The first Copernican was Copernicus: the difference between Pre-Copernican and Copernican heliocentrism

It is well known that heliocentrism was proposed in ancient times, at least by Aristarchus of Samos. Given that ancient astronomers were perfectly capable of understanding the great advantages of heliocentrism over geocentrism—i.e., to offer a non-ad hoc explanation of the retrograde motion of the p...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autor: Carman, Christian Carlos
Tipo de documento: artigo
Estado:Versão publicada
Data de publicação:2018
País:Argentina
Recursos:Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
Repositório:CONICET Digital (CONICET)
Idioma:inglês
OAI Identifier:oai:ri.conicet.gov.ar:11336/72174
Acesso em linha:http://hdl.handle.net/11336/72174
Access Level:Acceso aberto
Palavra-chave:Heliocentrism
Copernicanism
Aristarchus
Copernicus
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/6.3
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/6
Descrição
Resumo:It is well known that heliocentrism was proposed in ancient times, at least by Aristarchus of Samos. Given that ancient astronomers were perfectly capable of understanding the great advantages of heliocentrism over geocentrism—i.e., to offer a non-ad hoc explanation of the retrograde motion of the planets and to order unequivocally all the planets while even allowing one to know their relative distances—it seems difficult to explain why heliocentrism did not triumph over geocentrism or even compete significantly with it before Copernicus. Usually, scholars refer to explanations of sociological character. In this paper, I offer a different explanation: that the pre-Copernican heliocentrism was essentially different from the Copernican heliocentrism, in such a way that the adduced advantages of heliocentrism can only be attributed to Copernican heliocentrism, but not to pre-Copernican heliocentrism proposals.