Next message: Frank Reed: "Re: Almanac Heaven"
Lu Abel, you wrote:
"True, but then why didn't the rest of the "learned" crowd jump on the
idea as a solution for the motion of the planets? Or were they more
interested in a "logically satisfying" solution than one that provided
the easiest solution to a problem?"
For those who were engaged in the debate, the problems were observational as
well as "philosophical". If the Earth travels around the Sun, why don't the
stars display parallax. After all, each retrograde loop is nothing more than
parallax from the Earth's motion. This lack of parallax of the stars is real
*evidence* that the Earth is not moving --unless, of course, it turns out
that the stars, which otherwise so closely resemble the planets, are actually an
entirely different class of objects thousands of times farther away.
And don't forget that the motions of the planets, and the Moon, too, display
LARGE anomalies that are not satisfied even by Keplerian elliptical motion.
The "evection" of the Moon's motion, for example, has been known at least
since Hipparchus, but it was not explained until Newton. Likewise, the longitude
of Saturn oscillates away from the position predicted by Kepler's laws by up
to a full degree because of the gravitational influence of Jupiter.
-FER
42.0N 87.7W, or 41.4N 72.1W.
www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars
