Abstract: DURING the Copernican jubilee year scholars have focused on several critical historical questions. An important one asks why a Copernicus appeared in the early 1500s rather than a century earlier or a century later. Had the ancient astronomy just then reached the brink of its final collapse? Certainly the predictions of planetary positions did not agree very well with the heavens, but there was little systematic observing to detect the discrepancies or to improve the mechanisms. In Copernicus' treatise there are no new data that could not have been found several centuries before. His own tables furnished but little improvement, and none of this could be attributed to his new heliocentric cosmology. The few avant garde astronomers who were calling for the restoration of astronomy looked back enviously to antiquity as the time when giants such as Ptolemy clearly understood the intricate mechanisms of the heavens; they certainly expected to work within a geocentric framework to tidy up those few areas where uncertainties had arisen with the passing millennium. A mythology popular today imagines that an inadequately simple astronomy of Ptolemy had meanwhile been embroidered into an unworkable complexity. In reality, virtually no one understood the Ptolemaic system well enough to embellish it. Thus, within the astronomical tradition itself, there is no clear reason why a Sun-centered cosmology should have been introduced at that particular time. 1
Publication Year: 1975
Publication Date: 1975-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 26
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