Talk:Copernican heliocentrism

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 24 August 2020 and 20 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Spookykylie.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 18:27, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

How bad was the Ptolemaic system

A recent edit uses as its reference a page from Iowa State University titled The Copernican model. This asserts in part that the predictions of the Ptolemaic system "got worse and worse". I believe this is misleading. Orbital periods for the known planets had been calculated with reasonable precision. As far as I can see, ephemerides calculated in 1450 were just as accurate as those calculated in 1550. In any case, the initial heliocentric system (with circular rather than elliptical orbits) was no more accurate than Ptolemy's. Should this assertion be removed or modified, despite the reference? Rjm at sleepers (talk) 09:11, 5 December 2019 (UTC)

Confused sentence removed

I have removed the following -

"Over the years, the Ptolemaic system become less reliable and less accurate which became obsolete to Copernicus's system. ".

The sentence is somewhat confused and the supporting reference does not seem to be available, so I cannot work out to what extent the reference supported the sentence.

My understanding is that the Copernican model was not noticeably more accurate and the Ptolemaic model did not become obsolete. Rjm at sleepers (talk) 05:40, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

References

Sentence removed

I have removed this sentence from lead

Copernican heliocentrism is often regarded as the launching point to modern astronomy and the Scientific Revolution.

It serves no significant purpose. Sounds more rhetorical than encyclopaedic ChandlerMinh (talk) 17:14, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

Explanation of the seasons

In the section Modern Views, there is a part that reads:

Copernicus gave a clear account of the cause of the seasons: that the Earth's axis is not perpendicular to the plane of its orbit.

However, the obliquity of the ecliptic is sufficient to explain the seasons, regardless of the particular model adopted. The statement therefore is misleading. The following image suffices to explain the seasons:

External image
[1] [The] orientation [of the ecliptic] with respect to our horizon changes as the sphere spins around us each day.

173.225.242.152 (talk) 04:34, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

Is Copernicus' system really heliocentric?

Heliocentrism means that the Sun's centre is also the centre of the Solar System and is at rest. Copernicus, however, in his "Commentariolus" (about 1510), tertia petitio, states that the centre of the system is NOT also the centre of the Sun, even though it is quite near to that centre. Copernicus calculates the distance between these points exactly (1/25 of the radius of the earth's orbit). This can also be found in Copernicus' 1543 published book. However, this book had been subject to miscorrections by Andreas Osiander who supervised the printing while Copernicus lay ill at Frauenburg. For example, the diagram attached to the book of 1543, showing the smiling sun at the centre, is NOT the same as in Copernicus' autograph, where the centre is empty. Note by the way that Isaac Newton in his "Principia" of 1687, book III Prop. XII, clearly says that the Sun's centre cannot be the centre of the system since the Sun's centre moves around that point. Newton's celestial mechanics implies the fact that in a revolving system of several bodies every single body must be in motion around the centre of the system (Principia, Corollary IV to the laws of motion). 79.198.225.150 (talk) 17:12, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

The model of Copernicus

The model shown as an illustration to the article is false, since it is NOT Coperpernican. The true Copernican model can be seen in Copernicus' existing autograph. It differs in several most important aspects from the one that was published in 1543 in Nuremberg under the supervision of Andreas Osiander. It is known that Osiander corrupted Copernicus' manuscript by replacing the author's preface with an different one which he anonymously inserted. The false model corresponds with Osiander's idea to explain the new cosmology in relativistic manner, by simply changing the places of sun and earth, which is absolutely not Copernican. In Copernicus' authentic model the centre is empty. 79.198.225.150 (talk) 13:44, 16 March 2024 (UTC)