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

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#151

Post by hsitz » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 7:41 PM UTC

smallnamespace wrote: post #123

kevinwang wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most simply, the entire solar system revolves around the sun and not the earth.

Isn't that simply begging the question though? If you adopt a geocentric reference frame, then the Sun appears to rotate around the Earth, and all the other planets also appear to follow epicyclic paths around the Earth. You can predict the motions of every planet and star equally well, the equations are just different. So again, why is one more 'correct' than the other, besides calculational simplicity?

The simple answer of why one is more correct, is because it's deemed as correct by the scientific community, which comprises the scientific experts on that issue.

The larger issue you raise is one that was especially prominent in mid-20th century philosophy of science, specifically in Thomas Kuhn's concept of a "paradigm shift". A radically new scientific theory does not displace an existing theory because it is more "correct", since ad hoc modifications (e.g., epicycles) can always be made to the existing theory to account for new evidence that appears not to fit. However, at some point the existing theory will come to have so much baggage, and the new theory will explain the world so much more elegantly (e.g., with calculational simplicity) that the new theory will overthrow the old one and become the new "paradigm". Note that this is not because the old theory could not accommodate all the facts; any old theory can if you modify it enough, but at some point when you have to make all sorts of strange adjustments to the existing (old) theory it just becomes wildly implausible when compared with the new theory. At some point scientific consensus changes and the the new "paradigm" is accepted. You can read more about this at Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_Revolution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#152

Post by onlyrealcuzzo » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 7:46 PM UTC

smallnamespace wrote: post #112

Stupid question: given General Relativity, and in particular that all reference frames are equally valid , including rotating and accelerating ones, in what sense is heliocentrism more 'true' than geocentrism? E.g. you can pick a geocentric reference frame and all the math works out (albeit you'd need to define large fictitious forces, etc., but again, they are only 'fictitious' from the perspective of a different re…

Are these "large fictitious forces" the same thing as Dark Matter today? That would be pretty interesting, if so.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#153

Post by JackFr » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 7:52 PM UTC

EdHominem wrote: post #95

PakG1 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heliocentric system flew in the face of the bible, and that created the problem. Rather, in the face of a specific interpretation of the Bible. There are other literal interpretations of the Bible that are much more in tune with scientific knowledge of astronomy and origins, but they are not well-understood among less educated religious folk that follow the Bible. Likewise, certain interpretations of the Koran lead t…

> certain interpretations of the Koran lead to terrorism No, any belief in it or any other religion, leads to killing and oppression. As Old Man Jay says, it's the act of believing, not the belief per-se that's the issue. When you believe that there's a god above who will reward you infinitely it's going to skew your worldly actions one way or the other. You'll do what you're told, right or wrong, and that's the #1 i…

And yet you seem to have no problem making normative judgements. . .

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#154

Post by meetri » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 8:07 PM UTC

Do you have to believe that the sun orbits the earth in order to believe that the earth is the center of the universe? Is it possible that the Earth is the center of the universe given all light in the universe points in the direction of Earth.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#155

Post by drewcrawford » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 8:12 PM UTC

acqq wrote: post #148

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, that was a fairly quick but narrow reaction. I did not say "astronomy". I said "cosmology". The choice was conscious. The one is the more practical study of celestial phenomena, and you are correct that neither Plato nor Aristotle were astronomers. The other concerns itself with the large-scale structures and phenomena, both in time and space. Astronomy studies what is going on out there. Cosmology tries to fi…

No again. In order to be the "state of the art" in cosmology (as you define it that "concerns itself with the large-scale structures and phenomena") you should know what the "large-scale" actually is. That is what I quoted that these other Greeks actually calculated. The orders of magnitude. And no, this is also not true: "really it took the invention of the telescope" It's Tycho Brahe who measured enough: https://en…

You are equating knowledge with mere numerical literacy, e.g., you are imagining that knowledge is a set of fundamental constants to be measured, and that he who knows the constants to the highest precision is the greatest.

In fact knowledge is the thing that allows you to choose which constants to calculate at all. It is not intuitive why a light in the sky should have a size. What is the size of a sunset? What is the size of a rainbow? What is the size of an eclipse?

Knowledge is not the mere accumulation of measurement. It is the organizational structure that allows you to separate between what we can and cannot measure, what we have measured before and have not measured yet. It is what tells us whether "the" sun is a singleton or that "a" rainbow today is not the same today as tomorrow.

> who don't know history

I think you would benefit from reading up on the current consensus among historians on the Conflict Thesis before presenting it to those of us who have caught up on our Ferngren, Barker, etc.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#156

Post by jhbadger » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 8:20 PM UTC

The problem with saying that there was scientific in addition to religious opposition to Galileo kind of misses the point. That would like saying there was scientific in addition to ideological opposition to genetics in the Soviet Union in the Lysenko years. The reason while both Galileo and Soviet biologists were put on trial was because the power structure at the time opposed them, not because of legitimate scientific concerns.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#157

Post by acqq » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 8:59 PM UTC

drewcrawford wrote: post #155

acqq wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No again. In order to be the "state of the art" in cosmology (as you define it that "concerns itself with the large-scale structures and phenomena") you should know what the "large-scale" actually is. That is what I quoted that these other Greeks actually calculated. The orders of magnitude. And no, this is also not true: "really it took the invention of the telescope" It's Tycho Brahe who measured enough: https://en…

You are equating knowledge with mere numerical literacy , e.g., you are imagining that knowledge is a set of fundamental constants to be measured, and that he who knows the constants to the highest precision is the greatest. In fact knowledge is the thing that allows you to choose which constants to calculate at all. It is not intuitive why a light in the sky should have a size. What is the size of a sunset? What is…

Read my links. Those Greeks were much more right than Plato or Aristotle. We know that today. The first one didn't measure anything. The second one was the teacher of Alexander the Great, but also not particularly good scientist, compared to these other Greeks. We know because we have even better tools today, and we compared. They were better scientists.

Conflict Thesis has nothing to do with the facts I've presented. I haven't invented any. Where have you found any error in these?

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#158

Post by woodchuck64 » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 9:02 PM UTC

> But seen from Earth, stars appear as dots of certain sizes or magnitudes. The only way stars could be so incredibly distant and have such sizes was if they were all incredibly huge, every last one dwarfing the Sun.

What?? Oh, Wikipedia fills in some crucially missing info in this hypothesis.

> However, early telescopes produced a spurious disk-like image of a star (known today as an Airy disk) that was larger for brighter stars and smaller for fainter ones. Astronomers from Galileo to Jaques Cassini mistook these spurious disks for the physical bodies of stars, and thus into the eighteenth century continued to think of magnitude in terms of the physical size of a star. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitude_(astronomy)

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#159

Post by prmph » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 9:10 PM UTC

c3534l wrote: post #110

acqq wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The church thinkers actually believed what was in the Bible: Augustine, Saint Basil, St. Thomas Aquinas. And the scriptures were made by the people who understood very little about the world, compared to what the current science knows. Therefore the creation is described using the concepts that we today know for sure don't exist. Specifically, in the creation myth: "And God made the firmament, and divided the wat…

No one is saying that the bible has a physically accurate account of the world, only that the church at the time based their understanding of the physical universe primarily on Aristotle, and I don't think you'll find many historians arguing otherwise on account of us having writings from them arguing and justifying their positions.

> No one is saying that the bible has a physically accurate account of the world

Can you point out even one instance in which the Bible is inaccurate about the physical nature of the world? I'm curious

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#160

Post by gumby » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 9:23 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…

Aristotle was always such an obvious idiot ("women have fewer teeth than men" is my favorite nonsense) I have always+ wondered why anyone paid attention to him, ever.

+ Well since I was a teenager anyway