Science is a process, a methodology. It's not a collection of truthful fact.
Some got closer by accident, not because they had the right methodology. Because of that I award them no points.
Some got closer by accident, not because they had the right methodology. Because of that I award them no points.
One relevant excerpt:
“A phrase seems to have been humming in his ear like a tune one cannot get rid of; it crops up in his writings over and again: there is a force in the sun which moves the planet, there is a force in the sun, there is a force in the sun. And since there is a force in the sun, there must exist some beautifully simple relation between the planet’s distance from the sun and its speed. A light shines the brighter the nearer we are to its source, and the same must apply to the force of the sun: the closer the planet to it, the quicker it will move. This is his instinctive conviction, already expressed in the Mysterium Cosmographicum; but now, at last, he has succeeded in proving it.
In fact he has not. He has proved the inverse ratio of speed to distance only for the two extreme points of the orbit; and his extension of this ‘Law’ to the entire orbit was a patently incorrect generalization. Moreover, Kepler knew this, and admitted it at the end of the thirty-second chapter,18 before he became airborne; but immediately afterwards, he conveniently forgot it. This is the first of the critical mistakes which ‘as if by a miracle’ cancelled out, and led Kepler to the discovery of his Second Law. It looks as if his conscious, critical faculties were anaesthetized by the creative impulse, by his impatience to get to grips with the physical forces in the solar system.“
Likewise, Democritus correctly described matter as consisting of fundamental particles too small to see in 400 B.C., but verification wouldn't happen for over a millennium. Democritus still deserves credit for this observation.