Comment by somenameforme
8 hours ago
They often were. A lot of history has been retold more in a way to fit contemporary narrative than to maintain historical accuracy. For instance Galileo. The typical tale is something like Galileo dared claim the Earth is not the center of the universe, the Church freaked out at the violation of dogma, shunned him, and he was lucky to escape with his life. In reality the Pope was one of Galileo's biggest supporters and patrons. But they disagreed on heliocentrism vs geocentricism.
The Pope encouraged Galileo to write a book about the issue and cover both sides in neutrality. Galileo did write a book, but was rather on the Asperger's side of social behavior, and decided to frame the geocentric position (which aligned with the Pope) as idiotic, defended by an idiot - named Simplicio no less, and presented weak and easily dismantled arguments. The Pope took it as a personal insult, which it was, and the rest is history.
And notably Galileo's theory was, in general, weak. Amongst many other issues he continued to assume perfectly circular orbits which threw everything else off and required endless epicycles and the like. So his theory was still very much in the domain of philosophy rather than observable/provable science or even a clear improvement, so he was just generally acting like an antagonistic ass to a person who had supported him endlessly. And as it turns out even the Pope is quite human.
Cover both sides in neutrality???!!!
The geocentric position is silly and wrong. There are no two sides here.
If you step outside and watch the stars, and map them, you'd also come to the conclusion of a geocentric universe yourself. The nature of the sky makes it appear that everything is regularly revolving around us. And incidentally you can even create astronomical predictions based upon this assumption that are highly accurate. You end up needing to assume epicycle upon epicycle, but Galileo's theory was no better there since the same is true when you assume circular orbits.
So what made Galileo decide otherwise was not any particular flaw with geocentricism, but rather he thought that he'd discovered that the tides of the ocean were caused by the Sun. That is incorrect and also led to false predictions (like places only having one high tide), so the basis for his theory was incorrect, as were many assumptions made around it. But it was still interesting and worth debating. Had he treated 'the other side' with dignity and respect, it's entirely possible that we would have adopted a heliocentric view far faster than we ultimately did.
The thing that made him question geocentrism was that Venus quite visibly orbits the Sun.
It has always been known that the tides are caused by the Moon. The hard part is to predict the tides in detail, as they depend on the geography as well. Some of the first computers were invented to predict the tides.
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There were definitely two sides at the time in people's minds. He could have presented the geocentric position as being based on theories that were justified only by inductive reasoning, and contrasted that with his own observations and why they provide a more accurate view of the universe.
Neutral writing only means that it is not overtly prejudiced, and the weight of the evidence speaks for itself. That's definitely not what Galileo wrote. He was eventually widely considered to be right, but that didn't help him any.
Based on data and evidence that we now have? Yes.
Back then Galileo’s theory wasn’t exactly provable and while he did get the core idea right he was still wrong on quite a few important things.
e.g. Tycho‘s model solved quite a few questions that Galileo couldn’t at the time.
e.g. Stellar parallax was a big issue that was conclusively solved until the 1800s
There were two sides on the evidence available at the time.
The Tychonic model was probably the one best supported by evidence.
its worth bearing in mind that the Copernican model is also badly wrong - the sun is not the centre of the universe, just the solar system.
I think incomplete would be a better description; it was roughly right for our solar system and far more right than thinking everything revolved around the earth.
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> ... position is silly and wrong.
Both positions were build on top of aether, quintesence and Celestial Spheres. The result was silly and wrong no matter which one you picked.
It amazes me that people think this version of events makes the Church sound better, when it makes it sound worse.
It is not about better or worse, it is about correcting myths created later on that were intended to paint the Church as epitome of backwardness.
Galileo's affair wasn't about noble scientist going against stupid masses and oppressive institution designed to keep people in dark, while providing strong evidence for revolutionary theory, and being punished for his great genius.
But it is often presented like this.
Galileo is a noble scientist going against a Pope who had his fee-fees hurt, which then banned the truth. It doesn't make the Church any less backward.
Agreed. I'd also say that I think our habit of canonizing whoever happens to be perceived as the 'good guy' in history, and demonizing the 'bad guy' tends to make history much more difficult to learn from, because the people involved go from being real humans to actors in a very artificial Hollywood style story of good vs evil.
The real story here is one that has played out endlessly in history in various contexts. And is a great example of why The Golden Rule is something valuable to abide, even if you're completely self centered. It also emphasizes that all people, even the Pope, are human - and subject to the same insecurities, pettiness, and other weaknesses as every other human. And more. It's a tale of humanity that has and will continue to repeat indefinitely.
But when you turn it into a story of good vs evil, you lose all of this and instead get a pointless attack on one institution, which is largely incidental to what happened. For instance you can see the Galileo story clearly in the tale of Billy Mitchell [1] who went from suggesting that air forces would dominate the future of warfare (back in 1919!) to getting court martialed and 'retired' for his way of trying to argue for such. His views would go on to be shown to be 100% correct in 1937, the first time a plane downed a capital naval ship. However, he died in 1936.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell#
How so?
Because the Church didn't even have a good theological reason for siding against Galileo. It was a fit of pique.
But people have so completely internalized the idea that truth must bow to power that they think the fact that the Church condemned Galileo's ideas because he was rude somehow exonerates it as an institution.