Last week I had the pleasure of going to a wonderful talk by Dr. Christopher Graney at Immaculata Classical Academy. Graney spoke about the controversy surrounding Galileo and the heliocentric model. His main point was that most people spin this controversy as a conflict between science and bible-thumping faith, while ignoring the numerous scientific arguments that opponents of Galileo made at the time. For example, out of twenty-two arguments presented by Galileo’s contemporary Johann Georg Locher, only two were theological. The others had to do with objections from empirical data such as the absence of any observed parallax in the stars, the incorrect predictions of where planets would be on Galileo’s model, the apparent size of stars in telescopes at the time, and the motion of projectiles. These scientific objections were not decisively overcome until much later with the discoveries of Kepler, Newton, Coriolis, and others.

I had always thought that the main battle lines at the time of the controversy were between the old Ptolemaic model and the new Copernican model. I learned last week, however, that the most supported model at the time was that of Tycho Brahe, which differed from the Ptolemaic model by having the planets (other than the Earth) revolve around the sun, while the Sun, Moon, and stars still revolved around the Earth. The model apparently had better accuracy than either of the alternatives at the time and avoided the difficulties that are introduced with a moving Earth.

After the talk, Graney gave an encouragement to all the students of Latin at this classical school. He pointed out that most people who are into science these days have no Latin, and most people who study Latin are into things like classical poetry. This leaves a big hole in the history of science where there are few qualified researchers and yet a good deal of interest and funding available.