For millenia, humans thought the sun moved about the Earth.

[Jackpine Radical]

Recently, some people have been speculating that the actual situation is just the opposite.

Really, people--should we throw aside the wisdom of the ages in favor of some Polish agitators' cockamamie notions?

[Buzz Clik]

1. Step away from the keyboard, sir, and no one will get hurt.

[Faux pas]

2. LOL Good one Jackpine Radical

can we quit believing the earth is flat too?

[Jackpine Radical]

10. No. That nonsense is of the Devil,

who is forever trying to lure people off the edge so they will fall to Perdition.

[DetlefK]

3. He's a tool of the "Earth-around-the-Sun"-lobby. What a sell-out.

[NuclearDem]

9. What are you, some Big Geo shill?

[Recursion]

4. By modern standards we would probably reject Copernicus: Ptolemy predicted things just as well

Copernicus didn't offer a new testable prediction that could disprove Ptolemy's model; his just had greater aesthetic simplicity. It took until Kepler to actually get better matching of observations.

[Jackpine Radical]

8. Yes, I recall that history fairly well, but

more people associate heliocentrism with Copernicus than with, say, Aristarchus.

And what Kepler did was to break with tradition & realize that things worked out better if you postulated elliptical orbits rather than perfect circles (a holdover from Medieval Christian Idealist philosophy). Kepler, of course, used the observations of Tycho Brahe for much of his work.

An interesting book on the early post-Copernican years was Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers.

[malthaussen]

5. Metaphorically speaking, the sun does revolve around the Earth

Or, to put a finer point on it, around humans. You just need a different perspective, Jackpine, stop thinking about foolish things like objective reality.

-- Mal

[MisterP]

6. they accepted it pretty fast, actually

even Galilei got in trouble mostly because 1. he couldn't differentiate his system from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonic_system and 2. everyone involved was Italian

[snooper2]

7. stop having sex with white people

ISUPK HEBREW ISRAELITES