From the perspective on Earth, these planets orbit elliptically. That means that each planet doesn’t orbit with Earth at the centre (see diagram below). He explained the inconsistency in planetary motion by introducing an ‘equant’ for each planet. Ptolemy had to juggle these problems with his theory. He proposed a geocentric model of the universe where the Sun and all the planets in our solar system revolved around the Earth. What Would Happen if the Earth Was the Centre?īefore Copernicus, the dominant theory of our universe came from the astronomer Claudius Ptolemy (c.100 - c.170 AD). Secondly, the planets don’t go in one direction, they retrograde (move backwards). That means that Venus could decide to move faster this month, and then move slower the month after. You need not be perfect, but at least you can tell which direction Mercury will move towards.īut it isn’t as simple as this - obviously.įor one, the planets don’t move at consistent paces. If Mercury moves at a consistent pattern, anyone without advanced knowledge of mathematics or physics could point to the night sky and say, ‘This is where Mercury will be next month’. There wouldn’t be much of a problem, would it? Imagine if our planets moved in a consistent and uniform pattern that a simple theory could easily explain. No, revolutions occur when science realises it can’t right what was initially wrong. So, we’ll see that revolutions don’t occur because science realised it was wrong. As we’ll see, Copernicus's theory wasn’t anywhere near accurate to Ptolemy’s, nor was it any simpler. A discrepancy in planetary movement, combined with the geocentric model's ever-increasingly complexity, led to a paradigm shift.īut the change wasn’t radical. And this is the case with the Copernican Revolution. This is the time when a particular problem or a particular discrepancy has persisted for a very long time. The aim to solve as many of those problems as they could until they could go no further. They inherit a set of problems that they intend to solve. This is a process of puzzle-solving which he calls normal science.Ĭonsequently, no science begins flawlessly. A scientific community will consciously choose a set of problems to solve, and they will also decide on the methods and techniques used to solve these problems. This is what Kuhn observes in his hallmark work The Structures of Scientific Revolutions. On the contrary, science begins with knowing what’s wrong. Scientific revolutions don’t occur because scientists have found something wrong. I think popular media and culture is responsible for this false image. We might intuitively think that a scientific revolution occurs when the scientific community finds a truer ‘truth’. The major rival of the Copernican heliocentric model was not the Church - it was, but not the major rival. If Copernicus was the man behind the science, Galileo was undoubtedly the publicity man.īut the latter isn’t true. Indeed, Galileo was brave enough to stand against prejudice and persecution from the Church and died with his ideas. Scientists often like to use this story to martyr Galileo as the man who died for science, and that religion was (and is) the major hindrance to scientific progress. The Copernican revolution is widely told with the narrative of science v. It stretched for about a century, with Galileo being the centre of a romanticised story. It started with Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres and ended with Newton’s Principia. The revolution ended with the scientific community (and us today) accepting the heliocentric model of the universe (planets revolve around the Sun) and rejecting the geocentric model (the Sun and other planets revolve around the Earth). I don’t want to participate in it.įor those of us who are familiar with the Copernican Revolution, we’ll be familiar with the paradigm shift that occurred between the mid 16th century to the late 17th century. I’m sure this debate exists in some obscure part of this world. Though I’ve come across people debating over whether the Earth is flat or round, I’ve hardly come across anyone debating whether the Earth revolves around the Sun or the Sun revolves around the Earth. Image by Vadim Sadovski, accessed through Reader’s Digest.
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