Part I: from Ur to Athens, creating the round Earth

The first thing that is crucial to understand is that, from the origin of thought up to the 1600s, philosophy and science were not yet distinguished. Latin scientia (of the same root as conscience and omniscience) referred to knowledge with a broader scope than it does today, and what we nowadays call science was filed under the category of "natural philosophy," a subset of what Greeks called sophia. Different thinkers and schools advanced different models for the workings of the universe alongside their views on how to live one's best life, and these were part of the same package, which you couldn't easily set apart. Thus, different philosophies were also different cosmologies, astronomies, which were in dialogue with each other.

The second is that, although a lot of Greek thought was extremely original, it also took at times a lot of inspiration from Egyptian and Near Eastern works, which were considerably older. Much like how Homer and Hesiod around the 700s BC were not creating their narratives ex nihilo but rather following an ancient literary tradition extending back to the 2000s, Greek astronomy also consulted the data that Babylonians and Egyptians had been accumulating for a long time. In fact, all the constellations which we know through their Greek titles are actually renamed adaptations of their original Babylonian forms. The 12 zodiac signs that we are familiar with are ultimately about 3000 years old, known at their earliest through the MUL.APIN tablets, by which point Babylon was well practiced in taking measurements of the positions of celestial objects at various times of the year, writing them down, and collecting this data into lists and catalogues. It's of note that Babylonians used a base-60 numeral system, and this is the reason why there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 360(ish) days in a year, and 360 degrees in a circle. Stellar measurements too would be counted using sexagesimal degrees.

The Babylonians also believed in a flat earth, as did most ancient peoples across the world. The Near Eastern cosmological model consisted of solid land at the center surrounded by water, below which was a dark underworld where all the dead go, and above stood a solid firmament composed of a half-sphere across which the astra move, often supported by pillars to help it stay in place, and the waters that surround everything are the primordial chaos where Tiamat and Leviathan dwelt. This too appears in Homer's Iliad, when he describes the shield Hephaestus creates for Achilles, whose art displays the known earth surrounded by the divine "river" Okeanos, which in other passages he speaks of as the origin of everything:
>I am on my way to kind Earth’s bourne to see Oceanus from whom the gods arose
>I might easily lull another to sleep - yes, even the ebb and flow of cold Oceanus, the primal source of all that lives

This would serve as one the ingredients for the genesis of Greek philosophy, with Thales of Miletus around 600 BC. He, too, put great value on water and believed it was the "arche," the basic element serving as foundation of everything else. But others disagreed, and this was the point where the Greeks began their search for the natural principles that govern the world. Of the pre-Socratics, the one that's important to highlight is the Pythagorean cult (from Greek colonies starting in 500s Italy): they believed in a universe that was based on mathematical laws, so they studied numerology, associated it intimately with music, and, contrary to most astronomers, postulated that the Earth (implied to be a sphere) moved around a great fire (different from the Sun, which also orbited this fire). They also, in an oddly Indic streak, believed in reincarnation and the goodness of vegetarianism. Their esoteric mathfag autism and other last two Plato was quite happy with, and would employ them at length (particularly in the Timaeus, his most popular text across the middle ages), but he wasn't sold on a moving spherical earth. Plato established his Academy in Athens around 387, and his greatest disciple would be Aristotle, one of the main characters of this story. The most influential scientist in history, and most succesful creator of a theory of everything. If all of western philosophy is a footnote to Plato, then so is science to Aristotle.


The text of his that is relevant to astronomy is On the Heavens, which lays out a lot of his physics. Aristotle here argues against the idea that the world could be a flat disk or a cylinder (effectively an elongated disk), and he does so using the four classical elements and what he refers to as their "natural motion." The elements of earth and water are heavy, they naturally move down, while fire and air are light and naturally go up, all of this happening without needing to impart any force upon them. Other philosophers of his time argued that the world-disk was floating upon a current of air, yet for Aristotle this clearly could not be the case, nor could solid land be floating upon a massive amount of water as if it were wood, because earth is heavier and we always see it sink. Nor could there be an infinitely long underwater earthen foundation on which land rested, as this too was absurd and unsubstantiated.

Aristotle's solution was to have the Earth be a globe, and its centerpoint the center of the universe. Therefore, when something is falling down, it's actually moving straight towards the center of the universe, while things going up move away from it, and this would happen equally at any point of its surface, which leads to a situation where the elements roughly form a sphere. One piece of evidence he brings forth is the fact the visibility of stars depends on your position, specifically the large star Canopus which could be seen at the southern latitudes of Egypt, but not in northern Greece. This doesn't make sense if the Earth is a disk with a half-sphere above, in that case all stars should always be visible, but it does make sense if both the Earth and the universe are spherical. He chastises the Pythagoreans for arguing the Earth moved without producing sufficient evidence to support it:
>Most people -all, in fact, who regard the whole heaven as finite- say it [Earth] lies at the centre. But the Italian philosophers known as Pythagoreans take the contrary view. At the centre, they say, is fire, and the earth is one of the stars, creating night and day by its circular motion about the centre.
>In all this they are not seeking for theories and causes to account for observed facts, but rather forcing their observations and trying to accommodate them to certain theories and opinions of their own.
Clearly the Earth couldn't be moving across a set path, because then the center of the universe would be somewhere else, and you'd need a very different way to explain why things would ever fall down instead of towards that center. We also do not sense any movement, but we do see the planets and the stars move at night, so the much simpler explanation is that the Earth stays still while everything else moves.

This is important: the idea of a moving Earth was already known to the Greeks and is clearly discussed in what would become a foundational text by the most famous disciple of one of their most famous thinkers, who considered the theory to be bunk. I cannot stress this enough, On the Heavens was read by a huge amount of people, presenting several key arguments on motion, the elements, even the unmoved mover, so its contents were regularly discussed and thanks to it the Pythagorean worldview remained common knowledge among literate people long after the sect came to an end in antiquity. Although the idea of a sphere was floating around prior to Aristotle, this is nonetheless *the* text that served to popularize the idea that the Earth was necessarily round, and any other culture that eventually adopted this idea can trace its definitive development back to this single philosopher and this single text.

Moving on, he furthermore argues that the celestial bodies must be perfect and simple, that their natural motion is circular, and, unlike things from the sublunary (i.e. earthly) sphere, they must neither change nor decay. It must be so, given that for hundreds or thousands of years the Egyptians and Babylonians have seen them perpetually move in the exact same ways, and this would only be achievable if they moved in circles, each in its own "sphere." (More on that later.) There is a fundamental divide here, as Aristotle says the planets and stars are made of unalterable aether, the fifth element or quintessence, which is different from the other four that things are composed of down here in our dirty mundane mundus with all of its imperfections. The astra are something better, purer. He says as part of his explanation that:
>These premises clearly give the conclusion that there is in nature some bodily substance other than the formations we know, prior to them all and more divine than they.
>On all these grounds, therefore, we may infer with confidence that there is something beyond the bodies that are about us on this earth, different and separate from them; and that the superior glory of its nature is proportionate to its distance from this world of ours.
>For all men have some conception of the nature of the gods, and all who believe in the existence of gods at all, whether barbarian or Greek, agree in allotting the highest place to the deity, surely because they suppose that immortal is linked with immortal and regard any other supposition as inconceivable. If then there is, as there certainly is, anything divine, what we have just said about the primary bodily substance [aether] was well said.
It's often said in retrospect that the Earth being at the center of the universe meant to ancient peoples that it was the greatest thing in existence, the metaphorical center, but this is actually the opposite of the truth. With Aristotle, it was because the Earth couldn't possibly go any lower, and what was truly divine was up in outer space. Aetheric bodies were even endowed with a soul and an intellect, as per Plato. This idea, that the Earth is a shit, stuck around for a damn long time, as Galileo tells us waaaay later in his 1610 Sidereus Nuncius:
>For we will demonstrate that she [Terra] is movable and surpasses the Moon in brightness, and that she is not the dump heap of the filth and dregs of the universe, and we will confirm this with innumerable arguments from nature.
This is what Copernican heliocentrism actually did: it raised the Earth up into what had been previously the realm of the divine, it equalized the playing field. It was a promotion, not a demotion. According to geocentric Aristotelian Christianity, upwards lay Heaven, downwards lay Hell, such was Dante's model. Famous natural philosopher and bishop John Wilkins countered later in 1640 that:
>from the vileness of our earth, because it consists of a more sordid and base matter than any other part of the world; and therefore must be situated in the centre, which is the worst place, and at the greatest distance from those purer incorruptible bodies, the heavens.
We will return to this later.

There's something else we should mention about Aristotle. After spending twenty years at the Academy, he finally ended up leaving, and thanks to prior links he had with the Macedonian monarchs he became in 342 tutor to the young Alexander. This was the very same man who would go on to crush the neighboring Persian Empire, thus spreading Hellenic influence and science to most of the known world through his conquests: Greek sculptors in Bactria would be the first to depict the Buddha, the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty would begin their rule over Egypt until Cleopatra, and the Second Temple Israelites with their revised and rewritten Yahwism (no longer featuring child sacrifice!) would commence the protracted struggle of their jealous G-d against the corrupting forces of Hellenic philosophy under the Seleucid Empire. The Jews, who had by then totally reneged on their polytheistic Caananite ancestry, nonetheless conserved many ancient elements of Near Eastern myth, such as the flood story (as old as the Epic of Gilgamesh) and the predominant cosmological model of the region. We can see it in verses like Joshua 10:12-14, 1 Chronicles 16:30, Ecclesiastes 1:4-5, and many times in Psalms 19:6/93:1/96:10/104:5. These were commonly taken to be literal back then, which made Abrahamists of all ages widely favor an unmoving Earth. Of course, the situation was more complex than that, and there was plenty of debate over it: Hellenized Abrahamists accepted that the world could be a round globe even if the Bible spoke of corners or ends of the Earth that if taken literally are only physically consistent with the Near Eastern model of a flat Earth. (Such literalism was taken up by the father of the modern flat Earth conspiracy theory, Samuel Rowbotham, around 1849.) People debating what to make of such statements becomes a prominent part of the story later on. But again, this is only the starting point.

Ok, I have read it all finally.

>>3837
What's important about this part is the necessity of an unmoving world, and that the Jews are okay with this. That's the main two things, everything else is context.

I'll get to reading this eventually, but my attention span is lacking right now.

I always appreciate good intellectual discussion on the internet! do you have a blog?

>>3840
I just write stuff on Kissu, I'd say most monographs here are me and another more tech oriented fella.
Also, just wanted to mention that some bank stuff came up and I helped a relative format their laptop, so Part II is taking a bit more than expected, though most stuff I've already written down. Little hitch in the road.

Part II: measuring the universe with a stick and some triangles


After Aristotle, we arrive at the golden age of Greek mathematics, in the third century BC, where they got down to some powerful trickery. What sets Greek math apart from all other traditions is its approach to theoretical proofs, of setting up axioms and exploring the ensuing situations, sometimes even just for fun. Pure math is Greek math, more or less. It's around this time that Euclid composed his Elements while working in Egyptian Alexandria, the main center for science of the Mediterranean. You can regard the contents of that book as the baseline for what was commonly known by mathematicians then, and a good example of how it was done.

The first great mathematician-astronomer we need to go over is Aristarchus of Samos, who lived between 310 and 230 BC, give or take. The project he's known for is trying to measure the size of and distance to the Moon and the Sun relative to the Earth, and he did this in a fairly clever way, with trigonometry. In a text of his, On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon, he starts off with a number of propositions regarding the Moon, like how it perfectly covers the Sun in a solar eclipse, that the shadow cast by the Earth is as large as two Moons as seen in a lunar eclipse, that when we see the Moon halved (its phase being the first or third quarter) it's perpendicular to the Sun, forming an almost-right triangle (we see half of the half facing the Sun, which gives it light), and that its almost-right angle has 87 degrees. With these simple propositions, he's surprisingly able to set up a number of triangles and their proportions to each other, with which he's able to estimate the radius of the Moon and the Sun respective to the Earth.

Using a lot of math, he achieves precisely what it says on the tin, and gives some of the first estimations for the distance between them, but what's more important is their size: he concludes the Earth has to be about thrice as large as the Moon, and that the Sun's about six times larger than the Earth. This is using numbers that were possibly lowballed on purpose, and recorded with his bare eyes and a water clock, to make the point that if the smaller Moon orbits the larger Earth, then Earth logically should be orbiting the much larger Sun instead of sitting still, and the size of the universe needed to be much greater than the standard for reasons I'll soon go into. And he maps this with some really large numbers using what are to us quite primitive methods, all by hand, at one point arriving at the ratio of 71,775,875:61,735,500. He described his full model in a text that's now lost, and which had some small degree of popularity as a novelty, but wasn't widely accepted and only survives in a small handful of references, chief of which was composed by Archimedes.

Yeap, Archimedes. Despite being mostly known for his math and engineering, the guy was also involved with astronomy, being the creator of various planetariums and orreries that the later Antikythera mechanism would presumably base itself off, as basically a pocket-sized version of them. Archimedes' biggest text dealing with astronomy is The Sand-Reckoner, where he sets out to, using and improving on previous calculations, figure out how many grains of sand fit in the universe according to the scale given described by Aristarchus. To this end, he casually invented exponentiation, and used it as part of a system for employing new, bigger numbers to illustrate just how many grains of sand that'd take, which he argues is not infinite. This text is particularly important because it mentions heliocentrism in a positive light, and it survived into the middle ages. However, Archimedes nonetheless rejects the model because of a problem that would trouble heliocentrism for two thousand years: stellar parallax.

Let me invite you to do a little experiment. Hold up a finger right in front of your nose, and focus on it. Then, close your left eye, reopen it, and close your right eye. You will find that the position of the finger seems to shift, somehow it moves respective to everything else, just because you are looking at it with a different eye. This is called parallax: the change in the relative apparent position of something when looked at from a different standpoint. If the Earth did move, we'd expect to see parallax with the stars, our view should change as certain stars move closer and others move farther away, as Earth goes around in a circle. Yet the Greeks saw no such thing, and to explain this Aristarchus needed to greatly expand the universe to make the stars sit considerably farther away, since parallax has a much stronger effect on objects close-up than on those that are distant. But this clearly wasn't very convincing, as the evidence to back this up was lacking. It was effectively just a hunch for Aristarchus that planets should orbit the greater body, as he had no idea of gravity to explain this with. We'll return to this with Copernicus, but for now back to antiquity.

Archimedes, despite living in Sicily, had a friend in Alexandria with whom he regularly exchanged letters: Eratosthenes, chief librarian of the city. The guy was known for being adept at buttloads of stuff, but the experiment he's remembered for today is his measurement of the Earth. He figured having a grasp of the planet's precise circumference would help him better map the world with appropriate distances, and after writing about it in an individual text he'd return to the calculation in his three-volume work Geographika. For this, he did something very ingenious. Eratosthenes knew there was a town in Egypt where, during noon at the summer solstice, light would shine straight down, proven by the inside of a local well being fully illuminated by the sun above. And he knew also the distance between that town and Alexandria, too, which had been previously tallied. So when the day came, he measured the angle of a shadow at noon in Alexandria and got 7.2 degrees, meaning that the distance between the two places made up a 1/50th of the 360 degrees that made up the circumference of the Earth. Therefore, that distance times fifty should be the length of the Earth's circumference, and his estimation had only about a 1-2% error margin of the real value of 40,075 kilometers. And because this man was the fucking chief librarian of Alexandria, working with an actually popular model, people took note of this.

After this point there's a gap in our records, right at the end of this great generation of scholars. Somehow, right after this, a new astronomical model pops up, and its true origin is not known. Essentially, one of the biggest problems with tracking the movement of the planets is that they're a total mess. The astronomers were able to observe that from our frame of reference the astra move irregularly, sometimes going backwards, sometimes slowing down or speeding up. Their behavior hardly seemed to be perfect in any clear way. Eudoxus' model of spheres, championed by Aristotle, modeled it by having four or six literal spheres per planet moving at different speeds and creating a more complex movement from it, but in this little dark age of math someone came up with a different tool to model this strange movement: "epicycles," meaning "upon the circle." Imagine this: you are sitting still in a carrousel, and it moves you around in a circular manner. Now imagine that this carrousel is itself sitting on top of a bigger carrousel, so that it also moves across a circle. That's more or less how they modeled it, with each circle moving at its own speed, which allowed them to approximate their elliptical orbits and explained why it'd be moving backwards at times, this "retrograde movement," while needing just two perfect circles rather than several. Epicycles were so damn effective that they remained in use for close to two thousand years and are a key concept to understanding this millenary mess. We know epicycles already existed by the time of the Antikythera mechanism, because it employs them, but we don't know for sure who created that machine either, just that it's from sometime around 200 BC.

Astronomers continued to take measurements throughout the centuries, running the numbers and refining their calculations, comparing new data to ancient events and making progress towards better predictions. Hipparchus in the 2nd century BC somehow got a hold of the calendar-based Babylonian data (which they were still collecting out there in the temples of the Euphrates) and used it alongside his excellent math skills to create a synthesis with which he demolished everyone else in polemics, arguing that all previous thinkers were too imprecise, too loose in their descriptions. Lemme tell you an anecdote, to give you an idea: a philosopher had said that from ten "assertions," millions of combinations could be made. Hipparchus investigated this, and found that in fact the number would actually be 103,049. This is noteworthy, because that's the tenth Schröder number, something that was only rediscovered in 1870 through the exploration of combinatorics. The guy was literally two thousand years ahead of the game, much like Archimedes using proto-calculus in secret. But he also knew what was behind him: using the Babylonian data, he made more correct predictions like a year actually being 365+1/4 days, and he discovered the precession of the equinoxes, the fact that the stars also seem to move whereas before people had thought them static, and predicted the cycle would take 36k years (there may've been a typo, as the real value is 26k). He was one of the last great mathematicians that we have direct records of.


But believe it or not, all this extensive work mapping out the cosmos, which worked off the given that the Earth was a sphere, did not actually convince everyone that it was round. The Epicurean text De Rerum Natura from around 50 BC, which is typically hailed as visionary for its description of atomism, actually posits a flat earth, and Pliny in his Natural History from 77 AD describes the idea of the Earth being shaped like a pinecone as an acceptable theory. What's more, despite the fame Aristotle has today, his school was actually far less popular than Stoicism or Epicureanism during the Roman Empire, and it was only in the first few centuries after Christ that a new movement began in Platonism, that sought to harmonize it with the work of Aristotle and his successors.


After a long darkness of lost texts and slowing progress, we suddenly find the pinnacle of ancient astronomy in the mid-2nd century AD, in the form of Claudius Ptolemy's Syntaxis Mathematica, again from Alexandria, which is a distinctly Aristotelian continuation of Hipparchus' work, and whose principles I will summarize thus:
1) The Earth is a globe that sits still approximately at the center of the universe, it does not move and it does not rotate. Everything that is heavy falls towards its center.
2) The Sun, the Moon, and the planets move in uniform circular motions, which are not centered on Earth but an empty point of space nearby, called the "eccentric."
3) They simultaneously move across two circles, as previously explained. The large one is called a "deferent," the small one "epicycle."
4) There is a third point opposite to Earth, called the "equant," which is the center of speed. This means that the planet, moving along its path, becomes quicker or slower depending on how far away it is from the equant.
5) The rest of the stars sit on the outer rim of the universe, the spheric heavenly vault, which turns like a ball seen from the inside. That's the end of the finite universe.
The book is a masterclass in scientific writing. He explains the philosophy behind everything, the physics, the math, how to make instruments yourself to test everything with, and includes ample amounts of data, like Hipparchus' Babylonian dates for eclipses going back to the 8th century BC, close to a thousand years ago by then. He uses solar eclipses and the fact that they are observed at different times in different locations as examples of the impact of the curvature of the Earth, and that this wouldn't occur with any shape other than a globe, but right after that also explicitly rejects the movement of the Earth and the possibility of the Sun being at the center for various reasons. Take chapter 7, "That the earth does not have any motion from place to place, either":
>If the earth [moved], it is obvious that it would be carried down faster than [falling objects] because of its much greater size: living things and individual heavy objects would be left behind, riding on the air, and the earth itself would very soon have fallen completely out of the heavens. But such things are utterly ridiculous merely to think of.
This may sound like cartoon logic, but remember, they didn't have the concept of gravity, he's thinking in terms of Aristotelian physics while we today are Newtonian. Anyone reading the book at the time would encounter these ideas in the first few pages, at its very foundation, and would then take them for granted as part of the hegemonic framework of physics, accepting that the movement of the earth was disproven. And by "anyone" I mean "everyone," because the book was so incredibly successful, so legendarily popular, that throughout the centuries it became known simply as "the greatest." That's why today nobody actually calls it Syntaxis Mathematica, but rather the Almagest, which comes to us through Arabic. The majestic GOAT, one of the most influential scientific texts of all time, its longevity perhaps second only to Euclid's Elements. For 1,500 years, a lifespan larger than that of civilizations, it set the standard for excellence in astronomy.

So, what were its issues? Ptolemy positioned himself as an Aristotelian and used a lot of the same logic, invoking aether as well, but you may be able to tell there was always a point of friction between mainstream philosophy and his applied model: the equant, in particular. This was a strong point of contention, something he came up with himself, brand new. How could anyone say with a straight face that the movement was uniform if its speed was variable? That just didn't make sense, even if the math worked out. (And believe me, it worked very well.) This was a tension that would remain present for a very long time, we'll come back to it later.

But there's another important thing that Ptolemy bequeathed humanity (besides geography and maps as per Eratosthenes): his Tetrabiblos, an attempt to make a science out of astrology. See, after the Babylonians were conquered by the Persians back in 539, the astrologers of the region had gone from divining the fortunes of local kings to, gradually, those of the masses, and took efforts to systematize their craft. But they also took to travel, and by the second century texts were appearing all over the Mediterranean mentioning the astrological work of these "Chaldeans," which the Romans in particular took a great liking to. Foresight and omens are, clearly, much more practical than all of that philosophy the Greeks had been debating. But here's the deal: what if you used the predictive power of the Greek models, which by now were quite accurate, and used that to further refine the astrologer's work? This is what Ptolemy wished to bring legitimacy to, the shining clockwork lattice of the sky. There's always a backdrop, you see, and astrology has for most of history and beyond been a driving force behind astronomy. You may have heard this about the Incas and the Mayans, but it's also true for Europe and the Near East. The Tetrabiblos, too, was insanely popular as a companion to the Almagest, securing a place for astrology in court and school, and many of the other astronomers we'll talk about later worked as astrologers, so closely tied the two practices were. Consider that "mathematicus" and "mathematikos" meant not only "mathematician," but also astronomer and astrologer. And even to this day, if you ever hear something like "Mercury is in retrograde" -- that right there is Ptolemy's work still in use, nineteen hundred years later. It is the ghost of the epicycle.

With this, we can understand the starting point of what heliocentrism was fighting against: Aristotle and Ptolemy. They are the two great masters, the two great foes. That which will have to be destroyed.

With that, we have established the nature of mainstream classical astronomy, the foundation of this story. With that set, we can move on to Europe and pre-Copernican astronomy.

Part III: the absolute state of Europe


Rome reached its greatest extend at 117 AD, and Ptolemy lived to see the prosperous reign of the Five Good Emperors. But by the end of the 2nd century it would begin to shrink, split, and the western half of the empire would collapse two hundred years later. This would expose a great weakness of the Romans: language. Roman elites used to be schooled both in their native Latin and foreign Greek, which meant that many texts would simply stay in Greek without translation, or wouldn't be fully translated, like the Latin version of the Iliad that was effectively a summary, 1/15th of the original text's lines. This wasn't helped by the Roman's famous disinterest in developing theory over pursuing the practical needs of the State. But after the fall of the west, they lost their knowledge of Greek, and therefore lost access to the trove of research that the east still held onto. In this sense, the disconnect with antiquity never happened for the east, they had no dark age, and Byzantium kept seemingly anachronistic technology like napalm flamethrowers. The barrier most of Europe had to deal with consisted not just of the collapse of logistics after the fall of the Romans, but also the collapse of linguistic learning.

Even so, many ancient texts were able to be preserved in Latin thanks to early medieval writers like Boethius or Isidore of Seville, the body of literature was also gradually expanded by later movements such as the Carolingian and Ottonian renaissances (8th/9th/10th centuries), though the renaissance of the 12th century is the one that concerns us the most. The knowledge of a lot of Greek texts outside of Europe had been successfully transferred by being translated into Arabic, these works deposited in places like the House of Wisdom by people from all creeds and all nationalities under the Abbasids, which enabled the golden age of Islamic science. Europeans came into contact with these texts once more (or for the first time, depending how you look at it) through the establishment of Crusader states in the east and interaction with Al-Andalus in the west. Remember how the Almagest is known by its Arabic name? Yeah, that's the reason why, that's the point where it was taken up once more alongside an expansion of the Corpus Aristotelicum, in great part thanks to the Toledo School of Translators, which kicked off between the 1130s and 1150s. This is the point where westerners began to pick up on alchemy, for example.


I don't know to what degree Muslim theologians were making use of Greek philosophy, but I do know Maimonides, living under the Almoravids of Al-Andalus, wished to bring their innovation into Judaism, and wrote The Guide for the Perplexed around 1185-1190 in order to reconcile Jewish theology with Aristotelianism. The text and the critiques it leveled became infamous among many rabbis, and the book was sometimes burned publicly. In a similar vein, Aristotle was being condemned by Christians in France for some of his theories which people were picking up on, like the world being eternal and or that the soul is not immortal. To deal with this but still make use of his thought, Doctor of the Church Albertus Magnus and his lesser-known pupil Thomas Aquinas took Aristotle's texts (which were already extensive) and worked them into a Christian-compatible theory of everything. And I mean everything, from pure logic to biology and back. The end result was Thomism, an inescapable system of thought that would dominate Europe for several centuries and which the Catholic Church continues to uphold to this day, semi-officially, such as in its explanation of the Eucharist using essences and accidents. That's how Aristotle became normative, not just by being one of the best and most exhaustive around but by being expanded and taught by the biggest supranational organization of the time. That said, Aristotle was not unquestionable, and medieval physics developed the theory of impetus to offer a different account of projectile movement. There were many Aristotelianisms, hardly any of them synonymous with the man's original thought. (We could perhaps compare it to the seventeen hundred branches of Marxism from the last century.)

Not only that, people also had access to different cosmovisions from other authors, like Seneca's Natural Questions with its stoic physics, Capella's Marriage of Philology and Mercury, Pliny's Natural History, and compilations like Diogenes Laertius' Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers or Pseudo-Plutarch's On the Opinions of the Philosophers. These were quite popular, and lots of people would become acquainted with them and the alternative models they often contained while making their way through standard education. Aristotle and Ptolemy were hegemonic but the intellectual landscape was not monolithic, and lots of people had their own little departures from orthodoxy, even inquisitors. The problem was whether these departures fell within an allowed space of possibility or were heretical, which required debate to determine. And in the medieval period, the culture of debate and making up random shit that the Greeks had treasured had given way to one where proposals needed to be built upon previous precedent, this largely referring to the writings of previous thinkers like Greco-Roman philosophers or the Fathers of the Church, so even a small mention of someone's miscellaneous opinion could be worth bringing up to further an argument.


Okay, now the proper setting: Europe circa Anno Domini 1500. The Age of Discovery, a wild time.
In 1453 the Ottomans cracked open Byzantium (now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople) and in the following decades their empire would grow to hold all of the land that had been formerly governed by the eastern Romans or crusading Latins, plus some, while a good deal of Byzantine elites escaped into western Europe bearing forgotten texts and the ability to translate them, including the New Testament in Koine Greek instead of its Latin Vulgate translation that the west had based its bibles off for a thousand years. Consider the first polyglot bible, the Spanish Complutensian of 1514. There was a hope of spiritual renewal to be found in these ancient sources, what was called the "ad fontes" movements and Christian humanism, which aimed to write in simple terms what Aristotelian Scholasticism had made highly technical. There was a trendiness in ancient thinkers and icons, a resurgence, a rebirth. The Renaissance.
At the same time, Columbus landed in America in 1492, and contact was beginning, a series of exchanges that would lead Europe to re-assess its place in the world and the categories they used to classify everything in it, the old concepts, the new concepts, how did they fit this entirely new land no one in the three continents of the old world ever heard of? "Cabinets of curiosities" were assembled with trinkets and rarities from all over in an attempt to catalogue all that exists, and the work of "natural philosophers" as they were known back then grew increasingly popular and found itself under the patronage of wealthy nobles seeking to prove their fine taste in philosophy and art. Leonardo had painted his Mona Lisa around 1504, Michelangelo finished painting the Sixtine Chapel in 1541. This was also the time of the universal monarchy of Charles V, of pike and shot, of the witch hunt craze, of mercantilism, of growing centralized power, of everyone still dealing with the appearance of the printing press, and with a good deal of apocalypticism going around everything was in upheaval in one way or another. (I haven't even mentioned the Protestant Reformation.) An interesting symbol of the times is King James IV of Scotland, who became James I after the union of the crowns in 1603, around the time where he sponsored the terribly famous KJV and personally wrote a dialogue on witchcraft (Daemonologie) as well as a pamphlet on divine right (The True Law of Free Monarchies). He seems to also have had multiple homosexual lovers, weirdly enough.


In terms of astronomy specifically, as I've said the Almagest had been in part translated from Arabic a few centuries ago, by the prolific Gerard of Cremona, as part of the Theorica Planetarum he was writing. The Almagest's math was then used to calculate the Alfonsine Tables, more or less a long written set of data tables specifying the location of the astra across time so that people wouldn't have to constantly calculate it on their own, and could simply consult it as a shorthand. The spirit of renewal would touch on this area as well.
Georg von Peuerbach, born c. 1423, was from a young age recognized for his ability in... philosophy, getting a degree in 1446 and a master's in 1448, and was very interested classic Latin texts, poetry, rhetoric, and the like, which he was hired to teach at the University of Vienna. He'd never done any astronomical observations until 1451, close to thirty years of age, but his first experience struck him so deeply that he subsequently submerged himself in the topic and even managed to begin teaching a course on it, also at Vienna. In these new courses he met a young prodigy, Johannes Müller von Königsberg (known as Regiomontanus), who'd been making his own astronomical tables by himself before even starting traditional studies, and obtaining a bachelor's degree at 16 in 1452. The two immediately became friends and started working together despite the 13-year age gap. The dynamic duo took tons of observations, made instruments for them, wrote dense tables for trigonometry and eclipses, astronomical yearbooks, and used lecture notes to compose a book aptly named Theoricae Novae Planetarum, a noticeable improvement on Cremona's old text overall. Peuerbach even managed to become court astrologer for the King of Hungary and the Holy Roman Emperor.

But their biggest project was a new Latin translation of the Almagest, started with the help of and as a petition of Greek émigré Bessarion in 1460, now a Catholic cardinal. However, Peuerbach suddenly died of the plague next year, at the age of 38. It was now up to Regiomontanus to complete the Epitome of the Almagest, and he left Vienna to visit Rome with Bessarion and work there. He used his expertise and tools to add commentary as the translation progressed, which he finished maybe around 1462, but did not yet publish. He continued his rising career with more trigonometry, court astrology, the founding of the world's first scientific printing press, trashed the FUCK out of dekinai translators, and wrote ephemerides popular enough that Columbus used them to predict an eclipse and intimidate Amerindian islanders. Then Reggie died of the plague at 40 in 1476, and the Epitome was published posthumously in 1496. Even with their untimely demises, Peuerbach and Regiomontanus achieved their goals of updating astronomy and making it more accessible to the masses, and they would be remembered as the greatest astronomers of their time.

This is the part where they lied to you.

Part IV: Helios in the cathedral

With that, we finally arrive to Mikołaj Kopernik, alias Nicolaus Copernicus.

In 1473 lil' Nick was born in the city of Toruń, located in a region you may know as Prussia, to merchant parents "of burger status." Nick's dad had invested into the city during the last episode of the ongoing Polish-Teutonic conflict, the Thirteen Years' War, and had become a public figure with quite a few connections. Sadly, the man died when Nick was just ten years old, and the child began to be supported by his maternal uncle, Lucas Watzenrode. Lucas was a Catholic theocratic ruler, the Prince-Bishop of Warmia, a slice of Prussia that had splintered off the Teutonic Order's Monastic State and was now under the protection of the Polish king. (A surprisingly metal situation.) He wished to have Nicolas follow his footsteps.

Nick would prove to be much, much slower than the dynamic duo above, only obtaining his degree of canon law at the age of 30 after hopping through universities for twelve years. But it was in this period that his interest in astronomy would appear, through his instruction in mathematics, medicine, astrology, and contact with various teachers and sources on the matter, with whom and which he started to take measurements of the skies. From one famous teacher in Kraków, Albert Brudzewski, he would take the idea of astronomy's independence from mainstream philosophy and theology: "mathematics are for mathematicians," Copernicus would later write. From a career astronomer in Italy, Domenico Maria Novara, he'd take the theory of the Earth's axis having shifted and this explaining changes in observation, contrary to Ptolemy's static globe. In the Theoricae Novae and the Epitome of the Almagest he'd find his general footing, and from Greek classics he'd take up the idea of the Earth's motion and remold it. He may've also paid attention to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Disputations Against Divinatory Astrology, a prominent 1496 text arguing against the practice and its inconsistencies. (But don't take Pico for an atheist, he was one of the founders of Christian Kabbalah.) It'd explain why Copernicus never exercised astrology or wrote about it, unlike all the other astronomers in this story.

As a Catholic canon in the bishopric of Warmia, Nick's duties would be comparable to that of a wealthy government officer or a nobleman. First as a secretary for his uncle, and later in the small fishing town of Frombork with its population of a thousand where he'd be one of sixteen canons tasked with managing production of certain goods, overseeing taxes and the treasury, serving as judge, and other such functions. He even organized a defense against Teuton raiders in the siege of Olsztyn while vastly outnumbered. Nick specifically also practiced medicine as he was one of the few people around knowledgeable in that regard, having studied it as one of his detours, and visited whoever was ill in the town. His home was a walled cathedral atop a hill alongside his servants, and made arrangements to reside in one of its towers so he could be closer to his place of observation, where the walls to this day bear inscriptions of his records.

Most people think he first shared his heliocentric ideas with the publication of De Revolutionibus, but this is actually false, by a wide margin.
Although his job certainly took up most of his time, he was able to keep taking measurements, and between 1503 and some point before 1514 he first formulated his theory of heliocentrism, an earlier form of it, that spread as a handwritten manuscript of some thirty pages which he sent to various astronomers who then copied it and sent to others in turn: what we now know as the Commentariolus. It's a relatively brief outline where he expresses his heliocentric beliefs as a few postulates and charts, his dislike of the equant, and saying that the math backing his claims would be found in a later text. There's one specific comment on Ptolemy, regarding the equant, which I want to quote specifically because it's a big deal:
>Yet the planetary theories of Ptolemy and most other astronomers, although consistent with the numerical data, seemed likewise to present no small difficulty. For these theories were not adequate unless certain equants were also conceived; it then appeared that a planet moved with uniform velocity neither on its deferent nor about the center of its epicycle. Hence a system of this sort seemed neither sufficiently absolute nor sufficiently pleasing to the mind.
>Having become aware of these defects, I often considered whether there could perhaps be found a more reasonable arrangement of circles, from which every apparent inequality would be derived and in which everything would move uniformly about its proper center, as the rule of absolute motion requires.
This was his motivation for seeking a different system, the lack of uniformity of motion that equally bothered Aristotelian purists. It is very important to note that Nick arrived at heliocentrism as a solution to this problem, and he thought it up independently of Aristarchus' model: The Sand-Reckoner's translation would not be published until 1544, after his death. While Nick does mention Aristarchus in a scrapped comment, he didn't actually know what the ancient astronomer had worked on. Nick instead referenced the Pythagoreans, like a letter from a man named Lysis directed to a fellow math cult member.

Past that, in the 1524 "Letter against Werner," a critical review of the titular author's work, he again advertised this future book of his. It even happened that in 1533 a secretary of Pope Clement VII, Johann Widmannstetter, gave a lecture to the pope and various cardinals regarding these ideas, which they found interesting enough for the pope to gift Widmannstetter a rare Greek manuscript, and one of his attendants, cardinal Schönberg, would in 1536 write to Copernicus encouraging him to publish the eventual book:
>Some years ago word reached me concerning your proficiency, of which everybody constantly spoke. At that time I began to have a very high regard for you, and also to congratulate our contemporaries among whom you enjoyed such great prestige. For I had learned that you had not merely mastered the discoveries of the ancient astronomers uncommonly well but had also formulated a new cosmology. In it you maintain that the earth moves, that the sun occupies the lowest, and thus the central place, in the universe... I have also learned that you have written an exposition of this whole system of astronomy, and have computed the planetary motions and set them down in tables, to the greatest admiration of all. Therefore with the utmost earnestness I entreat you, most learned sir, unless I inconvenience you, to communicate this discovery of yours to scholars... I have instructed Theodoric of Reden to have everything copied in your quarters at my expense and dispatched to me. If you gratify my desire in this matter, you will see that you are dealing with a man who is zealous for your reputation and eager to do justice to so fine a talent.
Look at how fucking good this offer is, being made by a Catholic cardinal. He was similarly being encouraged by astronomers, by fellow clergymen, by astrologers, by mathematicians, by doctors, and even book publishers were trying to attract him expecting to earn a pretty penny. There were, of course, some who thought it absurd, like Martin Luther and his colleague Melanchthon, mostly theologians and Aristotelian scholars, yet nobody was threatening him over it. There were many, many people interested in getting their hands on a new model with more accurate predictions of the heavens.


But Nick was in trouble, for very different reasons. He felt he'd be ridiculed once published, that it wasn't good enough, that he was missing solid proof. But even more than that, by the 1530s Protestantism was beginning to take over several states, like in Scandinavia, England, and the HRE, including the Teutons' Monastic State, whose Grand Master converted and made the Ordensstaat into the Duchy of Prussia following Luther's advice, meaning that Warmia was now surrounded not just by Teutonic knights, but by heretical Teutonic knights. And the ensuing Catholic counter-reformation was starting to bring in people like this guy:
>Hosius would eventually be known as “the Hammer of the Heretics,” “Death to Luther,” and “the second Augustine.”
Pressure was mounting up, Nick's world seemed to be changing for the worst, and the king of Poland had taken measures to exile Protestant proselytes and banned their presence on pain of death. This was particularly worrisome for Copernicus, not only had he been ignoring his vow of chastity (which was wasn't uncommon at the time), another canon who'd been openly living with his concubine and even had children was found to own heavily annotated Protestant literature after he was investigated for quarreling with the current Warmian bishop. In response, the canon ran the fuck away. This association to heresy hung over Copernicus, and it only got worse when a Lutheran arrived to his door looking for him a week later.

This man was Georg Joachim Rheticus, teacher of mathematics at the university town of Wittenberg, a man certain that scientific astrology consisted of making horoscopes for understanding people's temperament, rather that predicting events which was much more prone to error. Luther and Melanchthon were also living in Wittenberg and the latter favored Rheticus quite a bit, himself a big fan of horoscopes, and at one point the reformer decided to send Rheticus on a tour to study in other cities while the place cooled down from some local drama. A poet, Simon Lemnius, had published a book ridiculing the leaders of the town and the Reformation, in response Luther had its copies burned and the man sent to trial while calling him a merdipoetam. (Simon, too, ran the fuck away, this time fleeing to Catholic lands.) Rheticus eventually arrived at Nuremberg, where people were still talking about Copernicus some twenty five years after the Commentariolus, and decided his best course of action would be to visit the mysterious scholar. The two thankfully hit it off and made enormous progress very quickly, as a new dynamic duo. In 1540 Rheticus in preparation for the publishing of the promised book wrote a smaller 100-page introduction to the public called the Narratio Prima, serving as a full outline of the Copernican model, which was well received and further boosted Copernicus' popularity.


The manuscript for De Revolutionibus was finally finished in 1541, although its printing got delayed for various reasons. In 1543 it changed hands from the original publisher, Johannes Petreius, to Protestant reformer Andreas Osiander (the one who converted the Teutonic Grand Master) and he did something very interesting. Copernicus had exchanged some letters with Osiander where he explained how worried he still was about backlash, and how they could possibly soften it. To achieve this, without either Rheticus' or Copernicus' consent, Osiander added an anonymous introduction to the book, seemingly by its author, which read:
>For these hypotheses need not be true nor even probable; if they provide a calculus consistent with the observations, that alone is sufficient.... The philosopher will perhaps rather seek the semblance of the truth. But neither [the astronomer nor the philosopher] will understand or state anything certain, unless it has been divinely revealed to him.... So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it. Farewell.
Rheticus had also referred to the Copernican model as a "hypothesis," which in this context specifically means a mathematical device. So when Osiander says "these hypotheses need not be true," what he means is that it's purely a tool for computation with no claim to truth whatsoever. This is the concept of choice of the time, the thing that was used to bridge the gap between philosophy/theology and mathematical models, something that was called "saving the appearances." "To save the appearances" (or "the phenomena") is to give an account, a way to make it work in practice, even if it doesn't describe fundamental reality. And it was perfectly valid for one type of saving to replace another, given that they were simply devices, as argued by Aquinas in his Summa Theologica:
>Reason may be employed in two ways to establish a point: firstly, for the purpose of furnishing sufficient proof of some principle, as in natural science, where sufficient proof can be brought to show that the movement of the heavens is always of uniform velocity. Reason is employed in another way, not as furnishing a sufficient proof of a principle, but as confirming an already established principle, by showing the congruity of its results, as in astrology the theory of eccentrics and epicycles is considered as established, because thereby the sensible appearances of the heavenly movements can be explained; not, however, as if this proof were sufficient, forasmuch as some other theory might explain them.
The second usage is what Osiander was banking on. This ties into Aristotelian logic, where astronomy is considered a "mixed science" that (instead of studying an object to abstract its essence) is forced to work with derivative mental constructs from the get-go as there was no way to directly examine the nature of the heavens like you can do with a rock or a vegetable, and for this reason astronomy was subordinate to higher disciplines, which you can see in Aquinas' example: earthly physics > astronomy. Of course, Copernicus (as did Ptolemy before) did believe his own model to be real and factual, and that's why Osiander added this introduction, to make everyone else treat it as strictly theoretical and thus unproblematic. (It helped that the book was so technical and dense that it stayed inaccessible to most.) This move greatly angered Rheticus, but the book was out, and even with a dampened atmosphere Copernicus managed to get his hands on it before his death in 1543, having lived to 70 and NOT dying of the plague. (The deathbed myth says the book only got published because he was dying, but this was only a coincidence.) He made it, and the book would be popular enough to be reprinted four times, much more than the average.


What Copernicus achieved was not, at the time, considered revolutionary. In good part because he had based himself off the Almagest and its records, the two models were mathematically identical, in the pre-telescopic epoch they were observationally and empirically identical as well. There really was no way to tell which was right, and people argued over whether it was knowable at all. In order to make the math work after removing the equant, he had been forced to add extra epicycles to the planets, epicyclets they were called, and oftentimes trying to calculate positions using the Copernican model wasn't as easy as with Ptolemy. You can see how it worked in this short video, which has a few more notes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG_JBJX78eA&list=PLS-Tvr0ip9TcEAH8PXj4Br9davHa3IOB9&index=6
He did it because he fervently believed the movements of the astra had to be perfectly uniform in the manner of Aristotle (a bad idea in the long run), he writes that he shuddered at the idea of things being otherwise, just like Ptolemy before wrote of the movement of the Earth. In this way, Copernicus can be seen as an Aristotelian-adjacent reformer rather than a revolutionary. His book was predominantly read for its dense math, as that's where most of the readers' annotations can be found, and the "Wittenberg interpretation" had no qualms about mixing and matching it with Ptolemy for simplicity's sake, given that all of these were by and large convenient tools for them as per Aquinas. It's not unlike scientists today choosing their preferred framework to analyze data with, and tweaking it as needed. Furthermore, as Thomas Kuhn wrote:
>In fact, Copernicus' theory was not more accurate than Ptolemy's and did not lead directly to any improvement in the calendar.
There's a myth, a malevolent, terrible and enduring myth according to which the Ptolemaic model had grown inaccurate, errant, blatantly obsolete, but modern historians no longer endorse this. It is itself an obsolete claim, the type of misinformation produced by that antiquated kind of historiography that enjoyed making shit up, sadly repeated by the likes of Mr. Kuhn and the Encyclopedia Britannica.

What Copernicus brought to the table was not an idea (which people like the Pythagoreans had been known to hold for over a thousand years), nor did he have proof of anything. He had, indeed, failed to demonstrate it, and subsequent debate would deal with this at length. What Nick had was a a model, a mathematical model with which to rival Ptolemy, assembled from various parts that hadn't been integrated until then. As he himself wrote:
>they are in exactly the same fix as someone taking from different places hands, feet, head, and the other limbs—shaped very beautifully but not with reference to one body and without correspondence to one another—so that such parts made up a monster rather than a man.
This fully-fledged formulation opened the floodgates for a wider reconsideration of the state of things now that it had clearly become feasible to propose something different, a new cosmology. This is the magic, the lifeblood of the scientific revolution. An ensuing plurality crashed into the world a few decades later.

>>3836
>Babylonians used a base-60 numeral system, and this is the reason why there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 360(ish) days in a year, and 360 degrees in a circle

Whoa, cool.

>It's often said in retrospect that the Earth being at the center of the universe meant to ancient peoples that it was the greatest thing in existence, the metaphorical center, but this is actually the opposite of the truth. With Aristotle, it was because the Earth couldn't possibly go any lower, and what was truly divine was up in outer space.

Neat.

>>3842
It really boggles the mind at how intelligent and ingenius the old masters were. Someone would probably discover things eventually as an inevitability of time, but I wonder when.
Whew, alright, I read two of them. My brain needs time to recover, I should watch some cute girls doing things.

>>3845
It's important to note that the people that we consider to be the old masters were in reality closer to our time than to the beginning of civilization, which originated before even the 30th century BC. This is one of the oldest math tablets ever found, and it's from around 1800 BC, and shows they already had been working on it for a while:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plimpton_322
It's a situation much like how Cleopatra's life was closer to our time in the 20th century AD than to the construction of the pyramids, built in the 26th century BC. Shit was already thousands of years old, but the Greeks with their decentralized culture of debate managed to create something different from the kingdoms of the Near East. And even if we look at the Greeks specifically, there's four or five hundred years between Homer and Aristotle and Plato. It took a damn while to set up, and it went by in the blink of an eye. It's really underestimated just how long the history of the bronze age is.

Also, this is just a neat side thing that I couldn't fit anywhere, but astronomical books in the Renaissance had these cool movable parts for simulating the motions of the heavens. Volvelles, they were called.

Based orb hater

>>3847
Based on what?

>>3845
I really like how meticulous the Sumerians were, among others.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277589191_The_Sumerian_K8538_tablet_-_The_great_meteor_impact_devastating_Mesopotamia

>>3836
There's a little something to clarify a bit, for clear context.
>>For all men have some conception of the nature of the gods, and all who believe in the existence of gods at all, whether barbarian or Greek, agree in allotting the highest place to the deity, surely because they suppose that immortal is linked with immortal and regard any other supposition as inconceivable. If then there is, as there certainly is, anything divine, what we have just said about the primary bodily substance [aether] was well said.
>It's often said in retrospect that the Earth being at the center of the universe meant to ancient peoples that it was the greatest thing in existence, the metaphorical center, but this is actually the opposite of the truth. With Aristotle, it was because the Earth couldn't possibly go any lower, and what was truly divine was up in outer space. Aetheric bodies were even endowed with a soul and an intellect, as per Plato.
It wouldn't be the opposite of truth for the ancient peoples at large. First of all, the Greeks had Gaia for a reason.
The following will be me based on what I had learned from The Ancient City (greatly recommended, as there's more to the caveat than I can explain efficiently).
Aristotle and Plato were quite radical in thought in relation to the actual culture they were in. Hardly representatives, and difficult to grasp holistically without understanding what context they referenced and had built upon.
Ancient Greece and Rome were one of many societies that started as, and were based on, a systematic, outsider-unfriendly enmeshment of family, spirituality, religion at the core. What we came to know as the Greek and Roman pantheons began as worship of immediate fallen ancestry, with the graves as their altars, and the home - a structure around the hearth having the grounds (pun unintended) and the fire for it - as the space for daily rituals. This is also reflected in the solidified representative of the function in Hestia - that marks the territory/ground (territoriality is inherently important here) around the hearth's fire as sacred, even at a settlement level. The Romans and their pantheon's analogous functioned practically the same, only the decisions and results around the worship differed somewhat.
The gods of the late-stage pantheons were entities born between a merge of the ancestors, the compromise between families, and the consensus to maintain this as important.
That's how radical the likes of Plato and Aristotle were.

>This idea, that the Earth is a shit, stuck around for a damn long time
Also, this is amusing - depth psychology researches and interprets the gnostic/alchemical prima materia as both the soil (earth) and the excrement. Perhaps as a part of the Christian inevitable early trend of being a response to the ancestral worship (e.g. at least technically implicitly denying Yahweh, in favor of El Elyon).

>>3843
>trashed the FUCK out of dekinai translators, and wrote ephemerides popular enough that Columbus used them to predict an eclipse and intimidate Amerindian islanders. Then Reggie died of the plague at 40 in 1476
I had read around a bit, and I prefer the interpretation of the fuzzy facts in that he was killed by George of Trebizond, one of whom he had trashed.

>>3844
>while calling him a merdipoetam
What a poem behind this!
>To achieve this, without either Rheticus' or Copernicus' consent, Osiander added an anonymous introduction to the book, seemingly by its author
Publishers being publishers since at least 16th century...
>He did it because he fervently believed the movements of the astra had to be perfectly uniform in the manner of Aristotle (a bad idea in the long run), he writes that he shuddered at the idea of things being otherwise
Filtered by biblically accurate planetary motions...

>>3849
>It wouldn't be the opposite of truth for the ancient peoples at large.
That's true, and you're right. It's more a feature of post-Socratic philosophy, particularly Platonism, and not something the people as a whole would agree with. We should remember that philosophers, as a fraction of the aristocracy, were a minority within a minority, and even if they weren't fans of it still participated in the rituals you describe.
>I prefer the interpretation of the fuzzy facts in that he was killed by George of Trebizond
I did run into this claim, but as far as I know none of George's other critics were murdered, and the rumor was spread way later in the 1650s by Pierre Gassendi. It's overall much more likely for Reggie to have died of the plague from the outbreak around him. I also find it half-poetic, half-comedic for both members of the duo to have died unceremoniously like that, helps illustrate the variability of life expectancies back then.

So that's what Nick did. But his death and Galileo's trial are ninety years apart, and in the interim astronomy kept changing. Let's now go over the response to Copernicus, and the foundation for a new astronomy. This part is the most non-linear of all, since there's a lot of stuff going on.

Part V: acceptance, rejection, and the lord with a metal nose

As I mentioned, back in Prussia the Teutonic Grand Master Albert (of the accursed house of Hohenzollern) had become an apostate, and based on Luther's advice he converted the Monastic State into the Duchy of Prussia. Among the many things this zealot did, like fighting peasants and Poles, he... funded astronomy. He commissioned Erasmus Reinhold, famous professor of higher mathematics, colleague of Rheticus, and avid reader of Copernicus (referring to him as "the most learned man whom we may call a second Atlas or a second Ptolemy"), to compile a new set of tables to rival the Alfonsine ones. Reinhold wasn't a heliocentrist, and he criticized Copernicus' tables in that "the computation is not even in agreement with his observations on which the foundation of the work rests" given that the measurements of this lone hobbyist were indeed often inaccurate, but his praise and repeated mentions helped spread the man's name and theories even more than they already had. Reinhold helps us illustrate what astronomers of the time saw as valuable in Copernicus, in the form of one of his annotations from his copy of De Revolutionibus:
>The axiom of astronomy: celestial motion is uniform and circular, or composed of uniform and circular motions.
He, like the vast majority of astronomers, still cared far more about perfect motions and clean mathematics than the physical reality of heliocentrism and a moving Earth, which was incongruent with physics and scripture. The Prutenic Tables were published in 1551, a product of Reinhold's negotiation between Ptolemy, Copernicus, and other modern sets of observations that Nick never consulted, and although the final product was not much of an improvement it nonetheless secured a place for the teaching of Copernicus in universities, though the idea of his model being factual continued to be overwhelmingly denounced as utterly absurd. Having become rector of the University of Wittenberg, Reinhold died of the plague at 41 years of age, in 1553. As mentioned in the previous post, the "Wittenberg interpretation" of this very university was upheld by its mathematicians, who were some of the chief supporters of Copernicus and his advancements in stellar measurements, though strictly as a formal instrument and not as model of physical reality. I want to add that the man who invented the equal sign, Robert Recorde (lmao), briefly mentioned the Copernican model as well in his 1566 astronomical text, The Castle of Knowledge:
>This is truly to be gathered: howbeit, Copernicus a man of great learning, of much experience, and of wonderful diligence in observation, hath renewed the opinion of Aristarchus Sainius, and affinnith that the earth not only moveth circularly about his own center, but also may be, yea and is, continually out of the precise center of the world 38 hundred thousand miles: but because the understanding of that controversy dependeth upon profounder knowledge than in this Introduction may be uttered conveniently, I will let it pass till some other time.
As was common at the time, the text is structured as a dialogue between two characters, of which the "master" once again rejects Copernicanism as absurd, but the scholar explaining astronomy brushes him off as uninitiated. We also can see Aristarchus in this example, and we can be sure that people now knew of his heliocentrism throught Archimedes because The Sand-Reckoner had by this point been translated, which I believe may've offered some further aid to Copernicanism among those dedicated to mathematics.

Meanwhile, rewinding back a few years to 1546, the first serious criticism of Copernicanism had been composed, by the Dominican priest Giovanni Maria Tolosani. This man had been involved in the Fifth Lateran Council (1512-1517), where (among many other things) the pope invited experts to look for a way to improve the calendar that had throughout the centuries strayed and become misaligned with Easter. Figuring out the correct time of Easter was a big deal to Christendom in the same way aligning oneself properly with Mecca is important to Muslims, and had been dealt with at length for over a thousand years, like in the Venerable Bede's The Reckoning of Time back in the 8th century. Tolosani was fairly involved with the Council, and encountered Copernicus' letters giving his own crack at the problem. Not only that, De Revolutionibus had been dedicated and sent to Pope Paul III, and the Dominican was assigned the task of condemning it. (You may wonder why, given that the previous pope had been positive to it, and the simple answer is that papal politics just come and go like that.) What's interesting is the dual character of Tolosani's critique, which attacks Copernicus based on both the scientific consensus of the day and the fact that it goes against scripture. For example, he writes in an appendix from 1546 to his unsubtly-titled 1544 text On the Very Pure Truth of Divine Scripture, against Human Errors:
>Summon men educated in all the sciences, and let them read Copernicus, Book I, on the moving earth and the motionless starry heaven. Surely they will find that his arguments have no solidity and can be very easily refuted. For it is stupid to contradict a belief accepted by everyone over a very long time for extremely strong reasons, unless the naysayer uses more powerful and incontrovertible proofs, and completely rebuts the opposed reasoning. Copernicus does not do this at all. For he does not undermine the proofs, establishing necessary conclusions, advanced by Aristotle the philosopher and Ptolemy the astronomer.
>Then let experts read Aristotle, On the Heavens, Book II, and the commentaries of those who have written about it ... and they will find that Aristotle absolutely destroyed the arguments of the Pythagoreans.
>Moreover Copernicus assumes certain hypotheses which he does not prove...when he says in Book I, Chapter 8: “If anyone believes that the earth rotates, surely he will hold that its motion is natural, not violent”? Copernicus assumes what he should previously have proved, namely, that the earth rotates.
This is true, Copernicus was indeed lacking evidence and this troubled him greatly. But that's not all:
>For by a foolish effort it tries to revive the contrived Pythagorean belief, long since deservedly buried, since it explicitly contradicts human reason and opposed Holy Writ. Pythagoreanism could easily give rise to quarrels between Catholic expounders of Holy Writ and those persons who might wish to adhere with stubborn mind to this false belief. I have written this little work for the purpose of avoiding this scandal.
Note the dual argument, reason AND scripture. And in another passage, he argues that Copernicus runs "the risk to himself and to the readers of his book of straying from the faith." That is to say, Tolosani's goal is to secure stability and legitimacy for the traditional Thomist-Aristotelian framework. This would be challenged later by an Augustinian hermit, Diego de Zuñiga, in his 1584/1591 Commentary on Job, specifically Job 9:6 here:
>This passage seems to be a difficult one indeed, but it is considerably clarified by means of the opinion of the Pythagoreans, who think that the earth moves by its own nature and that it is not otherwise possible to explain the motions of the stars which vary a great deal in their speed and slowness.
>There is no doubt that the locations of the planets are much better and more certainly determined by this doctrine than by what is found in Ptolemy's Almagest and in the views of others. It is well known that Ptolemy was never able to explain the motion of the equinoxes or to establish an exact and fixed beginning of the year. He confesses this in his Almagest III, 2, and leaves these matters for the discovery of later astronomers who would be able to compare more observations over a longer period of time than he could.
However, Zuñiga would later turn to oppose the theory on Aristotelian grounds, in his 1597 Philosophiae Prima Pars. What's important, though, is that we can see a relevant example of a man who is tolerant of the Bible being open to interpretation in light of future evidence, versus a man who wants to secure stability in tradition, both inside of the Church, though neither being an official position yet, only individual opinions. It's even more important to note that Tolosani's book wasn't even published, and remained a manuscript that only some people read internally and which was rediscovered relatively recently. Despite this, it aptly represents popular thought of that time, as is very relevant in reference to Galileo later.


Not only did Copernicus fail at proposing a mechanism for the Earth's motion while violating Aristotelian physics, he had also failed at addressing the two ancient problems of "why do things stay put on Earth" and "why do we not see parallax." These were valid scientific concerns: if you can't explain the mechanism that is the basis of your model, if it contradicts standard practice, if reality doesn't demonstrate the consequences we would expect from it, and if your predictions aren't even better than those we've always used, then of course hardly anyone is going to take it as much more than a neat idea. At this point, it was still possible to take Ptolemy's model and slightly recalibrate it so as to make it fit more recent observations, as was done by Caspar Peucer (student of Rheticus and Reinhold, son-in-law of Melanchthon, teacher of Tycho Brahe) in his 1568-1571 book Hypotyposes Orbium Coelestium, where he repudiates the Copernican model and its "offensive absurdity so alien to truth." Another person who would do the same was Giovanni Antonio Magini in the similarly-titled Novae Coelestium Orbium Theoricae, later in 1589. As I said before, the two models were mathematically equivalent, geocentrism was still perfectly able to get the job done.

Parallax specifically was a very salient issue, because it was regularly used to triangulate the distances between the planets, as Aristarchus had done before, but this broke down when looking at the stars: there no was no observable parallax, and therefore no chance of using it for such an end. Heliocentrist math implied that the stars were unfathomably far away and that they had unthinkably large sizes, easily dwarfing the Sun. The idea that the universe was perfectly geometric and beautiful was truly hegemonic back then, and it made everyone ask: why would God create such an absurd, irrational world? And EVEN IF those ridiculous estimations were true, you still couldn't see any parallax at all, you couldn't prove it. Lemme ask you, what's more reasonable: the idea that the Earth doesn't move, as everyone with common sense can tell and corroborated by physics and scripture, or that the universe is a gigantic void full of humongous stars haphazardly strewn together, yet nonetheless showing no discernible effect? When this criticism was raised against Copernicans they argued that God had made such works to impress us and remind us of His greatness. It wasn't terribly convincing. So Copernican astronomers, the ten or so that existed, were quite concerned with finding any evidence that could support their theory. It was a big deal.


Thaddeus Hagecius (Czech herbalist, astrologer, and personal doc of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II) was one of those handful of early Copernicans searching for it across the 1560s, alongside his Danish geocentrist friend Tycho Brahe. In November of 1572 the two would encounter something incredible: a bright spot suddenly appeared in the nightsky, a new star, and it remained visible for two years until 1574, a period during which several astronomers would independently observe it and take notes of this crazy new thing. Both would write on it, although it was Tycho's 1573 De Nova Stella that took the cake as the most popular. His measurements decidedly showed that this "nova" presented a total absence of parallax, just like any other star, which allowed the entity to be correctly categorized as belonging to that outer realm beyond comets and the planets. They hadn't found any evidence for Copernicanism, but they did deal a massive blow to the Aristotelian worldview by proving that it was possible for the outer heavens to experience change, a fact that was from then on increasingly accepted by astronomers. Remember, aether was supposed to be perfect and unchanging, but here was a very blatant form of change available for all to see.

Tycho, who is in reality the protagonist of this section, was a particularly high-tier Danish noble, a big shot of large caliber, but he wasn't interested in being a regular lord. His wish was to be a lord of science. At the age of 14, in 1560, he had been both impressed and bothered by the prediction of a solar eclipse that ended up being off by a day, an experience that would drive him to make astronomy as accurate as possible.
He also lost his nose in 1566, over a debate I'm unsure of. One source said his origin story consisted of predicting Suleiman's death in October of that year, only to be mocked, as the sultan had already died a month ago, in September. But many others say it's because of him getting drunk at a party and arguing with a cousin about who was the better mathematician. Either way, he challenged his foe to a duel in order to protect his honor, only to have his own nose sliced off by the better duelist. From then onwards he would wear a prosthetic nose, possibly switching between multiple of them, some made of brass, others of gold and silver.

Tycho's superpower was the precision he strove for, his perfectionism: the accuracy and superiority of his measurements would cement him as one of the most important astronomers of all time. This was made obvious through his observations of the nova, and the fame his text brought him, with which he was able to strike a deal with the Danish crown: they'd grant him dominion over the small island of Hven where he would be able to set up an observatory. And so he did, building Uraniborg, a palace and temple to astronomy, with towers, workshops, salaried artisans, a paper mill, an in-house printing press, an alchemical lab, plenty of fancy art, a dungeon to throw rebellious peasants in, a drunken pet moose, and a psychic dwarf to entertain guests during the feasts they'd be invited to. The Castle of the Heavens served as a place for the Danish crown to show off its soft power, and it's commonly said to have costed 1% of Denmark's GDP, which is about as much as what the USA spent on NASA at its peak. The many instruments Tycho built with his ridiculous budget certainly matches this comparison. (You can see some of them here.) Despite being in his 30s by this point, he managed to take measurements that reached the limit of what was possible with the naked eye, or yielded even better results after averaging out the numbers. His were by far the most accurate measurements ever taken by one guy looking at the sky real hard. It blew everything else out of the water, and Tycho knew it.

In 1577 he'd gain the perfect chance to capitalize on his resources. This time a comet appeared, and a new opportunity to take crucial measurements of it.
Aristotle had argued that comets had to originate in the sublunar realm, appearing in the uppermost layer of the atmosphere, which was made up of fire rather than air. (Meteors also had to be sublunar phenomena, they couldn't be from aetheric outer space, that's why the study of climate is called meteorology.) Believe it or not, this wasn't an unfounded belief, and the dynamic duo of Peuerbach and Regiomontanus had calculated the parallax of comets over a century ago in 1456 and 1472 with results that matched Aristotle's given location. But Aristotle also argued that comets weren't solid like planets, but rather an "exhalation," a mass of atmospheric fire burning up its stored potential when the situation was appropriate. This was indeed put into question around 1531 after Peter Apian and Girolamo Fracastoro both discovered the fact that a comet's tail is always facing a direction opposite to the Sun, its antisolarity, and Apian suggested this was due to the sun's rays hitting the comet, which meant there had to be more to it.

In this context of skepticism and new arising theories, Tycho set his sights on proving once again that he could beat Aristotle. With his measurements (ten to twenty times more accurate than Copernicus'), he not only managed to show that the comet was squarely supralunar, but that it went past the spheres of Mercury and Venus. YOU SEE, this was actually a double blow: the reigning model also had each planet not as a ball floating in the void, but attached to a physically solid yet translucent orb that moved the planet around through the sphere's rotation, in an universe composed of concentric spheres like the layers of an onion. Believe it or not, Eudoxus' concentric spheres were still alive and kicking, two thousand years later. Tycho's data showed that solid spheres were not possible, as the comet would've crashed into them, and furthermore the comet was hundreds of times bigger than was previously believed. Not only that, he also argued it must have an oblong rather than circular path (another huge break for astronomy in general, accustomed to perfect circles), and he tried to anchor these findings in the philosophy of alternative ancient thinkers, like Seneca (who had been so popular that forged letters were used to argue he was a crypto-Christian).

Tycho put on a spectacular show, and yet he wasn't done. The guy was a great admirer of Copernicus, he's the one who gave the Comentariolus its title, he gave out copies of it as gifts, he sent a servant to go to Warmia and buy the tools that Nick had used to take his measurements, then marveled at what the canon had been able to achieve with tools as kuso as those. But the science that was proving Aristotle wrong disproved Copernicus as well, and Tycho was also a firm Lutheran who believed the Bible when it spoke of the immobility of the Earth. Therefore he publicly announced he would make a new model to account for all of this, though he wasn't yet sure how. His breakthrough would arrive thanks to a roving mathematician and borderline wizard, Paul Wittich, a man whose life had been at one point lost to history for lack of records of his life, and his arrival to Hven in 1580...

>>3843
Okay I've read this one now, too. Nice GET, also.
I'm not sure that I was able to commit any of it to memory, though, there's like 80 different names of people and 50 different named objects/things. I need another brain break.

>>3852
Yeah, a good chunk of that part is for general context, but there's so much shit going on in this era that you need context for the context, and I chose to keep that short. Anyways, if you happen to have any interest in how this manifested in print, here's a reenactment of James' Daemonologie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXVQCss9yyo

>>3844
Okay I read this, too, but what's the lie you were building to? Copernicus credited as the foundation of heliocentrism?
I guess it sounds like that's true, but people often go with what's easier to understand instead of what they can understand after reaching a bunch of things. It's like saying "Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity" when the nuance is far different.

>>3854
There's several lies. First and foremost is the idea that Copernicus proved the Earth moves, and consequently anyone who rejected it had their head in the sand. Both are blatantly false, just myths. But also the idea that Copernicus was censored or otherwise harmed for his views, which is also false. He lived quite comfortably most of his life despite his heliocentrism being publicly known for decades, even those who fiercely disagreed took no action against him. And then the idea that geocentrism was obsolete while heliocentrism was a clear improvement, totally false as well.
Those claims are all central to the popular narrative, yet have no basis in reality.

>>3855
Oh, I see. Hmm. When you say myths do you mean i popular culture or do you mean among academics? Because pop culture is kind of known for being, well... dumb.

>>3856
The real history is only understood among historians of science, everywhere else people are prone to misunderstandings, even in other areas of academia. Galileo's trial has been an icon of the conflict between science and religion for centuries, and the waters are thoroughly muddied because of it.

>>3857
Oh. Yeah, true. That's how it goes. Specialization is what allowed civilization to exist at all, though.

>>3847
This doesn't go against Orb, though.

>>3836
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIBoVGwBVRM
the theme to this thread

>>3851
question: was my thread a few months ago where I complained about Orb your reason for deciding to write all this up?
very good stuff btw
I would subscribe to your blog

>>3860
If he was, I hope he watched it to completion since your thread was based on a few episodes before reaching the conclusion of all 25 of them!

>>3860
I actually started researching the topic back in December of last year, while Orb was still airing. I've been planning this for a while, your thread was a happy coincidence.

UPDATE: I'm still working on this, just took a pause to focus on fencing. I'll be posting the next part soon.

>>3863
Post the fencing essay

>>3864
Here you go:
https://annas-archive.org/md5/ba04e5af627c2167b2d32a4df5279740
I went back in time to publish it in 1570, so it'd fit with this thread's time window. Don't tell anyone though, it could get me in trouble.

Had a dream where I was being inquisitioned

This thread should be moved to /aut/.

>>3867
Ehh, you can still type URLs and link to boards when they're locked.
He can just do a new thread and say continued from >>3835
I could see moving it to /qa/ or something if OP requests it, though.

>>3867
>>3868
I was going to request moving it to the next seasonal board, yeah. It's got a lot of context, and I'm still working through the Kepler biography I picked.

Thread moved by request, then. In the future don't expect threads to be transferred between seasonal boards, though. It goes against the theme of cyclical discussion.

>>3870
Thank you. Won't happen again.