2: Stopping the Sun, Moving the Earth

Geocentrism is a scientific theory that could have left mankind in the 'dark ages', but in the end it still held civilizations back for thousands of years. Dr. Rob Carter and Joseph Darnell explore why it took people throughout history so long to figure out that the earth moves, and the implications this has had for all of science up to the present. How we arrived at heliocentrism (actually, the universe isn’t heliocentric either!) will possibly surprise you!

Geocentrism

Heliocentrism?

Copernicus, the man who stopped the sun and moved the world

Galileo

Newton

Calendar systems (scroll down to the subsection titled “Calendar Systems”)

Cathedrals as observatories, meridians

Nobody ever put to death over scientific views, Giordano Bruno and Michael Servetus included

Christopher Columbus was actually wrong, the urban myth of the “Dark Ages” and flat earth

Protestant Reformation

Protestantism and the pursuit of Science

Minor people we mention: Gregor Mendel, Tycho Brahe, Galen, Bede, Nicholas of Cusa, Eratosthenes, Boëthius

Here’s an interesting quote from Russel Grigg’s Exploring the God Question 1. The Cosmos, Part 2 (Multiverses):

“Furthermore, it’s tiresome to see atheists point to the immensity of the universe as if it were news. However, this truth has been well known for almost all the history of the Church. E.g. the Roman Christian philosopher Boëthius (AD c. 480–524/525), in prison awaiting trial and execution for an unjust charge of treason, wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, an imaginary dialogue between himself and ‘Lady Philosophy’. She points out that just as the earth is just a point in space, how much more insignificant is any glory of any of its inhabitants:

As you have heard from the demonstrations of the astronomers, in comparison to the vastness of the heavens, it is agreed that the whole extent of the earth has the value of a mere point; that is to say, were the earth to be compared to the vastness of the heavenly sphere, it would be judged to have no volume at all.

This was one of the most widely read and influential books in the West during most of the Middle Ages. So churchmen were well aware of how tiny the earth is, without considering it the slightest threat to faith. Furthermore, it was exactly this consideration that led some medieval scientists to propose that it was the tiny earth that rotated rather than the immense cosmos revolving around it.”

Retrograde motion

Frames of reference

James Cook, the Transit of Venus, Frederick Bessel, and the first measurement of parallax

Big bang, Alan Guth, etc., see Evolution’s Achilles’ Heels

Refuting Flat Earth

Refuting Absolute Geocentrism