Quote:
Originally Posted by endacl
This isn't a religion or politics forum where largely unimportant stuff gets debated as a matter of opinion, with links and articles being rustled up to justify opinions, or to score semantic points.....
Oh, and Galileo was a smart fellow. Even without knowledge of anything beyond visible light, he conducted almost all his solar observations using projections. This might be the way to go.
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Ah,but you see,it was politics and religion that was central to the implosion of Western astronomy and the impinging of mechanical astronomy (Ra/Dec system) on interpretative astronomy is an issue of the utmost priority arising from politics and denominational Christianity.It is fine that empiricists rewrote history to suit themselves in context of what they see as science vs religion or what unfortunate people presently see as a barely disguised view of the enlightened (empiricism) vs the superstitious (Christianity) but the fact is that the technical and historical details far surpass any individual here to view and deal with the matter properly,at least that is how its looks at the moment.
Even if the arguments didn't become explicit until Flamsteed's time in the late 17th century in terms of distinguishing interpretative astronomy from mechanical predictive astronomy,any person who adheres to the theory that it is possible to explain daily and orbital motions through the stellar circumpolar framework of right ascension,and this the main objection inherent in the Pope's view even if it didn't surface for a century and a half,is not proving the Earth turns and orbits the Sun.
I have to take the following author's description at his word but it looks about right to me.Galileo was a smart guy,that much is true but so also is the Pope and unlike any reader here,he could spot Galileo's betrayal in putting his arguments in the mouth of a fictional fool 'Simplicio' -
"In 1623 Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, a Florentine who had praised Galileo’s achievements, was elected Pope under the name of Urban VIII. Galileo had recently helped his nephew, Francesco Barberini, obtain his doctorate at the University of Pisa, and the Cardinal had written to express his appreciation. The postscript to his letter, which is in his own hand, leaves no doubt about his feelings. ‘I am much in your debt,’ he writes, ‘for your abiding goodwill towards myself and the members of my family, and I look forward to the opportunity of reciprocating. I assure you that you will find me more than willing to be of service in consideration of your great merit and the gratitude that I owe you.’ 4 Events moved rapidly, and less than two months after writing this letter, Maffeo Barberini had become Urban VIII, and was about to appoint his nephew, then only twenty-seven years old, to the College of Cardinals. Francesco became the Pope’s right hand.
Two close friends of Galileo, Giovanni Ciampoli and Virginio Cesarini, were also named to important posts. Cesarini was appointed Lord Chamberlain, and Ciampoli Secret Chamberlain and Secretary for the Correspondence with Princes. Under these favourable auspices Galileo thought the moment had come to renew his campaign for Copernicanism, and in 1624 he set off for Rome where he had the rare privilege of being received by the Pope six times in six weeks. Although the 1616 decree of the Index against Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus was not suspended, Galileo felt that he could now argue for the motion of the Earth as long as he avoided declaring that it was the only system that fitted astronomical observations.
Here lurked the danger of serious misunderstanding. Maffeo Barberini, while he was a Cardinal, had counselled Galileo to treat Copernicanism as a hypothesis, not as a confirmed truth. But ‘hypothesis’ meant two very different things. On the one hand, astronomers were assumed to deal only with hypotheses, i.e. accounts of the observed motions of the stars and planets that were not claimed to be true. Astronomical theories were mere instruments for calculation and prediction, a view that is often called ‘instrumentalism’. On the other hand, a hypothesis could also be understood as a theory that was not yet proved but was open to eventual confirmation. This was a ‘realist’ position. Galileo thought that Copernicanism was true, and presented it as a hypothesis, i.e. as a provisional idea that was potentially physically true, and he discussed the pros and cons, leaving the issue undecided. This did not correspond to the instrumentalist view of Copernicanism that was held by Maffeo Barberini and others. They thought that Copernicus’ system was a purely instrumental device, and Maffeo Barberini was convinced that it could never be proved. This ambiguity pervaded the whole Galileo Affair."
http://www.unav.es/cryf/newlightistanbul.html
In short,you cannot,I repeat,cannot justify daily and orbital motions using a stellar circumpolar framework or the 'inertial reference frame' as it is called today otherwise astronomy becomes largely unimportant stuff with no intellectual depth..
The power of contemporary imaging and even the ability to observe the Earth from space does away with almost all those arguments that people in Galileo's time found necessary yet the problem remains that contemporaries retain the flawed arguments inherent in Ra/ Dec reasoning !.In this respect,no matter what images are brought before individuals they positively refuse to interpret them properly so before you invoke Galileo again as being smart,mark well how he judged people who couldn't interpret the motions in the celestial arena with the care and attention needed to demonstrate insights -
"My dear Kepler, I wish that we might laugh at the remarkable stupidity of the common herd. What do you have to say about the principal philosophers of this academy who are filled with the stubbornness of an asp and do not want to look at either the planets, the moon or the telescope, even though I have freely and deliberately offered them the opportunity a thousand times? Truly, just as the asp stops its ears, so do these philosophers shut their eyes to the light of truth." Galileo
If you want to follow the herd and imagine a Church clinging desperately to the Earth as the center of the Universe then be my guest,there are also people here who imagine that religion is based on 'fairies in the sky' but this dumbing down of astronomy and its historical and technical details is only a recent development,mostly by people who think themselves largely important.
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