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Jackpine Radical

(45,274 posts)
8. Yes, I recall that history fairly well, but
Wed Apr 29, 2015, 08:01 PM
Apr 2015

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.

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