This interesting paper deserves to be known more widely: “And Yet It Moves: The Observability of the Rotation of the Earth” by Peter Kosso, Northern Arizona University, published in Foundations of Science, (2010) 15:213–225. Excerpts: Abstract A central point of controversy in the time of the Copernican Revolution was the motion, or not, of the […]
As a generalist I tend to think of the big picture and push global conceptions, which can get speculative, but should provide insight in some way. There are many ways of slicing up history that show a pattern, but we crave meaning and so expect patterns. For example, it is helpful to adopt a rather
Ancient Greek astronomy distinguished the ordered cosmos of the superlunary world from the disordered chaos of the sublunary world [see Remi Brague’s book The Wisdom of the World, English translation 2003, University of Chicago Press]. Isaac Newton undermined this distinction with his laws of physics published in 1687 by showing that universal gravitation accounted for
