had never seen its phases in order to know he even had a problem. As Barbour notes:
The phases of the planets, visible through the telescope, especially in the case of Venus, provided strong confirmation of the distances that Copernicus had postulated and demonstrated beyond all doubt that Venus orbited the sun….Galileo was convinced that, in confirming Copernicus’s prediction, these observations proved the earth’s mobility.
Barbour makes us privy to a little known secret of Ptolemy’s model:
In fact, they were still compatible with what one might call the ‘essential’ Ptolemaic system….The Ptolemaic theory left six free parameters that had to be fixed by guesswork. No violence was done to the essentials of the Ptolemaic theory by fixing these in such a way that the deferents of Mercury and Venus were taken equal to the earth-sun distance and the deferents of the superior planets to their actual distances from the sun. This choice has the consequence that the geometrical arrangement of the Copernican system (when treated as here in the zero-eccentricity approximation) is exactly reproduced, the only difference being that in one system the earth is at rest, in the other the sun. This in fact is the system which Tycho Brahe proposed… As far as astronomical observations are concerned, the Tychonic system, which is a special case of the Ptolemaic one, is kinematically identical to Copernicus’s except in its relation to the distant stars.85
In other words, the phases of Venus were no proof for the heliocentric system. The fact that Ptolemy did not know the distances between the heavenly bodies was compensated by the fact that his system incorporated six variables to account for such unknown quantities, thus making his model very pliable to what would actually be observed in the future. The simple fact is, Copernicus, influenced by many non-scientific factors,
85 Julian B. Barbour, Absolute or Relative Motion, Vol. 1, The Discovery of Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 224-225, italics his. Barbour’s second volume, Mach’s Principle, General Relativity and Guage Theory, was never formally published, although Dr. Barbour gave me a complete copy of his manuscript in preparation for his interview in the documentary, The Principle, produced by Stellar Motion Pictures, LLC, Los Angeles, CA.
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Galileo’s original drawing of Venus and its phases 42

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The Real Truth about the Copernican Solar System
Unbeknownst to almost all modern-day believers in the solar system of Nicholas Copernicus86 is one stark but incontrovertible fact: the popular idea of the Earth revolving around the sun has never been proven. Despite all the pretentious claims purporting to have proof for heliocentrism (which are made on the basis of such phenomena as stellar parallax, stellar aberration, retrograde motion, the Foucault pendulum, the Coriolis effect, meteor showers, red shift, ring lasers, the equatorial bulge of the Earth and geosynchronous satellites: all of which, as we demonstrate in this volume, do not prove, in the least, the heliocentric system), honest scientists will candidly admit that heliocentrism is merely their preferred model of cosmology, but certainly not the proven one.
Nicholas Copernicus: 1473 – 1543
86 Nicolaus Copernicus is the Latinized version of the original Polish name Nicklaus Koppernigk. While the spelling of the first name varies between Nicklaus, Niklas, and Nicolaus, the last name has had more of a variety: Coppernic, Koppernieck, Koppernik, Koppernigk, Cupernick, and Kupernick. Copernicus signed his name in various ways as well: Copernic, Coppernig, Coppernik, Copphernic, but in later years mostly as Copernicus. He is also referred to as Nicklaus Koppernigk Warmiensis, since he was from the province of Warmia in Poland. Ironically, in the Frankonian local dialect of Poland, koepperneksch still means “a far-fetched, cockeyed proposition” (Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, p. 191).
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Historically speaking, stellar parallax is particularly important to this debate, since a claim of finding the first parallax (and hence a false claim that heliocentrism was a proven fact), may have had something to do with the authorities under Pope Gregory XVI removing Copernicus and Galileo’s works from the Index of Forbidden Books in 1835, although the pope gave no specific reason for the removal.87 Even more intriguing is the fact that Gregory XVI, who was previously Cardinal Capellari when he served on the 1822 commission to give Canon Settele an imprimatur for his book on heliocentrism, appears to have been persuaded by a clever fabrication created by Frs. Antonio Grandi and Marizio Olivieri, the latter being the Commissary General of the Holy Office. In 1822 they posited that the only reason the Church declared the Copernican system formally heretical in 1616 and 1633 (at the trial of Galileo) was that it was a “defective” model because it did not contain elliptical orbits of the planets.88 This was, indeed, a blatant fabrication since the ecclesiastical
87 As cited by astrophysicist and historian, Owen Gingerich, at St. Edmunds Public Lecture series, titled: “Empirical Proof and/or Persuasion,” March 13, 2003, wherein he writes: “Hence, ironically, what persuaded the Catholic Church to take Copernicus’ book off the Index was an ultimately false claim for the discovery of an annual stellar parallax. The new edition of the Index appearing in 1835 finally omitted De Revolutionibus, three years before a convincing stellar parallax observation was at last published.” Gingerich cites his source for this information as Pierre-Noël Mayaud, S.J., La Condamnation des Livres Coperniciens et sa Révocation: á la lumière de documents inédits des Congregation de l’Index et de l’Inquisition (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Universita Gregoriana, 1997), no page number given. One of the contentions of our book Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right, is that, not only was the 1835 rescission of Copernicus’ and Galileo’s works presumptuous in light of the false parallax claims, even after 1838 (when Bessel published the first authenticated parallax) the case for heliocentrism was not proven, since parallax can also be explained equally well from a geocentric model. 88 As noted by Annibale Fantoli in Galileo: For Copernicanism and for the Church, p. 520, stating: “Father Grandi…working in agreement with Olivieri and basing himself on his argumentation, he had tried to realize the objective of saving the good name of the Holy See, substantially by emphasizing the fact that the Copernican system, by then recognized even by Catholic authors, had been purified from errors and inconsistencies which had made it unacceptable in its original form. This was equivalent to maintaining that the Church had not erred in 1616 by putting on the Index a work at that time so defective at the level of physics and that now the Church was legitimately authorized to approve it after its errors were corrected. And it was, as a matter of fact, this which ‘was sugested’ to poor Settele to make skillfully known in his work.” Maurice Finocchiaro, in his recent book, Retrying Galileo, p. 251, gives more detail, as taken from Olivieri’s November 1820 Summation, titled, “Ristretto di Ragione, e di Fatto,” ¶30: “Along
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records clearly show that Copernicanism was rejected purely because it made the earth move, not because it made the earth move incorrectly. What may have led to this fabrication was that, at this precise time in history, the Church was rather handicapped to discover the actual stipulations from the Galileo affair because all the records from the 1633 trial were in Napoleon’s possession in France, since he had confiscated them while storming of the Vatican in 1809. He didn’t return them until 1845, ten years after Galileo’s name had been removed from the Index. The important details of these events will be covered thoroughly in volume 2 of this work.
Suffice it to say, a thorough study of the original Copernican system, the very system the pre-1641 Galileo brought to the Catholic Church and demanded she accept, reveals a model racked with so many problems one wonders how it ever saw the light of day. In 1514 Copernicus was asked by Pope Leo X to use his talents to help fix the calendar. The calendar had been causing slight but pestering problems for many centuries. The last revision was initiated by Julius Caesar, who employed his astronomers to create what we now know as the Julian calendar, a calibration that incorporated 365¼ days per year, a marked improvement from the previous 355 days per year.89 As noted, even the Greek astronomer
with modern astronomers, Settele does not teach that the sun is at the center of the world: for it is not the center of the fixed stars; it is not the center of heavy bodies, which fall toward the center of our world, namely of the earth; nor is it the center of the planetary system because it does not lie in the middle, or center, but to one side at one of the foci of the elliptical orbits that all planets trace. Still less does he teach that the sun is motionless; on the contrary, it has a rotational motion around itself and also a translational motion which it performs while carrying along the outfit of all its planets” (ibid., p. 205). But unfortunately, Finocchiaro perpetuates the same fabrication when he concludes: “That is, the Church had been right in condemning the latter from a scientific point of view, because Galileo had also upheld heliocentrism in its unsatisfactory Copernican form…” (ibid., p. 520). The Church condemned Copernicanism for one reason only: it made the earth move. For more information on this issue, see Volume 3, Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right. 89 In the pre-Christian era, there were two dating systems: (1) a dating system based on the dates of the reigning monarch. In this system, the foundation date is 753 B.C., which is the foundation date of Rome under the auspices of Romulus. The Romans titled this foundation date ab urbe condita (meaning: “from the foundation of the city”). Their year began on April 21st and they had 355 days in their calendar. This inaccurate calendar remained in force until the time of Julius Caesar, who in 46 B.C., under the tutelage of the Greek astronomer Sisogenes, increased the number of days in the year 46 B.C. to 445. Thereafter (45 BC and onward) there were 365¼ days in the year, and the year would begin on January
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Eudoxus (d. 350 BC) knew that the year was 365 days and 6 hours long. But as good as Ptolemy’s model was, it was not good at incorporating the perturbations of the planets caused by their mutual gravitational attraction (and neither has any other system).
One of the reasons Copernicus was invited by the pope was that he had published a precursor of his heliocentric theory between the years 1510-1514, titled Commentariolus (“Little Commentary”) antedating his more famous work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, which was released some thirty years later, in 1543, the year of Copernicus’ death. It is in the Commentariolus that Copernicus makes his first claim that the Ptolemaic system is unsatisfactory, yet admits that it is “consistent with the data.”90 Among the more salient features of the treatise are Copernicus’ three major premises: (1) “That the Earth is not the center of the universe, only of the moon’s orbit and of terrestrial gravity”; (2) “That the apparent daily revolution of the firmament is due to the Earth’s rotation on its own axis”; (3) “that the apparent annual motion of the sun is due to the fact that the Earth, like the other planets, revolves around the sun.”
Copernicus’ motivation for introducing his new system was that he was dissatisfied with Ptolemy’s. As we noted earlier, however, whatever complexity and futility Copernicus saw in Ptolemy’s model, he attributed this to Ptolemy’s departure from the circle as the only possible movement for celestial bodies.
In De revolutionibus orbium coelestium he writes:
We must however confess that these movements are circular or are composed of many circular movements, in that they maintain
1st. (2) a dating system based on significant events. The commencement of the Olympic games in 776 B.C. is the foundation date. Every four years, the Greeks recorded the date of the Olympiads, abbreviated “OL.” 1 A.D. would be the 754th year of the foundation of Rome, or the fourth year of the 194th Olympiad. 90 Commentariolus, p. 57, as cited by Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, p. 71, n. 14. The full title is: Nicolai Copernici de hypothesibus motuum coelestium a se constitutes commentariolus. It had no name until given one by Tycho Brahe (Repcheck, Copernicus’ Secret, p. 185). Its exact date is uncertain, but evidence points to 1510-1514, predating De revolutionibus orbium coelestium by at least three decades. Koestler remarks on its effect: “…the first pebble had fallen into the pond and gradually, in the course of the following years, the ripples spread by rumour and hearsay in the Republic of Letters. This led to the paradoxical result that Canon Koppernigk enjoyed a certain fame, or notoriety, among scholars for some thirty years without publishing anything in print, without teaching at a university or recruiting disciples. It is a unique case in the history of science. The Copernican system spread by evaporation or osmosis, as it were” (Sleepwalkers, p. 149).
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism these irregularities [of motion] in accordance with a constant law and with fixed periodic returns; and that could not take place, if they were not circular. For it is only the circle which can bring back what is past and over with…”91
The Commentarilous: 1510 ~ 1513 So enamored was Copernicus with the circle that he retained Aristotle’s crystalline spheres as the perfect mold for the circle. As scientific historian from Harvard, I. Bernard Cohen, reveals: In both De revolutionibus and the Commentariolus Copernicus attacks the Ptolemaic astronomy not because in it the sun moves rather than the earth, but because Ptolemy has not strictly adhered to the precept that all celestial motions must be explained only by uniform circular motions or combinations of such circular motions. Ptolemy had recognized that an accurate representation of planetary motion necessitated the abandoning of uniform circular motion, and he boldly introduced what was 91 On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, trans., Wallis, p. 12.
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism later called an “equant,” from which nonuniform motion along an arc would appear uniform. From the point of view of accuracy, this was a great step forward, indeed, the best representation of planetary motion before Kepler. But Copernicus considered the use of an equant to be a violation of fundamental principles and devoted his original astronomical research to devising a system of sun, planets, moon, and stars in which the planets and the moon glide with uniform motion along a circle or with some combination of such motions.92
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium: 1543
92 I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science, 1985, 1994, p. 112. He adds: “Copernicus mentioned with approval in both the Commentariolus and De revolutionibus the ancient doctrine of Callippus and Eudoxus, in which combinations of circular motions (or rotations of spheres) had been used to account for the phenomena” (ibid). Aristotle has “a body that moves in a circle has neither heaviness nor lightness for it cannot change its distance from the center” (De Coelo, 269b34f).
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In light of this singular motivation, it appears that the legacy of the Copernican revolution is based on a fallacious premise – that circles are somehow superior to ovals. Cohen adds:
He then turned to ancient authors in order to find out whether in any of their writings they might have proposed alternative doctrines to Ptolemy’s. During this study, he said, he encountered the ideas of the Pythagoreans concerning the motion of the earth. It was only then, assured by a tradition of antiquity, that in humanist fashion he began to consider the astronomical consequences of the earth’s orbit, since he knew that “others before me had been given the same liberty” (“quia sciebam aliis ante me hanc concessam libertatem”).93
Copernicus seems to have tried to take the best from each school of Greek cosmology. While he borrowed a moving Earth from Pythagoras, he commandeered the crystalline spheres of Aristotle who believed that the Earth was motionless in the center. Contrary to popular opinion, Copernicus’ solar system was not one of free floating planets pushed by natural forces around the sun, but the same Greek idea of crystal spheres, within which the planets were hung, that rotated around a center point. As Cohen puts it, “the only thing Copernicus did was transform the old Greek idea of earth-centered spheres into new sun-centered spheres.” This can be seen in the original drawings made by Copernicus. Noel Swerdlow points out that in his manuscript drawing Copernicus has “seven numbered captions and eight circles, so that it would appear that the captions do refer to the seven spaces between the circles,” which correspond to “the spheres themselves, each being of a certain thickness…and everywhere contiguous to the sphere above and below it.”94 Hence Cohen remarks that Copernicus’ title, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (“On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres”) has the operative word “Spheres” for the very reason that he intended on keeping the Greek spheres in his cosmology. Later drawings of Copernicus’ system tend to hide this fact, since the captions for the circles are put outside the circles’ boundary.95
93 Ibid., p. 488. 94 Noel Swerdlow, “Pseudodoxica Copernicana: or, enquiries into very many received tenents and commonly presumed truths, mostly concerning spheres,” Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences 26:108-158, 1976, as cited in Cohen’s Revolution in Science, p. 110. The diagram of Copernicus’ original system is now housed in the Jagiellonian Library, Cracow, Poland. 95 E.g., Encyclopedia of Astronomy, 2004, uses outside captions but claims it is a “Diagram of the heliocentric universe from…De revolutionibus of 1543” (p. 103).
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Planets inside the circles, published 1543 Apparently, Copernicus understood his model as only an improvement on Ptolemy rather than a revolution in thinking. As Cohen notes, the “order and mode of presentation closely follow the plan of Ptolemy’s Almagest.”96
In that sense we might say that Copernicus’ model had more of a psychological and philosophical influence than it had in improving the knowledge of the heavenly orbs. Still, in his “improvements,” Barbour opines that Copernicus “comes under suspicion of plagiarism. In De revolutionibus his method of eliminating the equant is identical to Gutb alDīn’s, while the Tūsī couple is used both in his theory of precession and in his model of Mercury’s motion…his lunar theory is essentially that of Ibn al-shātir.”97 Barbour adds that the only thing that may save him from the charge is that independent discoveries are “commonplace in science.”
In any case, since the Commentariolus allowed Copernicus to enjoy a certain distinction among various astronomers and intellectuals, he seemed a likely candidate to offer some help in fixing the calendar. Copernicus informed the pope, however, that a further improvement could not be made until the motions of the sun and moon were more precisely 96 Revolution in Science, pp. 109-110. 97 Absolute or Relative Motion, p. 231.
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Planets outside the circles, post-1543 coordinated, and thus he declined the pope’s invitation.98 Still, various Vatican officials continued to make overtures toward Copernicus. For example, in 1533, the personal secretary of Pope Clement VII, Johann Albrecht of Widmanstadt, gave a lecture on the heliocentric system to a
98 Copernicus was correct about the difficulty, but such precision is not needed to coordinate a calendar. Still, the moon’s motions remain one of the most complicated of all celestial bodies. As Kuhn notes: “The moon travels around the ecliptic faster and less steadily than the sun. On the average it completes one journey through the zodiac in 27⅓ days, but the time required for any single journey may differ from the average by as much as 7 hours….Successive new moons may be separated by intervals of either 29 or 30 days, and only a complex mathematical theory, demanding generations of systematic observation and study, can determine the length of a specified future month. Other difficulties derive from the incommensurable lengths of the average lunar and solar cycles” (The Copernican Revolution, pp. 46-47). It is also known that the moon drifts tangentially from its orbit about 4cm/year. Hoyle adds: “The two most striking bodies in the sky, the Sun and Moon, cause difficulties at the outset, even before we come to the planets” (Nicolaus Copernicus, p. 53).
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chosen audience in the Vatican gardens.99 Then, under Paul III in 1535, Cardinal Nikolaus von Schöenberg became interested in Copernicus and requested Theodoric of Radzyn to copy all of Copernicus’ writings and have them sent to Rome. He then encouraged Copernicus in a private letter of 1536: “In it you maintain that the earth moves; that the sun occupies the lowest, and thus the central, place in the universe…. I entreat you, most learned sir, unless I inconvenience you, to communicate this discovery of yours to scholars.”100
99 Fantoli adds that Albrecht “had probably received his information on the Copernican theory from Theodoric of Radzyn, who at that time represented at Rome the chapter of Warmia, to which Copernicus as canon also belonged.” Rewarded with an ancient codex, Albrecht wrote these words on it: “The Supreme Pontiff Clement VII gave me this codex in Rome in the year 1533 after which I had explained to him the opinion of Copernicus on the motion of the Earth in the Vatican gardens in the presence of Cardinals Francesco Orsini and Giuseppe Salviati, of Giovanni Pietro, vescovo di Viterbo, and of the doctor, Matteo Curzio” (For Copernicanism and for the Church, p. 41). Pope Clement VII was the nephew of Lorenzo Medici, who ruled as the Grand Duchy of Tuscany from 1449-1492. The Grand Duchy of Tuscany was the head of about a half-dozen smaller Duchies in northern Italy (Duchy of Urbino to the west, Duchy of Modena to the north, etc.). Florence was in Tuscany, while Rome was part of the papal states directly to the south of Tuscany. Below the papal states was the kingdom of Naples and Sicily governed by Spain. Galileo would often seek refuge in Florence away from the pope in Rome, but he was often called back to Rome on such occasions. 100 The complete letter states: “Some years ago word reached me concerning your proficiency, of which everybody constantly spoke. At that time I began to have a very high regard for you, and also to congratulate our contemporaries among whom you enjoyed such great prestige. For I had learned that you had not merely mastered the discoveries of the ancient astronomers uncommonly well but had also formulated a new cosmology. In it you maintain that the earth moves; that the sun occupies the lowest, and thus the central, place in the universe; that the eighth heaven remain perpetually motionless and fixed; and that, together with the elements included in its sphere, the moon, situated between the heavens of Mars and Venus, revolves around the sun in the period of a year. I have also learned that you have written an exposition of this whole system of astronomy, and have computed the planetary motions and set them down in tables, to the greatest admiration of all. Therefore with the utmost earnestness I entreat you, most learned sir, unless I inconvenience you, to communicate this discovery of yours to scholars, and at the earliest possible moment to send me your writings on the sphere of the universe together with the tables and whatever else you have that is relevant to this subject. Moreover, I have instructed Theodoric of Reden to have everything copied in your quarters at my expense and dispatched to me. If you gratify my desire in this matter, you will see that you are dealing with a man who
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That Cardinal Schöenberg was going against all previous Catholic tradition in his praise of Copernicus’ system was certainly out of the ordinary. Schöenberg was a progressive cleric who believed the Church
needed to be reformed. Beyond that, however, the question lingers as to why such interest was showered on Copernicus’ book, since the detailed math and geometry was somewhat beyond his expertise to judge, not to mention the fact that he was well aware of the geocentric tradition of the Catholic Church stemming from the consensus of the Church Fathers and medievals. Something else was influencing Schöenberg and his immediate superior, Clement VII, for both to look favorably upon Copernicus. Part of the interest may have been generated by the persuasive lectures by Albrecht of Widmanstadt concerning Copernicus’ Commentariolus. But due to the severity with which Paul III (1548), Paul V (1616) and Urban VIII (1633) would eventually condemn heliocentrism, Schöenberg was treading on uncharted territory. Whatever the real impetus for his interest, Schöenberg died the year after he wrote his 1536 letter to Copernicus, and Clement VII died the year after Albrecht’s lectures. Paul III became pope in 1534 and a much more ominous cloud came over the horizon. In 1541, Copernicus summoned the courage to present his work to Paul III, at least under the pretext that his work was merely a “hypothetical” model and that he had no intentions of promoting it as the actual system.101 Copernicus records this sequence of events in the Introduction to De revolutionibus:
is zealous for your reputation and eager to do justice to so fine a talent. Farewell. Rome, 1 November 1536.” 101 Protestant reformer, Andreas Osiander, who wrote the Introduction to De revolutionibus (although he did so anonymously so as to leave room for the inference that Copernicus himself wrote it) and George Rheticus, Copernicus’ Protestant confidant who vigorously sought for the publication of the book against his master’s reticence, had different plans, however. Osiander’s April 20, 1541 letter to Rheticus reveals the ploy: “The Aristotelians and theologians will easily be placated if they are told that several hypotheses can be used to explain the same apparent motions…and eventually they will go over to the opinion of the author” (quoted in Johannes Kepler’s Apologia Tychonis contra Ursum, and published in the same’s Opera Omnia, ed. Frisch, I, pp. 236-276, cited in Koestler’s, The Sleepwalkers, p. 171). Based on a June 1542 letter from T. Forsther to J. Schrad,
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For not many years ago under Leo X when the Lateran Council was considering the question of reforming the Ecclesiastical Calendar, no decision was reached, for the sole reason that the magnitude of the year and the months and the movements of the sun and moon had not yet been measured with sufficient accuracy. From that time on I gave attention to making more exact observations of these things and was encouraged to do so by that most distinguished man, Paul, Bishop of Fossombrone, who had been present at those deliberations. But what have I accomplished in this matter I leave to the judgment of Your Holiness in particular and to that of all other learned mathematicians.102
Despite all the introductory fanfare, De revolutionibus was certainly not a smash hit in the annals of book publishing. The first run was a thousand copies, which never sold out. There were only four reprints in the next four hundred years. Compared to other books on astronomy being sold at that time, including Ptolemy’s Almagest, whose reprints were in the hundreds, De revolutionibus had one reprint prior to 1700.103 One reason
Koestler reasons that Copernicus knew of Osiander’s Introduction but allowed it to be attributed to himself, and thus it became “the greatest scandal in the history of science” (ibid., p. 169). Koestler concludes: “There is a strangely consistent parallel between Copernicus’ character, and the humble, devious manner in which the Copernican revolution entered through the back door of history, preceded by the apologetic remark: ‘Please don’t take seriously – it is all meant in fun, for mathematicians only, and highly improbable indeed’” (ibid., p. 175). 102 On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres, trans. Charles G. Wallis, 1995, p. 7. 103 These included Jesuit Christopher Clavius’ book Treatise on the Sphere, reprinted nineteen times; Philip Melanchthon’s Doctrine of Physics, reprinted seventeen times, which refuted Copernicus’ book. Claudius Ptolemaeus’ book was originally titled maqhmatikh; suvtaxiV (Mathematike Syntaxis) in AD 142 but was renamed by Arab astronomers Almagest, which means “the greatest.” As Toomer notes: “It was dominant to an extent and for a length of time which is unsurpassed by any scientific work except Euclid’s Elements….In the late eighth and ninth centuries, with the growth of interest in Greek science in the Islamic world, the Almagest was translated, first into Syriac, then, several times, into Arabic. In the middle of the twelfth century no less than five such versions were still available….Two of these translations are still extant, those of al-Hajjāj and IshāqThābit. In them we find the title of Ptolemy’s treatise given as ‘al-mjsty’. This is undoubtedly derived…from a Greek form megivsth (?sc. suvntaxiV), meaning ‘greatest [treatise]’, but it is only later that it was incorrectly vocalized as almajastī, whence are derived the mediaeval Latin ‘almagesti,’ ‘almagestum,’ the
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for its unpopularity was its unreadability. It was choppy, obtuse, and pedantic. The thrust of the theory fills fewer than twenty pages at the beginning of the book, roughly five percent of the whole treatise. More than half the book is filled with useless charts that prove nothing for Copernicus’ case. When the book reaches its end, there is little left of the original teaching, and thus Copernicus can offer no concluding statement, even though it was promised many times in the text. Truth be told, the main reason for its unpopularity was that it offered no real improvement over Ptolemy’s system. In the Introduction, Copernicus claims to have rid cosmology of Ptolemy’s somewhat cumbersome epicyclical system, which had been in use for over a thousand years. To Paul III he writes:
For some make use of homocentric circles only, others of eccentric circles and epicycles, by means of which however they do not fully attain what they seek. For although those who have put their trust in homocentric circles have shown that various different movement can be composed of such circles, nevertheless they have not been able to establish anything for certain that would fully correspond to the phenomena. But even if those who have thought up eccentric circles seem to have been able for the most part to compute the apparent movements numerically by those means, they have in the meanwhile admitted a great deal which seems to contradict the first principles of regularity of movement.104
Theologically speaking, Paul III wasn’t bothered by this assertion, since it appeared that Copernicus exhibited no insistence on making the heliocentric model more than an intriguing hypothesis. Unbeknownst to the pope, however, Copernicus’ solar system was in many instances more complicated than Ptolemy’s. What Copernicus claimed as simplicity is one thing; what his work shows is quite another. Even a cursory reading of De revolutionibus reveals that the model he proposed was complicated and uncertain.105 As one author observes:
ancestors of the modern title ‘Almagest’” (G. J. Toomer, Ptolemy’s Almagest, London, Duckworth, 1984, pp. 1-2). 104 On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres, p. 5. 105 Some of the things with which Copernicus had to contend are: the obliquity of the ecliptic; the intersection of the equator, ecliptic and meridian; declinations and ascensions of stars; angles of the ecliptic with the horizon; precessions of solstices and equinoxes; irregularities of the equinoctial precession; the magnitude and difference of the solar year; the irregularity of the sun’s movement; the changes of the apsides; regular and apparent movement; the moon’s very complicated and
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What we call the Copernican revolution was not made by Canon Koppernigk. His book was not intended to cause a revolution. He knew that much of it was unsound, contrary to evidence, and its basic assumption unprovable.106 ….As a result of all this, Canon Koppernigk’s lifework seemed to be, for all useful purposes, wasted. From the seafarers’ and stargazers’ point of view, the Copernican planetary tables were only a slight improvement on the earlier Alphonsine tables, and were soon abandoned. And insofar as the theory of the universe is concerned, the Copernican system, bristling with inconsistencies, anomalies, and arbitrary constructions, was equally unsatisfactory, most of all to himself. In the lucid intervals between the long periods of torpor, the dying Canon must have been painfully aware that he had failed.107
Copernicus: More Epicycles than Ptolemy
One of the more obvious faults of De revolutionibus was that for all its complaints against epicycles, in the end Copernicus actually produced more epicycles than Ptolemy. Ptolemy’s system has forty epicycles, whereas Copernicus ends up with forty-eight. Yet in the earlier work, the Commentariolus, Copernicus stated that his heliocentric system needed only thirty-four epicycles, and even this numeration was off by four.108
irregular movement; the unequal apparent diameter of the moon and its parallaxes; the mean oppositions and conjunctions of the sun and moon; ecliptic conjunctions; the irregular movements of the other planets; the latitudes of the planets; the planets’ angles of obliquation; and many other issues. 106 The Sleepwalkers, p. 151. So reticent was Copernicus to publish his work for fear of ridicule that Rheticus, wishing to obscure the true author, published a summary of the contents and attributed the work to “the learned Dr. Nicolas of Torun,” the town Copernicus was born. 107 Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, p. 126. 108 Copernicus writes in the Commentariolus: “Then Mercury runs on seven circles in all; Venus on five; the earth on three, and round it the moon on four; finally Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn on five each. Altogether, therefore thirty-four circles suffice to explain the entire structure of the universe and the entire ballet of the planets,” translated by E. Rosen in Three Copernican Treatises, 1971, cited in Barbour’s Absolute or Relative Motion, p. 255. But Koestler remarks: “Incidentally, as Zinner has pointed out, even the famous count at the end of the Commentariolus is wrong as Copernicus forgot to account for the precession, the motions of the aphelia and the lunar nodes. Taking these into account, the Commentariolus uses thirty-eight not thirty-four circles,” adding that Copernicus makes no mention of the total number of epicycles in De revolutionibus: “Apart
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What happened, of course, was that since the Commentariolus was merely a preliminary thesis, Copernicus soon discovered that when the time came to work out the finer details of his system a couple of decades later, he was forced to add fourteen more epicycles just to make his version of celestial mechanics come close to the accuracy of Ptolemy’s.109 Books IV and V are
from the erroneous reference to 34 epicycles, I have nowhere seen a count made of the number of circles in De revolutionibus” (The Sleepwalkers, p. 580), perhaps hiding the fact from his reader that it contained more epicycles than the Commentariolus. Gingerich adds: “Copernicus must have realized that with his small epicyclets he actually had more circles than the Ptolemaic computational scheme used in the Alfonsine Tables or for the Stoeffler ephemerides” (op. cit., p. 58). Regarding the discrepancies among the orbits of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn in 1504, Gingerich writes: “…the evidence is firm that he had observed the cosmic dance at this time [1504] and was fully aware of the discrepancies in the tables. But what is most astonishing is that Copernicus never mentioned his observation, and his own tables made no improvement in tracking these conjunctions” (ibid., p. 59). 109 The Sleepwalkers, pp. 194-195. One reason Copernicus had so many epicycles is, rather than placing the sun in the center of the universe, he placed the Earth’s entire orbit in the center (although, according to Gingerich: “this was an unresolved mystery in the book, for Copernicus hedged on the issue,” The Book that Nobody Read, p. 163). Koestler says discrepancies on the number of epicycles is because most historians have not read Copernicus’ book but depended on other biographers. Koestler’s notes show that he did a painstaking analysis of De revolutionibus that allows him to conclude Copernicus used forty-eight epicycles (pp. 579-580). Gingerich accounts for these extra epicycles as follows: “While he [Copernicus] had eliminated all of Ptolemy’s major epicycles, merging them all into the Earth’s orbit, he then introduced a series of little epicyclets to replace the equant, one per planet” (The Book that Nobody Read, pp. 54-55). For mistaken scholarly accounts that settled on Copernicus having only 34 epicycles, Koestler cites the Chamber’s Encyclopedia as stating the Copernican system reduced the epicycles “from eighty to thirty-four,” as is the case with Herbert Dingle’s address to the Royal Astronomical Society in 1943. I found the same discrepancies. Ivars Peterson writes: “Copernicus needed more circles in his suncentered model than Ptolemy did in his Earth-centered scheme [a] total of 34 circles for all the planets and the moon” (Newton’s Clock, p. 54). Some add more epicycles: “To account for the apparent alterations in speed and movement of the planets, Copernicus was obliged to use as many as ninety Ptolemaic epicycles” (James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed, p. 134); “[Ptolemy] ultimately required 80 circles and nested epicycles” (Introduction to Modern Astronomy I, Peter A. Becker, George Mason Univ., lecture 4). Outlandish estimates include: “Although Copernicus introduced…about 40 epicycles to account for observations, he considered this a great improvement since the Ptolemaic theory contained more than 240 such epicycles” (Lloyd Motz and Anneta Duveen,
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Page from Copernicus’ De revolutionibus showing his epicycles Essentials of Astronomy, Wadsworth Publishing, CA, 1966, p. 135). Motz was an astronomer with a Ph.D. in physics from Columbia Univ.
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism As one source describes Copernicus’ use of epicycles:
His actual reason for this was because planetary observations indicated that even when the slowing down and speeding up of the observed planets due to retrograde motion was precisely accounted for, the planets still nevertheless did not seem to travel at uniform speed about the sun. Rather, the observations clearly demonstrated that they appeared to travel faster through space when closer to the sun and slower when further away from it. Indeed, this noted fact that the planets did not maintain a constant distance from the sun at all times in their orbits led Copernicus to offset his major orbital circles so that they were not precisely centered on the sun. Thus, in holding fast to his circles, and through his conviction that the speed of the planets was uniform, he was forced to retain small planetary epicyclical orbits as a subtle way to account for the continued presence of their apparent non-uniform motion about the sun....If one were to plot the actual path of one full orbit about the sun, the planet would be found to trace out an elongated circular path as opposed to an exact circle. Such is the result of combining two uniform circular orbits in the proscribed manner.110
110http://www.ancient-world-mysteries.com/ancient-astro nomy.html. 59

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Hence, Cohen remarks:
…the claim for a great simplicity of the Copernican system, as opposed to a great complexity of the Ptolemaic system, must therefore – insofar as the number of circles is concerned – be taken cum grano salis, in fact, with the whole saltcellar…it takes only the most cursory leafing through the pages of De revolutionibus…to be struck by Copernicus’ use of epicycles page after page. Even a neophyte will recognize in the diagrams of De revolutionibus and the Almagest a kinship of geometrical methods and constructions that belies any simple claim that Copernicus’s book is in any obvious sense a more modern or a simpler work than Ptolemy’s.”111
Copernicus is reported by Rheticus to have said to him that if his planetary theory agreed with the observed positions of the planets (that is, to within ten minutes of arc), he would be as well pleased with himself as Pythagoras had been when he discovered the famous theorem associated with his name. In fact, however, Copernicus never attained this accuracy. To see how large or small this value is, it may be pointed out that the average nakedeye observer can just distinguish as two a pair of near-by stars four minutes of arc apart. According to Neugebauer, ten minutes was considered adequate agreement of observation….Before long, ten minutes of arc was considered to be so far off the mark that a difference of approximately this magnitude between a theory and the observed positions of Mars determined by Tycho Brahe could decide that a theory was worthless and should be cast aside. For Kepler it was unthinkable that there could be an error of even eight minutes of arc in Tycho’s planetary observations. The positions Tycho assigned to certain fundamental stars were generally less than one minute of arc from the true positions.”112
111 I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science, pp. 111, 119-120. Cohen adds: “But of course Copernicus was fully aware that no set of simple circular motions could give an accurate representation of the heavenly world….Anyone conversant with astronomy would be aware that the diagram in book I of De revolutionibus was at best schematic, a greatly oversimplified model of the system” (p. 111). J. L. E. Dreyer says Copernicus’ system had “a serious defect” (History of the Planetary Systems from Thales to Kepler, 1909, p. 342). 112 Revolution in Science, p. 117.
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More disturbing is the fact that, to make Ptolemy’s model appear worse than it really was, Copernicus exaggerated the number of epicycles employed by his ancient rival. Although Ptolemy used only forty epicycles, Copernicus asserted that he had eighty.113 This gives us a strong hint that perhaps Copernicus was not in this game merely to give the world a better model of cosmology; rather, he thought of it as an historic competition that allowed him to inflate his opponent’s errors. As Barbour notes: “In fact, there are far fewer circles in the Ptolemaic scheme presented in the Almagest than many accounts would lead one to believe; Ptolemy was remarkably economic in his use of circular motions.”114 But most astronomers perpetuate an illusion about Copernicus. Cohen remarks again:
A biography of Copernicus, subtitled “The Founder of Modern Astronomy,” would have us believe that “by making the Earth rotate on an axis and revolve in an orbit, Copernicus reduced by more than half the number of circular motions which Ptolemy had found it necessary to postulate.”115
As it stands, Ptolemy’s equant made his model much more economical. Copernicus had to add a second circular epicycle (or epicyclet) to do what Ptolemy’s equant had accomplished; and Copernicus was compelled to do so because he believed Ptolemy, by introducing the equant, had departed from strictly circular motion. As noted earlier, Ptolemy’s equant was so versatile that it would rival Kepler’s ellipse, for it allowed the planets to sweep out the same area per unit time of revolution
113 Cohen remarks on Robert Palter’s coining of the “80-34 syndrome” of those who desired to place Copernicus above Ptolemy. Owen Gingerich adds that the myth of having to put up with Ptolemaic epicycles perpetuated itself like an outof-control gossip chain. He writes: “The legend reached its apotheosis when the 1969 Encyclopedia Britannica announced that, by the time of King Alfonso, each planet required 40 to 60 epicycles! The article concluded, ‘After surviving more than a millennium, the Ptolemaic system failed; its geometrical clockwork had become unbelievably cumbersome and without satisfactory improvements in its effectiveness.’ When I challenged them, the Britannica editors replied lamely that the author of the article was no longer living, and they hadn’t the faintest idea if or where any evidence for the epicycles on epicycles could be found” (The Book that Nobody Read, pp. 56-57). Elsewhere Gingerich adds: “the Copernican system is slightly more complicated than the original Ptolemaic system” (“Crisis versus aesthetic in the Copernican revolution,” Vistas in Astonomy, 17, p. 87, 1975. 114 Julian Barbour, Absolute or Relative Motion, p. 184. 115 I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science, p. 119.
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Chapter 1: The New Galileo and the Truth about Copernicanism that Kepler’s famous Second law of motion (the “equal area law”) would eventually accomplish a millennia and a half later.
116
The complexity of Copernicus’ heliocentric system stems in part from the fact that most of the charts and figures in De revolutionibus were not original. Copernicus merely borrowed them from the Greeks and then reworked the figures to fit his heliocentric model:
Canon Koppernigk was not particularly fond of star-gazing. He preferred to rely on the observations of Chaldeans, Greeks, and Arabs – a preference that led to some embarrassing results. The Book of the Revolutions contains, altogether, only twenty-seven observations made by the Canon himself; and these were spread over thirty-two years!…Even in the position he assumed for his basic star, the Spica, which he used as a landmark, was erroneous by about forty minutes’ arc, more than the width of the moon.117 116 See CDROM for animation of Copernicus’ epicycles. 117 Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, p. 125.
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The great scholar on early astronomy, Otto Neugebauer, writes:
The popular belief that Copernicus’ heliocentric system constitutes a significant simplification of the Ptolemaic system is obviously wrong. The choice of the reference system has no effect on the structure of the model, and the Copernican models themselves require about twice as many circles as the Ptolemaic models and are far less elegant and adaptable.118
Modern historians, making ample use of the advantage of hindsight, stress the revolutionary significance of the heliocentric system and the simplification it had introduced. In fact, the actual computation of planetary positions follows exactly the ancient patterns and the results are the same. The Copernican solar theory is definitely a step in the wrong direction for the actual computation as well as for the underlying kinematic concepts.119
Koestler adds:
Alexandrian astronomers can hardly be accused of ignorance. They had more precise instruments for observing the universe than Copernicus had; Copernicus himself hardly bothered with star-gazing; he relied on the observations of Hipparchus and Ptolemy. He knew no more about the actual motions of the stars than they did. Hipparchus’ Catalogue of the fixed stars and Ptolemy’s Tables for calculating planetary motions were so reliable and precise that they served, with insignificant corrections, as navigational aids to Columbus and Vasco da Gama. Eratosthenes, another Alexandrian, computed the diameter of the Earth as 7,850 miles with an error of only ½ per cent. Hipparchus calculated the distance of the moon as 30¼ Earth diameters – with an error of only 0.3 per cent. Thus, insofar as factual knowledge is concerned, Copernicus was no better off, and in some respects worse off, than the Greek astronomers of Alexandria who lived at the time of Jesus Christ.120
118 Otto Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, 1957, p. 204. 119 Otto Neugebauer, “On the Planetary Theory of Copernicus,” Vistas in Astronomy 10, p. 103, 1968. 120 Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, p. 73. NB: Before the invention of the telescope, an accurate measurement of the distance between the sun and the Earth
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Along these lines, Thomas Kuhn reveals the modern misconception of Copernicus:
But this apparent economy of the Copernican system, though it is a propaganda victory that the proponents of the new astronomy rarely failed to emphasize, is largely an illusion….The seven-circle system presented in the First Book of the De revolutionibus, and in many modern elementary accounts of the Copernican system, is a wonderfully economical system, but it does not work. It will not predict the position of planets with an accuracy comparable to that supplied by Ptolemy’s system.121
To drive home the point, Kuhn adds:
…this brief sketch of the complex system of …Copernicus…indicates the third great incongruity of the De revolutionibus and the immense irony of Copernicus’ lifework. The preface to the De revolutionibus opens with a forceful indictment of Ptolemaic astronomy for its inaccuracy, complexity, and inconsistency, yet before Copernicus’ text closes, it has convicted itself of exactly the same shortcomings. Copernicus’ system is neither simpler nor more accurate than Ptolemy’s. And the methods that Copernicus employed in constructing it seem just as little likely as the methods of Ptolemy to produce a single consistent solution of the problem of the planets. The De revolutionibus itself is not consistent with the single surviving early version of the system, described by Copernicus in the early manuscript Commentariolus. Even Copernicus could not derive from his hypothesis a single and unique combination of interlocking circles, and his successors did not do so….Judged on purely practical grounds, Copernicus’
was not possible. Ptolemy had estimated the distance to be 610 Earth diameters, while Copernicus estimated it to be 571 Earth diameters. The actual distance is 11,500 Earth diameters. 121 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought, 1957, 1959, p. 169. N. R. Hanson adds: “…in no ordinary sense of ‘simplicity’ is the Copernican theory simpler than the Ptolemaic” (Constellations and Conjectures, Dordrecht, D. Reidel, 1973. Cited in Imre Lakatos’ The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, p. 175).
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new planetary system was a failure; it was neither more accurate nor significantly simpler than its Ptolemaic predecessors.122
Having heard of his fame, a fellow heliocentrist, Georg Joachim Rheticus,123 visited with Copernicus in 1539. After befriending Copernicus and reading his works, Rheticus worked very hard in convincing him to publish his De revolutionibus. Prior to Copernicus’ decision, Rheticus wrote a summary version of Copernicus’ work titled Narratio prima in 1540.124 It was Rheticus’ purpose to do all that he could to disseminate the heliocentric universe. With the help of the Protestant publisher Johannes Petreius,125 Rheticus acquired the services of Lutheran Andreas Osiander to write a preface for De revolutionibus. After years of labor, Rheticus was finally nearing success, but he did not get to see the final draft of De revolutionibus before it was published. In the meantime, Copernicus had suffered a stroke in December 1542, but his book was finally published in March 1543 by Petreius, and Copernicus had died shortly thereafter.
In regard to his heliocentric theory, Copernicus consistently appealed to the “harmony” of his system, but it was a harmony ennobled by a sun that he personified, and, some say, deified. Copernicus writes:
In the middle of all sits Sun enthroned. In this most beautiful temple could we place this luminary in any better position from which he can illuminate the whole at once? He is rightly called
122 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought, p. 171. Herbert Butterfield adds: “[Copernicus] was puzzled by the variations he had observed in the brightness of the planet Mars…Copernicus’ own system was so far from answering to the phenomena in the case of Mars that Galileo in his main work on this subject praises him for clinging to his new theory though it contradicted observation….” (The Origins of Modern Science: 1300-1800, p. 37). 123 Rheticus’ original name was Georg Joachim Iserin. His father, Georg Iserin, had been convicted of various crimes (either sorcery or theft, or both) and was executed. Families of the executed were required to change their last name. He chose “Rheticus” from the region of Rhaetia from where his mother originated. 124 Rheticus writes in the Narratio: “…each of the planets, by its position and order and every inequality of its motion, bears witness that the earth moves and that we who dwell upon the globe of the earth, instead of accepting its changes of position, believe that the planets wander in all sorts of motions of their own” (translated by Edward Rosen, in Three Copernican Treatises, 1971, p. 165). 125 Petreius published works on Luther, Erasmus, Melanchthon, Henry VIII, Regiomontanus and Gasser. Although he also published a few works by Augustine, Calvin and Luther had commandeered some of Augustine’s works on predestination for the cause of Protestantism.
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the Lamp, the Mind, the Ruler of the Universe: Hermes Trismegistus names him the Visible God, Sophocles’ Electra calls him the All-seeing. So the Sun sits as upon a royal throne ruling his children the planets which circle round him. The Earth has the Moon at her service. As Aristotle says, in his On Animals, the Moon has the closest relationship with the Earth. Meanwhile the Earth conceives by the Sun, and becomes pregnant with an annual rebirth.126
Karl Popper shows the origin of these cultic ideas:
Copernicus studied in Bologna under the Platonist Novara; and Copernicus’ idea of placing the sun rather than the Earth in the center of the universe was not the result of new observations but of a new interpretation of old and well-known facts in the light of semi-religious Platonic and Neo-Platonic ideas. The crucial idea can be traced back to the sixth book of Plato’s Republic, where we can read that the sun plays the same role in the realm of visible things as does the idea of the good in the realm of ideas. Now the idea of the good is the highest in the hierarchy of Platonic ideas. Accordingly the sun, which endows visible things with their visibility, vitality, growth and progress, is the highest in the hierarchy of the visible things in nature.…Now if the sun was to be given pride of place, if the sun merited a divine status…then it was hardly possible for it to revolve about the Earth. The only fitting place for so exalted a star was the center of the universe. So the Earth was bound to revolve about the sun. This Platonic idea, then, forms the historical background of the
126 De revolutionibus, “10. Of the Order of the Heavenly Bodies,” as cited in The Copernican Revolution, pp. 179-180 (Kuhn’s translation from the Latin). Charles Glenn Wallis’ translation (or his editor’s), although similar, seems desirous to lessen Copernicus’ deification of the sun by using slightly different wording and lower case letters: “In the center of all rests the sun. For who would place this lamp of a very beautiful temple in another or better place than this wherefrom it can illuminate everything at the same time? As a matter of fact, not unhappily do some call it the lantern; others, the mind, the pilot of the world. Trismegistus calls it a ‘visible god’; Sophocles’ Electra, ‘that which gazes upon all things.’ And so the sun, as if resting on a kingly throne, governs the family of stars which wheel around. Moreover, the Earth is by no means cheated of the services of the moon; but as Aristotle says in the De Animalibus, the Earth has the closest kinship with the moon. The Earth moreover is fertilized by the sun and conceives offspring every year” (On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres, 1995, pp. 24-26).
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Copernican revolution. It does not start with observations, but with a religious or mythological idea.127
Popper, being a supporter of the heliocentric revolution, couches his critique of Copernicus in rather polite terms, but essentially he is saying that Copernicus’ brainchild had all the earmarks of originating from pagan sun-worship. As Wolfgang Smith notes:
…in the Renaissance movement championed by Marsiglio Ficino, the doctrine came alive again, but in a somewhat altered form; one might say that what Ficino instituted was indeed a religion, a kind of neo-paganism. Copernicus himself was profoundly influenced by this movement, as can be clearly seen from numerous passages in the De revolutionibus.128
Upon reading De revolutionibus, one is struck by the preponderance of philosophical and humanistic arguments Copernicus brings to his aid. As J. D. Bernal notes: “[Copernicus’] reasons for his revolutionary change were essentially philosophic and aesthetic,” and in a later edition he is more convinced that the “reasons were mystical rather than scientific.”129 Overall, Copernicus presents about five-dozen arguments, at least half of which are solely philosophical in nature. Although the other half of his argumentation depends more on mechanics, these also have philosophical appendages to them. Very few of his arguments are based on his own personal observations, since, as we noted earlier, Copernicus merely reworked the observations of his Greek predecessors. In fact, Copernicus concludes that, because the Greeks did not detail their cosmological
127 Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, p. 187. Popper is referring to Dominicus Maria da Novara, a mathematician and astronomer in Italy. Indulging in a bit of anachronistic evaluation, Popper goes on to defend him, suggesting that even though Copernicus’ idea came before the observation, he was nevertheless correct and “not a crank.” More of Popper’s aposteriori thinking appears later in the book: “The Copernican system, for example, was inspired by a Neo-Platonic worship of the light of the Sun who had to occupy the ‘centre’ because of his nobility. This indicates how myths may develop testable components. They may, in the course of discussion, become fruitful and important for science” (ibid., p. 257). 128 Wolfgang Smith, The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology, p. 174. Copernicus was also influenced heavily by the liberal humanist, Codrus, who was known for denying various Church doctrines. 129 J. D. Bernal, Science in History, 1st edition, London, Watts, 1954; 2nd edition, 1965. Cited in Lakatos, Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, p. 129.
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models more thoroughly, history (and God) have called upon him to provide the long-awaited documentation of true cosmology.130
But if one were to read De revolutionibus to discover a geometric sun that corresponded to Copernicus deified sun, he would be at a loss. For all Copernicus’ talk about the sun, it rarely appears in the diagrams of his book. It is replaced by “C” to designate the center. He said the sun was near the center, but he really didn’t know where to put it. Copernicus was mainly interested in moving the earth, but not necessarily moving it precisely around the sun. The Copernican Revolution, in essence, was a revolution to get the earth moving. The details of how to achieve that goal were certainly not accomplished with Copernicus or Galileo.
The Real Truth about Kepler’s Solar System
After Copernicus there were, of course, refinements, such as Johannes Kepler’s elliptical orbits of the planets, which seemed to make things run a bit more smoothly for the heliocentric system. Kepler illustrated these ideas in his famous work Astronomia Nova in 1609. It was right around this time that Galileo began to profess publicly his belief in heliocentrism, although he failed to attribute much of anything to Kepler.
Kepler, although a Lutheran, was influenced by the occult, as was his mother, Katherina Kepler, and the latter’s endeavor may have led to her trial as a witch.131 Following his philosophy, Kepler’s main motivation for
130 Thomas Heath sheds more light on this connection: “Copernicus himself admitted that the [heliocentric] theory was attributed to Aristarchus, though this does not seem to be generally known….But it is a curious fact that Copernicus did mention the theory of Aristarchus in a passage which he afterwards suppressed: ‘Credibile est hisce similibusque causis Philolaum mobilitatem terrae sensisse, quod etiam nonnulli Aristarchum Samium ferunt in eadem fuisse sentential.’” Heath also shows by quotes from Plutarch and Archemides that Aristarchus was the originator of the heliocentric view (Thomas Heath, Aristarchus of Samos: The Ancient Copernicus, 1913, p. 301ff). J. L. E. Dreyer provides a more readable translation of Archimedes’ words: “You know that according to most astronomers the world (kovsmoV) is the sphere, of which the center is the center of the earth, and whose radius is a line from the center of the earth to the center of the sun. But Aristarchus of Samos has published in outline certain hypotheses, from which it follows that the world is many times larger than that. For he supposes (uJpotiqevtai) that the fixed stars and the sun are immovable, but that the earth is carried round the sun in a circle which is in the middle of the course…” (J. L. E. Dreyer, History of the Planetary Systems from Thales to Kepler, 1906, p. 136). 131 Kepler’s Witch, James A. Connor, 2004, pp. 275-307. The Sleepwalkers, pp. 389-393. The woman relative who raised Katherina was executed for practicing witchcraft (John Lear, Kepler’s Dream, 1965, p. 31).
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Johannes Kepler: 1571 – 1630 In one passage he describes the sun as: “Who alone appears, by virtue of his dignity and power, suited…and worthy to become the home of God himself, not to say the first mover.”132 Similar to Copernicus, Kepler was also influenced by Greek thought, and in particular the Pythagorean concept of the harmony of the spheres. Using the idea of harmonic ratios, Kepler developed his third law of motion wherein the cube of a planet’s orbital period is proportional to the square of its distance from the sun. Kepler believed that even God was subject to these “harmonic” laws and had no other choice than to make the solar system by them. At one point Kepler attributes divinity to geometry, stating: “Geometry, coeternal with the divine mind before the origin of things, God himself (for what is there in God that is not God himself) has supplied God with the examples for the creation of the world.”133
132 On the Motion of Mars, Prague, 1609, Chapter 4, as cited in Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution, 1959, p. 214. Kuhn notes: “This symbolic identification of the sun and God is found repeatedly in Renaissance literature and art” (ibid., p. 130). Later adding: “This conviction [of Kepler’s], together with certain intrinsic incongruities discussed above, was his reason for rejecting the Tychonic system” (ibid., p. 214). Kepler’s reference to the “first mover” encapsulates his concept that as the sun rotated on its axis, its rays would act like a brush to move the planets. 133 Johannes Kepler, De Harmonice Mundi, 1619.
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Astronomia Nova, 1609
Kepler versus Tycho
Ironic as it may seem, astronomers realize that “the Keplerian system contradicts Copernicus on almost every fundamental principle….he jettisoned all but the two most general Copernican axioms: that the sun stands still and that the earth rotates and revolves.”134 Whereas Copernicus had no specific value or place for the sun, Kepler’s distinction among all his predecessors was that he attributed a significant role to the sun in the motion of the planets. Aristotle believed that the planets were attached to spheres that were pushed by the gods. Copernicus, with the other medievals, believed that the Christian God moved only the outer sphere, which then moved the inner spheres holding the planets. The spheres had enough room between their inner and outer walls to accommodate the epicycles of either Ptolemy or Copernicus. 134 Cohen, Revolution in Science, pp. 125-126.
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Kepler’s “Harmonic Laws” of the Planets As noted earlier, in the course of his work Copernicus stumbled upon a geocentric system that did not use Ptolemaic epicycles, but he rejected that system because it did not incorporate the crystal spheres of the Greeks. But Copernicus’ trash became Tycho Brahe’s treasure. Brahe, through his discovery in 1577 of a comet, proved there were no crystal spheres in outer space, since a comet circling the sun would have crashed into the spheres. There was no more excuse to reject the geocentric alternative. Copernicus’ objection had now been answered and Tycho returned to the immobile earth with a revolving sun. Geometrically, all was sound. Everything that Copernicus’ system could do, Brahe’s could do, except the sun and the earth were switched.
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Tycho’s Immobile Earth and Revolving Sun One thing missing from Brahe’s model, however, was the power grid. What was making the sun revolve around the earth, and the planets around the sun? How, in fact, could the larger sun revolve around the smaller earth (which was one of the issues that bent Copernicus toward a suncentered model)?135 The Greeks believed the power came from their gods; the Christians believed it was God of the Bible, but no one had supplied a natural reason for the celestial movements (even if the natural cause was created by God). Brahe didn’t offer any solutions. He was merely a planetcharter who was devoted to the biblical geocentric system but didn’t know quite how to use his forty-years worth of figures to prove his case. Of course, although Kepler offered a solution (the magnetic pull of the sun) it 135 The objection raised by Hartman and Nissim against Brahe’s system is worded in a similar vein: “Brahe’s system violates conservation of momentum in that the solar system does not orbit around its center of mass and Mach gives no inkling on how to deal with the nonconservation of momentum in Brahe’s system” (“On Mach’s critique of Newton and Copernicus,” American Journal of Physics 71 (11) November 2003, p. 1167). We will thoroughly address this objection in Chapter 2. Suffice it to say for now that the “center of mass” in the geocentric system is no longer defined on a local, solar system, basis but on the basis of the whole universe in rotation around a fixed Earth at the universe’s center of mass.
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would later be discredited.136 To this day, no one has found the power grid. Two centuries later, Newton would merely refine Kepler’s area law and show how gravity, not magnetism, was involved with the orbits of the planets, but he couldn’t explain the mechanism that produced gravity. He merely developed an equation to show its effects.
Meanwhile, Kepler wrote his first book on astronomy in 1596 titled Mysterium Cosmographicum, which defended the Copernican system by asserting that the planets’ orbits were tied into the ratios of the Platonic solids. He found that each of the five Platonic solids could be encased in a sphere and thus produce six circular layers corresponding to the six orbits of the known planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. By a precise ordering of the solids: octahedron, icosahedron, dodecahedron, tetrahedron, and cube, Kepler showed that the spheres could be made to correspond to the orbits of the planets.
Kepler sent his book to Brahe. Brahe was impressed and wrote a letter to Kepler’s professor with due praise, but added that he believed Kepler’s ingenuity would be better served by applying his mathematics to the geocentric system. Tycho also revealed his possession of planetary charts that would be useful for an intellect like Kepler’s. After a while, Tycho hired Kepler as an assistant and put him to work crunching astronomical numbers, but he did not give Kepler his planetary charts, probably because he didn’t know whether he could trust the young apprentice. Kepler worked for Brahe off and on for about a year, but he soon became restless. He desperately needed Brahe’s forty-years planet-charting to bring his Mysterium Cosmographicum theory to fruition. As Kepler describes it:
For among the most powerful causes of visiting Tycho was this also, that I might learn the truer proportions of the deviations [of the planets] from him, by which I might examine both my Cosmic Mystery and The Harmony of the World. For these a priori speculations ought not to impinge on clear experience: but with it be reconciled.137
136 After reading William Gilbert’s 1600 book De Magnete on magnetism, Kepler believed that each planet contained a magnet, and the sun contained a huge magnet. Depending on how the magnets were positioned, the result would either pull or push the planet around the sun. The farther the planet was from the sun, the weaker the magnetic field, and thus the slower the planet would move around the sun. The precise orientation of the polarities of the sun and the planets would then determine the ellipticity of the latter’s orbits. 137 Heavenly Intrigue, p. 154. The Gilders’ add: “Kepler had not forgotten Brahe’s advice; he understood that, without the empirical backing only Brahe’s
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Without these charts, Kepler would have been just another seventeenth-century astronomer struggling to make a living by reading astrological horoscopes, for he would have had little evidence upon which to base his theory regarding the motions of the planets. Modern telescopic observation reveals that, without ever using a telescope, Brahe’s star charts were consistently accurate to within 1 minute of arc or better. His observations of planetary positions were reliable to within 4 minutes of arc, which was more than twice the accuracy produced by the best observers of antiquity. In fact, it was Tycho’s express desire to use his precise measurements to uncover the errors in Copernicus’ solar system. This data was absolutely priceless, and Kepler, who revered Tycho and called him The Phoenix of Astronomy, would eventually pay, the evidence shows, the ultimate price to obtain them. Tycho knew of Kepler’s desire to possess the charts but Tycho did not want to see them pressed into service for Copernicus since he was the staunchest anti-Copernican of his day. Tycho’s very first letter to Kepler outlined his express desire that his fortyyears of painstaking work be used to promote the geocentric system. In his book published in 1588, De mundi aetherei recentioribus phaenomenis, he stated his devotion to Scripture and to geocentrism:
What need is there, without any justification, to imagine the earth, a dark dense and inert mass, to be a heavenly body undergoing even more numerous revolutions than the others, that is to say, subject to triple motion, in violation not only of all physical truth but also of the authority of Holy Scripture, which ought to be paramount.138
Tycho had more than a suspicion that Kepler saw things very differently. As the story develops, Kepler is now suspected of murdering Brahe in order to obtain the planetary charts.139 In the words of one author:
Kepler knew that in Tycho’s possession were the raw observations that he, as “architect,” longed to assemble into a coherent picture of planetary motion. And Tycho knew that the gifted Kepler had the mathematical wherewithal to prove the validity of the Tychonic [geocentric] system of the heavens. But Kepler was a confirmed Copernican; Tycho’s model had no
incomparable observations could provide, his idea of universal structure and harmony would never amount to anything but an elegant theory” (ibid.). 138 Brahe’s work is cited in Repcheck’s Copernicus’s Secret, p. 187. 139 See Volume 3, Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right, Chapter 11.
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appeal to him, and he had no intention of polishing this flawed edifice to the great man’s ego.140
All in all, Kepler’s geometrical modification didn’t prove Copernicus’ sun-centered system was right. It merely revealed Kepler’s preferences, since he knew that, if the same elliptical modifications were given to the reigning geocentric model of Tycho Brahe, they would have shown heliocentrism to be merely an alternative system, not a superior one. As one physics course put it: “However, one could also construct a ‘Tychonean’ model with elliptical orbits.”141
Be that as it may, some historians hold that although Kepler claimed the discovery of elliptical orbits was supported by independent computations of planetary positions, in actuality, he employed the elliptical theory in order to derive his “observations.”142
140 Alan W. Hirshfeld, Parallax: The Race to Measure the Universe, 2001, pp. 9293. Brahe was the principal author but perhaps not the only one who discovered what we now know as the Tychonic system. Helisaeus Roeslin worked on a similar system, but his work was never published. Nicholas Reimers Bär (also known as Ursus), published a Tychonic system with a rotating Earth in the Fundaments of Astronomy [actual title: Nicolai Raimari Ursi Dithmarsi Fundamentum astronomicum, Strasburg, 1588] but was known to have stolen it from Brahe, whereupon Brahe sought litigation against him, but Ursus died before the trial [see Heavenly Intrigue, pp. 120-185]. 141 University of Illinois, Physics 319, Spring 2004, Lecture 03, p. 11. 142 Knowing this fact, historian Owen Gingerich says that Kepler’s ploy “may simply have been a legitimate flourish meant to persuade recalcitrant colleagues of the correctness of his insight” (As cited in the Bulletin of the Tychonian Society, No. 53, 1990, p. 32). Gingerich also suggests that elliptical orbits may not have been the brainchild of Kepler, but of Jerome Schreiber. He writes: “On folio 143 [of Kepler’s copy of De revolutionibus] there appears the single Greek word elleiyiV – that is, ellipse – together with the same sort of emphasis marks that Schreiber used to highlight the passage on folio 96. When I first saw that book in Leipzig, I assumed that it was Kepler who had written elleiysiV in the margin, and I hadn’t made a color slide of it. Later, when I had discovered more information about the double layer of annotations and the evidence that it was likely Schreiber’s handiwork, I had to worry about which one wrote it….Eventually I obtained excellent transparencies, which left no doubt that it was indeed Schreiber’s ink in the book Kepler had inherited” (The Book that Nobody Read, p. 165).
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Others are more endearing to Kepler and state that… after trying 70 different combinations of circles and epicycles, he finally devised a combination for Mars that would predict its position – when compared to Tycho’s observations – to within 0.13º …however, the error of 0.13º still exceeded the likely error in Tycho’s measurements. Kepler knew enough about Tycho’s methods to know that an error of 0.13º in the data was too much….Finally, Kepler decided to abandon the idea of circular orbits…He tried various ovals….After 9 years of work, he found a shape that fit satisfactorily with the observed path of Mars.143 Whatever the true state of affairs, in the end the discovery of ellipses
helped both the heliocentric and geocentric models to conclude that planetary orbits were not perfect circles (although some are very close to perfect circles).144 In fact, when Kepler discovered the elliptical orbit of 143 Theo Koupelis, In Quest of the Universe, 6th edition, Jones & Bartlett Publishers, 2010, p. 57. 144 Not only may Schreiber have pre-dated Kepler in regards to inventing elliptical orbits, it seems that neither Schreiber nor Kepler were the first to introduce the phenomenon. That honor apparently belongs to the Greeks. As Koestler notes:
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Mars, he found that its deviation from a circle was only one part in 450 (the same deviation Ptolemy found for Mars and which was demonstrated by his equant).145 Kepler could see this deviation because, unlike Copernicus, he had the sun pushing the planets in their orbits by a magnetic sweeping motion and thereby he sought to make the sun the actual center of the solar system to replace Copernicus’ ‘mean sun’ – the common point of intersection for all the orbits of the planets. Once the sun is placed in the center, it is just a matter of measuring how the planet advances toward and recedes from the sun.
One historical note of interest is that on his deathbed Brahe asked Kepler to use his forty-years of planet-charting to support the geocentric system. Kepler fulfilled Brahe’s wishes but did so in his usual style – showing the three systems side-by-side (the Ptolemaic, Tychonic and Copernican). As Barbour notes: “Kepler immediately takes the opportunity to point out that, viewed in purely geometrical terms, the three forms are completely equivalent,” but Kepler believes he has “physical and dynamical” evidence of “the severe difficulties that the two rivals to Copernicus face.”146 As noted earlier, the only differences are that Kepler, for his model only, employs precise elliptical orbits (and, in particular, he halves Tycho’s eccentricity of the sun-earth circumference); and uses the “area law” so that the consequent improvements of planetary motion and speed favor him alone. If Kepler had done the same to Tycho’s or even a modified Ptolemaic model, the equivalence would not only be “geometric” but also “physical and dynamical.” Unfortunately, Barbour never mentions
“There exist some fragmentary remains, dating from the first century AD, of a small-sized Greek planetarium – a mechanical model designed to reproduce the motions of sun, moon, and perhaps also of the planets. But its wheels, or at least some of them, are not circular – they are egg-shaped [footnote: Ernst Zinner, Entstehung und Ausbreitung der Copernicanischen Lehre (Erlangen, 1943), p. 48]. Gingerich adds: “The equant got Ptolemy into a lot of trouble as far as many of his successors were concerned. It wasn’t that his model didn’t predict the angular positions satisfactorily. Rather, the equant forced the epicycle to move nonuniformly around the deferent circle, and that was somehow seen as a deviation from the pure principle of uniform circular motion. Ptolemy himself was apologetic about it, but he used it because it generated the motion that was observed in the heavens. Altogether his system was admirably simple considering the apparent complexity and variety of the retrograde loops” (The Book that Nobody Read, p. 53). 145 Compare this to the bulge of the earth’s equator, which is one part in 231. 146 Julian B. Barbour, Absolute or Relative Motion, pp. 273, 291. Kepler’s “area law” holds that as a planet travels in its elliptical orbit around the sun, it will cover the same area in the same time due to the fact that it speeds up when it is closer to the sun and slows down when it is farther away.
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this fact in his review. Instead, he quotes Kepler as saying: “Thus, the house that we erected on the basis of the Tychonic observations we have now demolished with other observations of the same man.” In actuality, Kepler didn’t demolish anything except his chance to be honest with the application of the scientific data.
That Kepler was biased toward the Copernican universe is noted in his statement about the great advantages of having a moving earth:
For it was not fitting that man, who was going to be the dweller in this world and its contemplator, should reside in one place of it as in a closed cubicle: in that way he would never have arrived at the measurement and contemplation of the so distant stars, unless he had been furnished with more than human gifts…it was his office to move around in this very spacious edifice by means of the transportation of the earth his home and to get to know the different stations, according as they are measurers, i.e., to take a promenade so that he could all the more correctly view and measure the single parts of his house.147
Hence Kepler is driven to Copernicanism because he believes it is better for the Earth to take part in an adventurous excursion through the universe rather than being in a unique and immovable position from which to observe the universe, thus proving once again that modern cosmology is influenced by a significant percentage of philosophical bias. In actuality, a moving earth would not allow man to “more correctly view and measure the single parts of his house,” simply because without an immovable foundation on which to set his measuring stick, there is no accurate way to know the distances, positions, or motions of the house. It is the very reason that Barbour titled his book “Absolute or Relative Motion?” for he, like Kepler, cannot tell what is moving and what is not.
Of course, like Copernicus who had to form a crib for his moving Earth by placing it inside a fixed wall of stars in order for the latter to serve as his absolute frame of reference, Kepler did the same. He writes:
The region of the fixed stars supplies the movables with a place and a base upon which the moveables are, as it were, supported;
147 In Kepler’s Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae, 1618, 1620, as cited by Barbour, op. cit., p. 298. Barbour adds that Kepler’s bias toward Copernicanism is quite different “from the modern viewpoint according to which the main effect of the Copernican revolution was to demote man from the central position in the universe.”
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and movement is understood as taking place relative to its absolute immobility.148
In saying this, however, Kepler knew, as did Copernicus before him citing Virgil,149 that assuming the star field is fixed rather than rotating around the earth is completely arbitrary. The only thing Kepler knew for certain is that both the star field and the Earth couldn’t be rotating simultaneously. He had to choose one or the other, and his philosophy led him to a fixed star field. Part of that philosophy was evident in Kepler’s deification of the sun, the same philosophy that helped push Copernicus over the edge into heliocentrism when he stumbled upon a Tychonic style geocentric model. Kepler writes: “The Sun represents, symbolizes, and perhaps even embodies God the Father; the stellar vault, the Son; and the space in between, the Holy Ghost.”150
Regardless of Kepler’s motivations, Tycho Brahe’s system is its mirror image. Whatever improvements Kepler gave to his system were automatically true for Brahe’s, even if Kepler failed to apply them. In Brahe’s, the sun is in orbit around the Earth, while all the planets orbit the sun. In this way, all the distances, geometry and velocities of the heliocentric system are identical with the geocentric. Ptolemy’s deferent of Venus is now outside the sun, and thus all of Venus’ phases can be seen from Earth.
Before we leave Tycho, we need to see one important discrepancy in his system that would eventually show that even his model was not adequate. Although it is true that if elliptical orbits are applied to Tycho’s planets his model would be just as accurate as Kepler’s, Tycho had always asserted that one of the main scientific reasons he had rejected heliocentrism was that it necessitated the existence of stellar parallax. That is, as the Earth revolves around the sun, at six month intervals it is on opposite sides of its orbit and thus we should be able to see closer stars shift in position when compared to stars that are more distant. Since no stellar parallax had ever been found, Tycho used this lacuna as proof of the geocentric system. But eventually the lack thereof could not serve as proof, especially since stellar parallax was confirmed about 250 years later
148 In Kepler’s De Stella Nova in Pede Serpentarii, 1606, as cited in Barbour, op. cit., p. 336. 149 “And why not admit that the appearance of daily revolution belongs to the heavens but the reality belongs to the Earth? And things are as when Aeneas said in Virgil: ‘We sail out of the harbor, and the land and the cities move away,” as stated in De Revolutionibus, Ch. 8, para. 4. 150 In De Stella Nova in Pede Serpentarii, 1601, cited in Closed World to Infinite Universe, p. 58, fn. 2.
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by Bessel in 1838. So, if the geocentric system is true, it cannot be based on Tycho’s original model, unless, of course, it is modified to account for stellar parallax. We will cover this issue in Chapter 2. Suffice it to say for now, each of the foregoing systems had inherent flaws. Even today we do not have a perfect system to know the precise movements of the heavenly bodies. The only question we can address at this point is which model at least begins with the correct status for the Earth. Does the Earth move or is it fixed in space? As we move on, Chapter 2 will show that modern science has no proof for a moving Earth. Chapter 3 will show evidence that the Earth is in the center of the universe, while Chapter 4 will show evidence that the Earth does not move, either by rotation or revolution.
Ptolemy, Copernicus and Kepler in Perspective
Sir Fred Hoyle, one of the better-known celestial mechanics of our generation, gives an insight into the relationship of the various models:
…the geocentric theory of Ptolemy had proved more successful than the heliocentric of Aristarchus. Until Copernicus, experience was just the other way around. Indeed, Copernicus had to struggle long and hard over many years before he equaled Ptolemy, and in the end the Copernican theory did not greatly surpass that of Ptolemy.151
Accordingly, no less a scientific luminary than Stephen Hawking admits the same:
We now have a tendency to dismiss as primitive the earlier world picture of Aristotle and Ptolemy in which the Earth was at the center and the sun went around it. However we should not be too scornful of their model, which was anything but simpleminded. It incorporated Aristotle’s deduction that the Earth is a round ball rather than a flat plate and it was reasonably accurate in its main function, that of predicting the apparent positions of the heavenly bodies in the sky for astrological purposes. In fact, it was about as accurate as the heretical suggestion put forward in 1543 by Copernicus that the Earth and the planets moved in circular orbits around the sun.
151 Fred Hoyle, Nicolaus Copernicus: An Essay on his Life and Work, 1973, p. 5.
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Galileo found Copernicus’ proposal convincing not because it better fit the observations of planetary positions but because of its simplicity and elegance, in contrast to the complicated epicycles of the Ptolemaic model. In Dialogues Concerning Two Sciences, Galileo’s characters, Salviati and Sagredo, put forward persuasive arguments in support of Copernicus. Yet, it was still possible for his third character, Simplicio, to defend Aristotle and Ptolemy and to maintain that in reality the Earth was at rest and the sun went round the Earth.152
Even though Hawking betrays the fact that he hasn’t thoroughly studied Copernicus’ De revolutionibus and is thus under the false impression that only Ptolemy, not Copernicus, had “complicated epicycles,” still, he reveals the distinct advantage a twentieth-century astronomer possesses over his sixteenth-century counterpart, that is, in the science of kinematics it is possible to make any point in space the center, and subsequently coordinate all of the other bodies around it. As Hoyle notes again:
Let it be understood at the outset that it makes no difference, from the point of view of describing planetary motion, whether we take the Earth or the Sun as the center of the solar system. Since the issue is one of relative motion only, there are infinitely many exactly equivalent descriptions referred to different centers – in principle any point will do, the Moon, Jupiter….So the passions loosed on the world by the publication of Copernicus’ book, De revolutionibus orbium caelestium libri VI, were logically irrelevant…153
In other words, mathematically and relatively speaking, we can make any planet, or even the moon, the center of the solar system, and the geometric proportions will turn out precisely the same as having the sun at the center.
152 On the Shoulders of Giants, ed., Stephen Hawking, 2002, pp. ix-x. 153 Fred Hoyle, Nicolaus Copernicus: An Essay on his Life and Work, p. 1. Two years later he wrote: “We know that the difference between a heliocentric theory and a geocentric theory is one of relative motion only, and that such a difference has no physical significance. But such an understanding had to await Einstein’s theory of gravitation in order to be fully clarified” (Astronomy and Cosmology, 1975, p. 416).
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Sir Fred Hoyle: 1915 – 2001 He further adds: …we can take either the Earth or the Sun, or any other point for that matter, as the center of the solar system. This is certainly so for the purely kinematical problem of describing the planetary motions. It is also possible to take any point as the center even in dynamics, although recognition of this freedom of choice had to await the present century.154 Other notables recognize the same principle. Physicist Max Born states: 154 Fred Hoyle, Nicolaus Copernicus: An Essay on his Life and Work, p. 82. Also from the same book: “Today we cannot say that the Copernican theory is “right” and the Ptolemaic theory is “wrong” in any meaningful sense. The two theories are…physically equivalent to one another” (ibid, p. 88). Physicist J. L. McCauley who reviewed Hoyle’s book stated it was “The only brief account, using understandable modern terminology, of what Ptolemy and Copernicus really did. Epicycles are just data analysis (Fourier series), they don’t imply any underlying theory of mechanics. Copernicus did not prove that the Earth moves, he made the equivalent of a coordinate transformation and showed that an Earth-centered system and a sun-centered system describe the data with about the same number of epicycles. For the reader who wants to understand the history of ideas of motion, this is the only book aside from Barbour’s far more exhaustive treatment” (Letters on File, 10-1-04).
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Max Born: 1882 – 1970
...Thus we may return to Ptolemy’s point of view of a ‘motionless Earth.’ This would mean that we use a system of reference rigidly fixed to the Earth in which all stars are performing a rotational motion with the same angular velocity around the Earth’s axis…one has to show that the transformed metric can be regarded as produced according to Einstein’s field equations, by distant rotating masses. This has been done by Thirring. He calculated a field due to a rotating, hollow, thickwalled sphere and proved that inside the cavity it behaved as though there were centrifugal and other inertial forces usually attributed to absolute space. Thus from Einstein’s point of view, Ptolemy and Copernicus are equally right. What point of view is chosen is a matter of expediency.155
155 Max Born, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, 1962, 1965, pp. 344-345. In Volume 2, Chapter 9 will address this aspect of physics in more detail. Suffice it to say for now, Thirring’s model has been duplicated by Barbour & Bertotti (Il Nuovo Cimento B, 38:1, 1977) and Joseph Rosen (“Extended Mach’s Principle,” American Journal of Physics, Vol 49, No. 3, March 1981) using Hamiltonians; and by William G. V. Rosser (An Introduction to the Theory of Relativity, 1964) who expanded on Thirring’s paper and and noted that the universe’s rotation can exceed c by many magnitudes; Christian Møller (The Theory of Relativity, 1952) who also extended Thirring’s paper using a ring universe rather than a shell; G. Burniston Brown (“A Theory of Action at a Distance,” Proceedings of the Physical Society, 1955) who discovered geocentrism based on Newtonian physics; Parry Moon and Domina Spencer (“Mach’s Principle,” Philosophy of Science,
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Martin Gardner, who authored one of the most popular and wellwritten books on Einstein’s theory of Relativity, states quite candidly:
The ancient argument over whether the Earth rotates or the heavens revolve around it (as Aristotle taught) is seen to be no more than an argument over the simplest choice of a frame of reference. Obviously, the most convenient choice is the universe…. Nothing except inconvenience prevents us from choosing the Earth as a fixed frame of reference…If we choose to make the Earth our fixed frame of reference, we do not even do violence to everyday speech. We say that the sun rises in the morning, sets in the evening; the Big Dipper revolves around the North Star. Which point of view is “correct”? Do the heavens revolve or does the Earth rotate. The question is meaningless.156
In the late 1800s, author and scientist J. L. E. Dryer adds that the Earth-centered system developed in 1583 by Tycho Brahe “…is in reality absolutely identical with the system of Copernicus and all computation of the places of the planets are the same for the two systems.”157 Physicist Hans Reichenbach, contemporary of and firm supporter of Einstein, admits:
…it is very important to acknowledge that the Copernican theory offers a very exact calculation of the apparent movements of the planets…even though it must be conceded that, from the modern standpoint practically identical results could be obtained by means of a somewhat revised Ptolemaic system….It makes no sense, accordingly, to speak of a difference in truth between Copernicus and Ptolemy: both conceptions are equally
1959) who arrive at geocentrism using Mach’s principle; J. David Nightingale (“Specific physical consequences of Mach’s principle,” 1976) who transposed the Einstein equation of Mach’s principle into Newtonian physics for a geocentric universe; and several others do the same. 156 The Relativity Explosion, 1976, pp. 86-87. The previous edition was published in 1962 under the title: Relativity for the Million. 157 J. L. E. Dreyer, A History of Astronomy from Thales to Kepler, New York, Dover Publications reprint, 1953, p. 363. See also his 1890 work Tycho Brahe, (New York, Dover Publications reprint, 1963). Modern astronomy admits that the Tychonean planetary model is observationally indistinguishable from the Copernican model, yet in that model the Earth remains absolutely fixed while the universe revolves around the sun, and the sun, in turn, revolves around Earth. For a simulation, please employ the enclosed CDROM.
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permissible descriptions. What has been considered as the greatest discovery of occidental wisdom, as opposed to that of antiquity, is questioned as to its truth value.158
Lincoln Barnett, another Einstein disciple, is quite honest about science’s inability to prove Copernicanism and disprove geocentrism. He writes: “We can’t feel our motion through space; nor has any experiment ever proved that the Earth actually is in motion.”159 Henri Poincaré admits: “A great deal of research has been carried out concerning the influence of the Earth’s movement. The results were always negative.”160 Carl E. Wulfman adds: “…I tell my classes that had Galileo confronted the Church in Einstein’s day, he would have lost the argument for better reasons. You may use my name if you wish.”161 Philosopher and scientist Bertrand Russell reveals:
Whether the Earth rotates once a day from west to east, as Copernicus taught, or the heavens revolve once a day from east to west, as his predecessors believed, the observable phenomena will be exactly the same. This shows a defect in Newtonian dynamics, since an empirical science ought not to contain a metaphysical assumption, which can never be proved or disproved by observation.162
Before Copernicus, people thought that the Earth stood still and that the heavens revolved about it once a day. Copernicus taught that ‘really’ the Earth revolves once a day, and the daily rotation
158 From Copernicus to Einstein, 1970, pp, 18, 82. 159 Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein, 1957, p. 73. Albert Einstein wrote the Foreword to Barnett’s book, yet while Barnett says in his book that there is no proof to Copernicanism, in Einstein’s famous 1905 paper it is stated: “…the same dynamic and optical laws are valid, as this for first-order magnitudes already has been proven,” showing that Einstein based Relativity on his belief that Copernicanism was, indeed, a “proven” fact (“Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Korper,” Annalen der Physik, Vol. 17, 1905, pp. 891-892). In addition, Barnett’s book contains Einstein’s following endorsement: “Lincoln Barnett’s book represents a valuable contribution to popular scientific writing. The main ideas of the theory of relativity are extremely well presented: Princeton, New Jersey, September 10, 1948.” 160 Stated in 1901 in La science et l’hypothèse, Paris, Flammarion, 1968, p. 182. 161 Letter from Carl E. Wufman (University of the Pacific) to Mr. Roush, Nov. 2, 1975, cited in “Galileo to Darwin,” P. Wilders, Christian Order, Apr.1993, p. 225. 162 Quoted from Dennis W. Sciama’s, The Unity of the Universe, 1961, pp. 102103.
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of sun and stars is only ‘apparent.’ Galileo and Newton endorsed this view, and many things were thought to prove it – for example, the flattening of the Earth at the poles, and the fact that bodies are heavier there than at the equator. But in the modern theory the question between Copernicus and his predecessors is merely one of convenience; all motion is relative, and there is no difference between the two statements: ‘the earth rotates once a day’ and ‘the heavens revolve about the Earth once a day.’ The two mean exactly the same thing, just as it means the same thing if I say that a certain length is six feet or two yards. Astronomy is easier if we take the sun as fixed than if we take the Earth, just as accounts are easier in decimal coinage. But to say more for Copernicus is to assume absolute motion, which is a fiction. All motion is relative, and it is a mere convention to take one body as at rest. All such conventions are equally legitimate, though not all are equally convenient.163
Philosopher of science I. Bernard Cohen wrote in 1960:
There is no planetary observation by which we on Earth can prove that the Earth is moving in an orbit around the sun. Thus all Galileo’s discoveries with the telescope can be accommodated to the system invented by Tycho Brahe just before Galileo began his observations of the heavens. In this Tychonic system, the planets…move in orbits around the sun, while the sun moves in an orbit around the Earth in a year. Furthermore, the daily rotation of the heavens is communicated to the sun and planets, so that the Earth itself neither rotates nor revolves in an orbit.164
In the 1930s, physicist Arthur Lynch saw the same truth:
Descartes is, however, doubly interesting to us in the discussion of Relativity, for at one time when the Inquisition was becoming uneasy about his scientific researches, he gave them a reply that satisfied them, or perhaps he merely gained time, which was long, while they were trying to understand its meaning. He declared that the sun went around the Earth, and that when he
163 Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity, London, revised edition, editor Felix Pirani, 1958, pp. 13-14. 164 I. Bernard Cohen, Birth of a New Physics, revised and updated, 1985, p. 78.
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said that the Earth revolved round the sun that was merely another manner of expressing the same occurrence. I met with this saying first from Henri Poincaré, and I thought then that it was a witty, epigrammatic way of compelling thought to the question; but on reflection I saw that it was a statement of actual fact. The movements of the two bodies are relative one to the other, and it is a matter of choice as to which we take as our place of observation.165
And once again from the celebrated astronomer, Fred Hoyle:
Tycho Brahe proposed a dualistic scheme, with the Sun going around the Earth but with all other planets going around the Sun, and in making this proposal he thought he was offering something radically different from Copernicus. And in rejecting Tycho’s scheme, Kepler obviously thought so too. Yet in principle there is no difference.166
We know now that the difference between a heliocentric and a geocentric theory is one of motions only, and that such a difference has no physical significance,” [the Ptolemaic and Copernican views], “when improved by adding terms involving the square and higher powers of the eccentricities of the planetary orbits, are physically equivalent to one another.”167
Even college physics textbooks make it known to their students that geocentrism has not been dethroned. The authors of these texts know the relevance of the question, since virtually every physics book published in
165 Arthur Lynch, The Case Against Einstein, p. 22. 166 Fred Hoyle, Nicolaus Copernicus: An Essay on His Life and Work, p. 3. Hoyle continues: “So what was the issue? The issue was to obtain even one substantially correct empirical description of the planetary motions. The issue was to find out how the planets moved….With knowledgeable hindsight, the situation may not seem unduly complicated, but looked at without foreknowledge the problem of how is anything but simple” (emphasis his). In the same book, Hoyle adds a timelapsed photograph of the motions of the planets as seen from Earth. The photo shows looping motions, zig-zagging motions, abrupt reversal motions, in short, a dizzying array of complexity. 167 The first quote taken from Fred Hoyle’s Astronomy and Cosmology, 1975, p. 416; the second, from Hoyle’s Nicolaus Copernicus: An Essay on His Life and Work, p. 88.
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the last two centuries begins its lessons by making reference to the debate between the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems. One text puts it this way:
Does the Earth really go around the Sun? Or is it also valid to say that the Sun goes around the Earth? Discuss in view of the first principle of relativity (that there is no best reference frame).168
Obviously, in light of the principle of Relativity to which the student was introduced earlier, the above questions are merely rhetorical. The textbook is actually preparing the student for the fact that modern science will no longer allow anyone to lay claim to the Copernican principle, and the text further implies that it has no way of determining which model is correct, the heliocentric or the geocentric. The author, Douglas C. Giancoli, attempts to reinforce the relativity principle with a discussion of the famous 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment, which, he states: “…was intended to measure the motion of the Earth relative to an absolute reference frame. Its failure to do so implies the absence of any such preferred frame.”169 Of course, the alternative he fails to offer his reader, in line with his rhetorical question above (“Or is it also valid to say that the Sun goes around the Earth?”), is that a perfectly valid “implication” of the Michelson-Morley experiment is that no “motion of the Earth” exists and, consequently, the Earth itself is the “preferred frame.”
Interestingly enough, in the first and second editions of the same physics textbook, Giancoli freely admitted the geocentric “implications” of the Michelson-Morley experiment:
But this implies the earth is somehow a preferred object; only with respect to the earth would the speed of light be c as predicted by Maxwell’s equations. This is tantamount to assuming that the earth is the central body of the universe, an ancient idea that had been rejected centuries earlier.170
168 Physics: Principles with Applications, 4th ed., Douglas Giancoli, 1995, p. 767. 169 Physics: Principles with Applications, 5th ed., Douglas Giancoli, 1998, p. 800. 170 Douglas C. Giancoli, Physics: Principles with Applications, 1985, pp. 613-614 and 1980, p. 625. From pages 610-614 (1985 edition) and 621-625 (1980 edition), the text reads: “However, it appeared that Maxwell’s equations did not satisfy the relativity principle. They were not the same in all inertial frames. They were simplest in the frame where c = 3.00  108 m/s; that is, in a reference frame at rest in the ether. In any other reference frame, extra terms would have to be added to take into account the relative velocity. Thus, although most of the laws of physics obeyed the relativity principle, the laws of electricity and magnetism apparently
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