So what does this have to do with "NASA EPIC LIES"?
The dawn of Copernicanism faced mankind with a revolution in human thinking unsurpassed by any single event, save Noah’s flood and the advent of Jesus Christ. As Alexander Koyré understood it:
The dissolution of the Cosmos…this seems to me to be the most profound revolution achieved or suffered by the human mind since the invention of the Cosmos by the Greeks. It is a revolution so profound and so far-reaching that mankind – with very few exceptions, of whom Pascal was one – for centuries did not grasp its bearing and its meaning; which, even now, is often misvalued and misunderstood. Therefore what the founders of modern science, among them Galileo ,had to do, was not to criticize and to combat certain faulty theories, and to correct or to replace them by better ones. They had to do something quite different. They had to destroy one world and to replace it by another. They had to reshape the framework of our intellect itself, to restate and reform its concepts, to evolve a new approach to Being, anew concept of knowledge, a new concept of science – and even to replace a pretty natural approach, that of common sense, by another which is not natural at all.
That is a total exaggeration!
The heliocentric solar system was introduced simply because the old Ptolemaic universe was finally seen to have been completely impossible.
But the Ptolemaic universe was not immediately discarded and the Copernican one introduced. In fact as far as the accuracy of the motion of the planets was concerned the Copernican one was no better that the old Ptolemaic universe.
Correct.
The
De revolutionibus itself is not consistent with the single surviving early version of the system, described by Copernicus in the early manuscript
Commentariolus. Even Copernicus could not derive from his hypothesis a single and unique combination of interlocking circles, and his successors did not do so….
Judged on purely practical grounds, Copernicus’ new planetary system was a failure; it was neither more accurate nor significantly simpler than its Ptolemaic predecessors.
In regard to his heliocentric theory, Copernicus consistently appealed to the “harmony” of his system, but it was a harmony ennobled by a sun that he personified, and, some say,
deified.
Copernicus writes:
In the middle of all sits Sun enthroned. In this most beautiful temple could we place this luminary in any better position from which he can illuminate the whole at once? He is rightly called the Lamp, the Mind,the Ruler of the Universe: Hermes Trismegistus names him the Visible God, Sophocles’ Electra calls him the All-seeing. So the Sun sits as upon a royal throne ruling his children the planets which circle round him. The Earth has the Moon at her service. As Aristotle says, in his On Animals, the Moon has the closest relationship with the Earth.Meanwhile the Earth conceives by the Sun, and becomes pregnant with an annual rebirth.Popper, being a supporter of the heliocentric revolution, couches his critique of Copernicus in rather polite terms, but essentially he is saying that Copernicus’ brainchild had all the earmarks of originating from pagan sun-worship. As
Wolfgang Smith notes:
…in the Renaissance movement championed by Marsiglio Ficino, the doctrine came alive again, but in a somewhat altered form; one might say that what Ficino instituted was indeed a religion, a kind of neo-paganism. Copernicus himself was profoundly influenced by this movement, as can be clearly seen from numerous passages in the De revolutionibus.The complexity of Copernicus’ heliocentric system stems in part from the fact that most of the charts and figures in
De revolutionibus were not original. Copernicus merely borrowed them from the Greeks and then reworked the figures to fit his heliocentric model: Canon Koppernigk was not particularly fond of star-gazing. He preferred to rely on the observations of Chaldeans, Greeks, and Arabs –
a preference that led to some embarrassing results. The Book of the Revolutions contains, altogether, only twenty-seven observations made by the Canon himself; and these were spread over thirty-two years!…Even in the position he assumed for his basic star, the Spica, which he used as a landmark, was erroneous by about forty minutes’ arc,
more than the width of the moon.
The great scholar on early astronomy,
Otto Neugebauer, writes:
The popular belief that Copernicus’ heliocentric system constitutes a significant simplification of the Ptolemaic system is obviously wrong. The choice of the reference system has no effect on the structure of the model, and the Copernican models themselves require about twice as many circles as the Ptolemaic models and are far less elegant and adaptable.
Modern historians, making ample use of the advantage of hindsight, stress the revolutionary significance of the heliocentric system and the simplification it had introduced. In fact, the actual computation of planetary positions follows exactly the ancient patterns and the results are the same. The Copernican solar theory is definitely a step in the wrong direction for the actual computation as well as for the underlying kinematic concepts.Koestler adds:
Alexandrian astronomers can hardly be accused of ignorance. They had more precise instruments for observing the universe than Copernicus had; Copernicus himself hardly bothered with star-gazing; he relied on the observations of Hipparchus and Ptolemy. He knew no more about the actual motions of the stars than they did. Hipparchus’ Catalogue of the fixed stars and Ptolemy’s Tables for calculating planetary motions were so reliable and precise that they served, with insignificant corrections, as navigational aids to Columbus and Vasco da Gama.Eratosthenes, another Alexandrian, computed the diameter of the Earth as 7,850 miles with an error of only ½ per cent. Hipparchus calculated the distance of the moon as 30¼ Earth diameters – with an error of only 0.3 per cent. Thus, insofar as factual knowledge is concerned, Copernicus was no better off, and in some respects worse off, than the Greek astronomers of Alexandria who lived at the time of Jesus Christ.Koestler adds:
The Copernican system is not a discovery…but a last attempt to patch up an out-dated machinery by reversing the arrangement of its wheels. As a modern historian put it,
the fact that the Earth moves is “almost an incidental matter in the system of Copernicus which, viewed geometrically, is just the old Ptolemaic pattern of the skies, with one or two wheels interchanged and one or two of them taken out.”