Next message: Frank Reed: "Re: Simple celestial navigation in 1897"
George H wrote:
"Ptolemy, in the early pages of his "Almagest", in about 200 AD, considers
the arguments for and against motion of the Earth, and decides that indeed the
Earth is stationary at the centre of the Universe. I doubt if many of us
would have argued otherwise, if we had found ourselves in the same situation, in
the same state of knowledge."
I agree with that completely, and I would even go a little farther. If we
were placed back in time 1800 years with our modern sense of scientific
methodology and principles intact, we would still reach the same conclusion. The
most damning evidence against the motion of the Earth is the apparent lack of
stellar parallax. The reply from advocates of a moving Earth --"well... maybe
the stars are really far away..."-- would immediately strike us an ad hoc
assumption designed to avoid facing up to observational evidence that clearly
rules out the theoretical model. That the ad hoc assumption turns out to be
entirely correct is one of those things that makes the history of science
interesting...
-FER
42.0N 87.7W, or 41.4N 72.1W.
www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars
