A privileged position
A discredited historical myth refuses to die.
Much of our work is explaining science and mathematics to people who are not scientists or mathematicians, so we have a professional interest in others’ efforts in this direction. One of our consultants is now partway through a book that will eventually cover high-energy physics for the layman. None of us has much background in this area, so we’re interested in how it comes out. So far it has been mostly historical, much about Newtonian Physics and a bit about astronomy. The treatment is somewhat unusual, which is all to the good; but depressingly, it repeats a myth that we wish could finally be laid to rest.
Somewhat paraphrased, it goes like this: the geocentric picture of the universe, current in ancient times through the Middle Ages, held that Earth’s position in the center of the universe was a mark of honor and importance. The Copernican theory, placing the Sun at the center, thus demoted the Earth (and by implication Man) to the unimportant periphery. This continued when the Sun was shown to be a run-of-the-mill star among many billions in the Milky Way, and the Milky Way shown to be only one of innumerable galaxies in the universe. Modern astronomy is thus a lesson in humility. The defenders of the old view were horrified by this demotion and felt it to be a blow at all existing power structures, in particular the Catholic Church. They thus fought against it with all the powers at their disposal, in a proud but losing battle against the humiliating Truth.
Our own reading among the geocentrics didn’t find much support for the first part of this thesis. Ptolemy understood that the Earth was tiny compared to the stellar universe, as far as he could tell infinitely small. None of the philosophers we read made any connection between being the center and being important. Indeed, one scholar has noted that the Earth, being made of corruptible and corrupt matter, according to the old philosophy was far inferior to the eternal, perfect heavens. And at the center of the Earth (according to Dante) was Hell, and at its center Lucifer himself. The geocentric theory was not defended on the basis of Earthly or human importance, or virtue.
The myth appears to have been invented by heliocentrics, attributing scurrilous motives to their opponents as well a blindness to the obvious. Well, the superiority of the Sun-centered system was not obvious at the start. Copernicus’ calculations were no more accurate than Ptolemy’s; better planet predictions would have to wait until Kepler discarded circular orbits more than a half-century after the former’s death. And a new physics was required to meet all the old objections, not completed until Newton another half-century later.
The myth lived on as part of the story of the transfer of political, economic and scientific power from the Mediterranean to Northern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The story was never more than an overgeneralization in the first place, but it’s easy to remember. And modern readers can feel superior to the false-proud geocentrics because of our greater humility.
