Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious • Hacker News Board

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#81

Post by jcranmer » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 5:05 PM UTC

jkot wrote: post #4

Earth-Centric model was actually scientifically better at that time. With Occam's razor you would prefer it. - Even church agreed that Earth is not static, but is rotating. - Nobody observed star parallax, major proof for Copernican model was missing until 19th century. - Ptolemaic model with its epicycles provided better predictions. - Copernican model is also wrong, planets are orbiting around center of gravity, wh…

- The Copernican model held uniform circular motion around the sun, which is at odds with even the crude experimental evidence of the time.

- If the Earth was a high-speed ball flying around the sun, shouldn't we be thrown off the planet? (Note that this is before Newton's law of gravitation)

- To be visible from such a distance, the stars would have to be >1AU in diameter according to the best measurements of the day.

- Some of the more esoteric portions of Copernican model were dangerously close to actual heresy, for example about the nature of matter in an infinite universe.

It should be noted that what saved the heliocentric model was not so much Kepler's elliptical motion but Newton's gravitational theory.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#82

Post by ConceptJunkie » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 5:11 PM UTC

neaden wrote: post #56

hprotagonist wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bruno was burned alive for being a complete prat, and pissing off all the wrong people, actually. Formally, he was condemned because: > In the spring of 1599, the trial was begun before a commission of the Roman Inquisition, and, after the accused had been granted several terms of respite in which to retract his errors, he was finally condemned (January, 1600), handed over to the secular power (8 February), and burne…

It amazes me that a literal wizard is held up as a martyr for science these days.

It's amazing how the narrative is distorted to push an agenda, isn't it?

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#83

Post by ekianjo » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 5:11 PM UTC

criley2 wrote: post #35

joeclark77 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also worth mentioning: Galileo himself was "within the Catholic Church".

"Also worth mentioning: Galileo himself was "within the Catholic Church"." Also worth mentioning: not being in the Catholic Church during that era was called "excommunication" and was banishment from public society all together

Excommunication is not the same thing as heresy.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#84

Post by ConceptJunkie » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 5:12 PM UTC

jomamaxx wrote: post #76

An amazingly reasonable thread for what could be just ignorant mud-slinging.

Agreed. Came here hoping to see a good discussion, was not disappointed.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#85

Post by jkingsbery » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 5:13 PM UTC

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #24

To be fair, the Church's influence in what we would call science back then was incredibly powerful. I think its unrealistic to see 17th century science as this secular institution like we have today. Of course the 'scientists' of the age followed a church friendly narrative. It was in their interests to do so. I think we will never really understand the chill on speech and research the Church had during the medieval…

As someone who is both Catholic and a software engineer, I find quite the opposite - people today are all too quick to villainize religion in general and Catholics in particular. I see people point out short comings that make up a relatively minor percentage of Church's history and impact on society, and completely leave out things like the preservation of Classical works, expenditures on science, the development of the university system, the creation (at least in the West) of hospitals and orphanages. It is no mere splitting of hairs - religious people are flawed as all people are, but nonetheless have lots to be proud of.

Moreover, there are tangible costs to going against the grain of secular science: loss of livelihood, others refusing to publish your work, isolation. Often it's not that you've "earned" it, there's plenty of examples of the scientific consensus recently being wrong (or at least stating positions that are too strong), with consumption of certain kinds of fats being my favorite example.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#86

Post by ekianjo » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 5:14 PM UTC

jahnu wrote: post #36

colechristensen wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>planets are orbiting around center of gravity, which is outside of sun.. The only planet with a barycenter with the sun outside it's radius is Jupiter. And that only slightly. (with an altitude of 0.07 of the sun's radius) The earth-sun barycenter is 0.0006 times the sun's radius from it's _center_

Even then the definition of the surface is different than the definition of the surface of, say, the Earth, so I'm not sure what "outside" the Sun means precisely.

The sun is roughly a sphere of a fixed size. What is there not to understand ?

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#87

Post by vslira » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 5:14 PM UTC

api wrote: post #58

santaragolabs wrote: post #2

This is basically the thesis of Paul Feyerabend who used it as his main argument against there being a scientific method. His book "Against Method" is one of the best works on Philosophy of Science I've read during my university education.

For quite a while I've suspected that you might be able to support Feyerabend's argument using modern learning theory. In particular I suspect that this is relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_op... Science is essentially a learning process. Since every learning method has a performance envelope and fares better against some fitness landscapes than others, restricting science to a singu…

>(E.g. I put down Lean Startup when I realized I was just reading a description of gradient descent in the business domain. Gradient descent only works over very regular fitness landscapes with clear peaks and well-connected paths to those peaks. In a rocky fitness landscape you will get stuck at a local maximum almost instantly and never go any further.)

Funny, that's exactly how I interpreted the book, but I didn't see that as a bad thing. Of course, a naive gradient descent won't solve everything, but will help on a lot of things satisfactorily. Maybe LS won't help you build the next Airbnb, but not all business must reach Unicorn Status. Pretty clever on Ries' part

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#88

Post by jnordwick » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 5:15 PM UTC

What about the Orthodox?

"The Church" is really an anachronism. You are speaking of the Roman church which is about only half of Christianity at the time: Western Europe.

What about the other half of the Church? Eastern Europe, Russia, Asian, Norther Africa, the Middle East, Greece?

How did they receive Galileo?

I've always been fascinated by this total amnesia over the Orthodox Church as if it didn't exist or was only a few percent.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#89

Post by ConceptJunkie » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 5:19 PM UTC

lmickh wrote: post #60

michaelsbradley wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really a lot of nonsense, though I'll grant you that "progress-stifling, working-against-science church" is a long-entrenched meme[+]. [+] https://www.quora.com/Why-did-science-make-little-real-progr...

Would also add that much of the Dark Age myth originated from the renaissance humanists. I've always found it funny that so much of the movement was examining original sources instead of what someone wrote about them, yet so many people read the renaissance works and don't look back to the original sources just before them.

A lot of the myth of the "Dark Ages" has been exaggerated to show how the Reformation "saved" us from them. A lot of this historical revisionism comes from the Enlightenment era.

The Renaissance itself didn't occur ex nihilo in a benighted world of ignorant superstition either; it was a wholly organic evolution of the great learning and development that occurred before it, especially in the 12th and 13th centuries. The period we call the "Dark Ages" were certainly more chaotic than the era of classical antiquity, etc., but by no means did culture and learning stagnate.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#90

Post by elboru » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 5:21 PM UTC

baldfat wrote: post #64

edko wrote: post #6

There is no question that there was religious opposition to Galileo within the Catholic church. However, it was not unanimous, and there were some notable exceptions. José de Calasanz (saint), the founder of the Piarist order, was a friend of Galileo, and had some of the teachers of his congregation study with Galileo, so that the science they learned could be taught in his schools. Moreover, when Galileo fell in dis…

Also worth mentioning: geocentric view was based on Aristotle and not scriptures. My undergraduate was in Theology and graduate degree was Historical Theology. Back then the dominate foundations of Theology in the Church was Plato vs Aristotle and one would consider themselves to be in the camp of one or the other and well Aristotle kind of won the popular vote back in those times. Here is the article on Artistole's…

Any good book you recommend about these topics?, a lot of things are not clear in my mind, like why is Galileo known for "fighting" the Catholic Church about this, but not Copernicus? I have to admit I haven't gone further than some Wikipedia articles.