I beg to differ with Moorad. Copernicus did indeed offer a scientific
"discovery"--a new, highly detailed hypothesis to explain celestial
appearances without equants (though with lots of epicycles)--but his
discovery was hardly one confined to astronomy, or even more broadly to
science generally. Thomas Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution illustrates
quite well what was involved. Moving the earth *did* wreak havoc with
traditional ideas in many fields, incl. theology (it was almost universally
thought, e.g., that the Bible prohibits this idea). The question on the
table, was whether Copernicanism upset human dignity, and the point I made
was simply that moving the earth out of the center was not understood in
this way at the time.
However, to offer just one further example, the fact that accepting
heliocentrism forced one to accept a universe of immense size (at least 1000
times in radius larger than traditionally thought)--since annual parallax
could not then be seen, and thus the stars had to be so much farther
away--did cause some consternation. Thus, two of Descartes' prominent
correspondents (Princess Elizabeth of the Palatinate and Queen Christina of
Sweden) worried about whether God could still find us, if the world were
infinite in size, and even Pascal expressed anxieties about the vastness of
space. These worries may perhaps underlie the modern myth about devaluing
humans, though of course they express a quite different concern.
Ted Davis
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