Terrence Tao has an old excellent presentation on the “cosmic ladder” which shows how from this measurement you can build up to measure the largest distances in the visible universe: https://terrytao.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/cosmic-distance...
“Ironically, when Aristarchus proposed the heliocentric model, his contemporaries dismissed it, on the grounds that they did not observe any parallax effects...”
“ so the heliocentric model would have implied that the stars were an absurdly large distance away.”
“[Which, of course, they are.]”
> Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) proposed an experiment that would determine whether or not the earth goes around the sun. Basically, if the Earth orbits the sun, nearby stars should periodically "move" back and forth in their position with respect to more distant stars every 6 months. If the Earth was stationary (at the center of the Universe, this wouldn't occur.
The heliocentric model's parsimony (explaining many different phenomena, such as retrograde motion of the inner planets, with the fewest assumptions) and various supporting observations (such as Venus' phases, which rule out any strictly geocentric model), combined with a physical theory that grounded the model (Newton's laws) rendered any alternative implausible by the late 1600s at the latest. It would be nearly 200 years before parallax was first detected.
They had measured the visible diameter of stars and without any parallax, would’ve also meant that the stars were absurdly large in addition to far away.
I don’t think they had a problem with the distance, per se, but the implied size.
(You have to treat stars as points - any perceived diameter is an illusion - but nobody knew that at the time.)
But it's easier than ever to do your own research in the modern age. Heliocentrism vs. geocentrism is a well established topic. It doesn't take a genius to reach the right information. You can even conduct your own experiment if you want to.
The only thing stopping people from learning besides poverty is their own free will. I think the reputation is well deserved.
Doing research means believing works written by old dead men who held power. Sometimes, they are proven false. Other times, they were right all along.
That's just figure of speech. I don't see how it's relevant.
> Doing research means believing
The thing about good science is that it's verifiable, no need to believe. In this case, anyone with a cheap telescope can conduct their own experiment. There's just no excuse for believing in geocentrism in 2023.
As I mentioned, this is a well established scientific fact we're talking about here. People believing in geocentrism failed at multiple levels. For starters, they failed to distinguish trustworthy information from outright misinformation. They also failed to comprehend the details of the arguments being made, or haven't even bothered. On top of that, they also failed at critical thinking too.
That's more than enough reason to draw conclusions about one's ability to learn.
> works written by old dead men who held power
People so powerful that they were persecuted for their work by the church.
There are also countless people, currently alive, of various age and gender, independently verifying scientific facts and writing about it. Nobody gets their facts solely from "old dead men."
What is verifiable? A well written paper on some particles being smashed together has to be taken on some level of faith unless I have the means and methods to reproduce the event. I do not have the means so I just believe it.
As a sub thread bonus I've got a sneaking suspicion Terence Tao read this collection of essays about the same time he met Paul Erdős in Australia in the early 1980s.
I don't know, there's a sibling comment to this one that brings up some proposed benefits to having a moon.
It's possible that the foundation of life itself relied on having tidal variation of some kind, since AFAIK the equivalent of early amino acids were formed in tidal pools cut off from the main ocean and cooked under the stress of UV and evaporation.
Obviously not something we'll know for sure until/unless we find other organic life, but it's interesting to think about something like having a large orbital influence being a requirement.
Plug that into the fermi equation with observed planets with a moon >0.2% the size of the parent body and it has a definite damping effect on the probability of observing complex life.
Edit: Also shocked I had to revise my numbers, the moon is only 1.2% of the weight of the earth. I thought it was something more like 10% - so you can probably put "tides too strong to allow life" under the other side of that fermi equation factor as well!
But even before radar, we had parallax methods for figuring this stuff out. Radar just brings the error down into the low parts-per-billion territory.
Thousands of years from now someone will do a presentation on how a few of us "ancients" correctly estimated the distance to other solar systems with such poor instruments and how their modern measurements from actually going there show we were only 10% off!