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  • And here I thought I was just being INTP. ;) Not sure what you mean by trollish (okay, I admit, I can be... ;) ) - I posted as many times as I did because the field wasn't big enough for everything I had to say. Sorry about that. Just to clarify one point, though. The commoners _didn't_ believe the Ptolemaic universe. The _academics_ did. The academics found out about the heliocentric universe from the commoners. But in any case, I get your underlying point - they were brothers in the quest for the truth, even if they had different interpretations. If Ptolemy had lived in Copernicus' time, he might have seen things differently. I just think Ptolemy catches way too much flack from modern society for reasons that had nothing to do with him or his model. He just happened to have a model that fit with others' religious convictions resulting in the later oppression of others with opposing views. Sorry, but that's yet another hole the Catholic Church dug for itself all by itself.
    Don't get me wrong, Ptolemy may have been arrogant, for all I know (though, the guys in Copernicus' era were pretty arrogant, too). However, as I understand it, that wasn't the main reason for his model.
    To this day, science behaves much the same way. The only difference is that we acknowledge when we can't rule out a model and the uncertainties in measurement (it also took us millennia to develop the scientific standards we have today...if you look for a time in the history of science at which scientific study kind of resembled that of today, you'd have to go all the way to the time or Newton). But even cases that we do close can be reopened (e.g., the cosmological constant). As for academics, the academic view was the Ptolemaic universe. Even renowned and respected astronomers like Tycho Brahe believed in the Ptolemaic universe. As a matter of fact, my historian sister once told me that Copernicus was introduced to the heliocentric view of the universe by talking to commoners who believed that the Earth revolves around the Sun. .
    The second argument was based on parallax. If the Earth is moving, then the positions of distant stars on the sky should change depending on the Earth's position with respect to the Sun. Of course, this does happen, and we can measure this effect today (for nearby stars), but they couldn't. These are perfectly valid arguments, and it took us several millennia to reconcile the facts. You might say that they were too quick to reject the idea and should have acknowledged the uncertainty, but honestly, the Ptolemaic model did work, was simpler, and didn't result in consequences they couldn't reconcile with their observations. Hence, that was the model they chose and for very valid reasons.
    I'm not so sure that that's a fair assessment of Ptolemy. If we didn't know what we know today, as those in Antiquity didn't, then it's easy to see how one can walk outside of his/her house and think that the Sun revolves around the Earth because that is what it looks like. The heliocentric universe had, in fact, been discussed in Antiquity (I forget the guy's name, though), but the Greeks rejected it on sound (for their time, understanding, and technology) scientific arguments. One argument was that if the Earth moves, there should be a wind associated with its movement that should be observable. Of course, they didn't know that space is a vacuum, so no wind. But interestingly, this idea has reappeared throughout the history of science in various manifestations (Michelson-Morley experiment that led to Special Relativity; temperature dipole in observations of the cosmic microwave background).
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