Copernican heliocentrism

It's a trauma.

This has been called a Copernican trauma.

And as you've cited a couple of really good ones, like Freud talked about this as well.

I think he was kind of a schmuck, but he got that one right.

such ideas sound to us grotesque but imagine no tracts made for us by scientific ancestors and what aspects would we single out from nature to understand things by not till the beginning of the seventeenth century did the more insipid kinds of regularity in things abstract men's attention away from the properties originally picked out Few of us realize how short the career of what we know as science has been.

350 years ago, hardly anyone believed in the Copernican planetary theory.

Optical combinations were not discovered.

The circulation of the blood, the weight of air, the conduction of heat, the laws of motion were unknown.

This is actually seen as being something of the move towards Copernicus.

This is often because of the change of the view about astronomy in this time from a geocentric, Ptolemaic view of the solar system that the Earth is in the middle and everything else revolves around the Earth, to the Copernican view, which he wasn't the first, etc., but others had suggested it, but he was perhaps the most famous, suggesting that, no, the Earth is not in the middle, the Sun is, and all the planets, all these bodies, planets meaning wanderers, because they go back and forth in the sky, the night sky, revolve around the Sun.

And they obviously knew about, was it Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

They were known.

All of that shattered the idea that there's something special about the Earth, something special about humanity, that we are unique.

And it gave rise to this new way of thinking, which can be called the mediocrity principle, or sometimes people call it Copernicanism, because Nicholas Copernicus was the astronomer who first discovered that the Earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around.

And both of those are just ways of saying there's nothing special about Earth.

So in our solar system for a long time, lots of scientific thinking people, the most advanced progressive people in the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, they all assumed that if we could ever go to other planets, we would find other living species on those planets.

It remained only as a geometrical conception, whereon we find it convenient to indicate the places of the stars.

Once the Copernican doctrine had been fully set forth, it was impossible for anyone who had both the inclination and the capacity to understand it to withhold acceptance of its truth.

The doctrine of a stationary earth had gone forever.

Copernicus, having established a theory of celestial movements which deliberately set aside the stability of the earth, it seemed natural that he should inquire whether the doctrine of a moving earth might not remove the difficulties presented in other celestial phenomena.

We have already remarked that Mars, though generally advancing from west to east among the stars, occasionally pauses, retraces his steps for a while, again pauses, and then resumes his ordinary onward progress.

Copernicus showed clearly how this effect was produced by the real motion of the Earth combined with the real motion of Mars.

In the adjoining figure, we represent a portion of the circular tracks in which the Earth and Mars move in accordance with the Copernican doctrine.

I show particularly the case where the Earth comes directly between the planet and the sun because it is on such occasions that the retrograde movement, for so this backward movement of Mars is termed, is at its highest.

Doesn't he talk about, I can't remember if this was from Kuhn himself or if it's just something that, uh, I thought of while reading it or, or read when I was reading about him.

Um, he specifically, uh, with like the, the Ptolemaic versus Copernican, um, a strong astronomical mental models, uh, or paradigms rather, um, uh, As data starts to accumulate, that kind of lets people know there's something wrong with the Ptolemaic model, like there's some problem here because we can't account for all of these things that we're beginning to be able to measure and that we're seeing.

There's going to be quite a period of time where first, just because you have that accumulation of data that doesn't fit, you don't have a better model to replace the old one with.

And then even once you do, there was a period of time after the Copernican model was sort of it was out there for everybody that the Ptolemaic model was still able to actually help people navigate more accurately for quite some time than the Copernican model, like a lot of different things that it's still explained better because the Copernican model wasn't fleshed out yet.

And so that's like a big part of the resistance to change as well.

Like you really do have to, you see this, you know, to come back to the military aspect.

And, you know, if you didn't have a Internet connection or a television, you could very plausibly not even know we were at war.

You know, there's very, very, very little direct consequence that sort of stimulates that learning process.

You have all these different groups, right? And they're also created in the image of God.

So we're going to have a 50 centering and then a 60 centering like we had during the Copernican and Darwinian revolution.

That man was no longer created.

He was like the animals.