The Birth of Modern Astronomy

Copernicus claimed that over the course of a year, the apparent motion of the Sun about
the Earth could be described as well by the motion of the Earth about the Sun. He further
proposed that the celestial sphere's apparent rotation could be clarified by assuming the Earth
rotates when the celestial sphere is stationary. To the claim that it would break into fragments if
Earth turned around an axis, Copernicus responded that if such a motion would rip Earth apart,
the much faster motion of the much larger celestial sphere expected by the geocentric
hypothesis would be much more catastrophic.

Copernicus was unable to prove that the world was rotating around the sun. In fact, the
old Ptolemaic system may have compensated for the movements of the planets in the sky with
some revisions, too. Copernicus, however, pointed out that the Ptolemaic cosmology was
clumsy and lacked its successor's beauty and symmetry.

In the world of physics, the study of motion and the behavior of forces on bodies were
Galileo's main achievements. It was then familiar to all people, as it is now to us, that once
anything is at rest, it appears to stay at rest, and to set it in motion needs some outside force.
As a consequence, rest was usually called the normal state of matter. Galileo introduced to
government officials of the city-state of Venice a telescope with a magnification of 9. We say that
the linear dimensions of the objects being observed looked nine times greater by a
magnification of 9, or, similarly, the objects appeared nine times nearer than they actually were.
A system for viewing distant objects has been connected with clear strategic advantages.
Galileo was able to carry out, with his telescope, the examination of the Copernican theory
based on the Venus phases. In Ptolemy’s model, Venus could also show phases, but they were
the wrong phases in the wrong order from what Galileo observed.