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Cover both sides in neutrality???!!!

The geocentric position is silly and wrong. There are no two sides here.

If you step outside and watch the stars, and map them, you'd also come to the conclusion of a geocentric universe yourself. The nature of the sky makes it appear that everything is regularly revolving around us. And incidentally you can even create astronomical predictions based upon this assumption that are highly accurate. You end up needing to assume epicycle upon epicycle, but Galileo's theory was no better there since the same is true when you assume circular orbits.

So what made Galileo decide otherwise was not any particular flaw with geocentricism, but rather he thought that he'd discovered that the tides of the ocean were caused by the Sun. That is incorrect and also led to false predictions (like places only having one high tide), so the basis for his theory was incorrect, as were many assumptions made around it. But it was still interesting and worth debating. Had he treated 'the other side' with dignity and respect, it's entirely possible that we would have adopted a heliocentric view far faster than we ultimately did.

The thing that made him question geocentrism was that Venus quite visibly orbits the Sun.

It has always been known that the tides are caused by the Moon. The hard part is to predict the tides in detail, as they depend on the geography as well. Some of the first computers were invented to predict the tides.

> Venus quite visibly orbits the Sun

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonic_system

Was already a thing, though.

Galileo not only actively rejected lunar explanations for the tides, but felt that they were driven purely by the kinetic motion of the Earth - rotation about its own axis + revolution around the Sun. He dismissed the concept of invisible action at a distance -- Newton would be born in the same year that Galileo would die. You can read more about Galileo and his views on the tides here. [1] He felt that this was his most compelling argument for heliocentricism.

[1] - https://galileo.library.rice.edu/sci/observations/tides.html

There were definitely two sides at the time in people's minds. He could have presented the geocentric position as being based on theories that were justified only by inductive reasoning, and contrasted that with his own observations and why they provide a more accurate view of the universe.

Neutral writing only means that it is not overtly prejudiced, and the weight of the evidence speaks for itself. That's definitely not what Galileo wrote. He was eventually widely considered to be right, but that didn't help him any.

Based on data and evidence that we now have? Yes.

Back then Galileo’s theory wasn’t exactly provable and while he did get the core idea right he was still wrong on quite a few important things.

e.g. Tycho‘s model solved quite a few questions that Galileo couldn’t at the time.

e.g. Stellar parallax was a big issue that was conclusively solved until the 1800s

There were two sides on the evidence available at the time.

The Tychonic model was probably the one best supported by evidence.

its worth bearing in mind that the Copernican model is also badly wrong - the sun is not the centre of the universe, just the solar system.

I think incomplete would be a better description; it was roughly right for our solar system and far more right than thinking everything revolved around the earth.

I think that is a reasonable take with regard to Copernicus - and however you look at it he made a huge advance on any previous model.

Geocentric models may look silly with the benefit of hindsight, but Galileo’s claim that the Copernican model was proven was entirely unwarranted at the time. The evidence did not exist until much later.

> ... position is silly and wrong.

Both positions were build on top of aether, quintesence and Celestial Spheres. The result was silly and wrong no matter which one you picked.

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