408 years ago today, Galileo’s discovery changed our understanding of the solar system forever. His astronomical observations irrefutably confirmed the hypothesis formulated by Copernicus 100 years earlier that the Earth was not the centre of the solar system. This was an Earth-shattering discovery.
Between 7th and 13th January 1610, Galileo discovered and observed the four Moons orbiting Jupiter, demonstrating that not every object in the starry sky rotated around the Earth as their centre, and thereby put the nail in the coffin of 2000 years of Aristotelian cosmology and overturned Roman Catholic cosmology.
The overweening Roman Catholic regard for Aristotelian authority held up Christian theology and scientific progress for a long time. The mold was broken by the 16th-century Protestant Reformation in Europe.
Copernicus was persuaded by Rheticus, a mathematician from the new Lutheran University of Wittenberg, where Luther introduced the European Reformation, to publish his early thoughts on the Sun being at the centre of the solar system. Reluctantly, because of fears of papal reprisals, he finally published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543, his 70th year and the year of his death. This is now reckoned to commence the Scientific Revolution.
Copernicus was not the first with this hypothesis, and Aristarchus of Samos in Greece, living in the third century BC, is usually credited with being the first to advance the opinion that the Earth orbits the Sun, although extant Sumerian clay tablets show a heliocentric solar system at a much earlier date. Copernicus knew about Aristarchus’ opinion but it is difficult to prove if he was dependent upon him for the idea or not. At least, Copernicus is credited with popularising and breaking the paradigm in European thought, just as Martin Luther broke through the religious paradigm in Roman Catholic Europe at the same time.
Heliocentrism and spherical Earth
In the 6th century BC Pythagoras was reputed to favour the view that the Earth was a sphere rather than a disk. Possibly earlier philosophers concluded similarly, and by the 5th century BC it was generally accepted among the Greeks.
As far as written records can inform us, most people believed in terra firma in ancient times, that the Earth was fixed and immovable. Upon such an opinion the geocentric hypothesis had been developed and held sway for thousands of years.
In the medieval world, the heliocentrism of Aristarchus of Samos was not well-known—just as in our day biblical teaching is not well-known. Long before Aristarchus, the prophet Isaiah in the 8th century BC told us that:
‘God sits above the circle of the Earth, Who stretches out the heavens as a curtain and spreads them out as a tent to dwell in’ Isa 40:22.
While some may interpret this as ‘the disk theory’, Hebrew exegesis does not determine this. Rather, the Hebrew word translated ‘circle’ has more of a concept of movement as in ‘circuit’ rather than shape, suggesting that the Earth was ‘on the move’.
One may wonder nowadays why intelligent people could not see that the heavens were not turning but that the Earth was turning. Possibly they did – but the significant point is who wrote it down? Possibly Isaiah did, and he was probably not alone in thinking so. It is common for people who are unfamiliar with the Bible to think that the ancient Hebrews were an unscientific people. In fact, the most scientific book in the Bible is its oldest book, the Book of Job, which is based in the Mesopotamian civilisation where the Babylonians were intimately involved in mathematics and astronomy and followed the Sumerian civilisation, where a heliocentric model was known. The Hebrews were not themselves involved in astronomy, which was often associated with false religion in those times, but this did not mean that they were ignorant and unscientific. The Hebrews had the Book of Job as part of their Scriptures and had their own views of the natural heavens. The Hebrews were forbidden to worship the heavens and the false gods associated with them. Possibly Isaiah and his contemporaries understood that the Earth was revolving, rather than the visible heavens.
Some academics know so little about the Bible, its teaching and its history that they repeat the academic mantra that Herodotus is ‘the father of history’. As he lived in the 5th century BC, during whose lifetime the Hebrew Old Testament was being completed, this title suggests to the popular mind that the biblical narratives are not history, which is indeed the poorly informed opinion of some academics. However, this story will need to wait for another blogpost.
See the Comments below.
Updates:
4 Feb 2020: the Copernican Principle updated by the global map of the cosmic background microwave radiation.
5 Mar 2022: Seven Days that changed the world: comment on the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war.
Donald's Thoughts 
Dear Donald,
We seem to be living in a era of a “Scientific Papacy” where new concepts, new discoveries, new theories, are not allowed to interrupt the growth of mankind’s “Tree of Knowledge” that has been planted and left to grow, cultivated since Babylonian times.
Earth spinning around the Sun was to be accompanied by burning at the stake: Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) insisted that the earth revolved around the sun, that there are infinite worlds inhabited by intelligent beings, and that the sun is essentially a star. For these and other beliefs, he was tried by the Inquisition, and burned as a heretic.
Recantations under threat of torture, long-term home arrests (Galileo, for 10yrs to his death), and other threats, book-bannings were commonplace. Most new cosmological discoveries have to be tried and tested against a “fossilised tree” of knowledge where hangs the reputations of scientists past & present. If a new discovery contradicts the status quo of written knowledge in accepted books, then it can’t be good or useful, and hybrid shoots and suckling stems at the base of the trunk of the “tree o knowledge” have to be surgically removed forthwith.
The new religion for the Humanists is Evolution & Cosmology by Chance, as opposed to Creationism & Theology by a benevolent God.
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Isaac Newton, a genius in his own days, was also guilty of extreme egotism, and carefully tended his own contributions to mankind’s tree of knowledge, not above stealing other scientists methodologies, and denouncing rivals (Hooke). Newton’s life and work in relation to his achievements was also guarded by his hostile arguments with such people as Robert Hooke, John Flamsteed – the first Astronomer Royal, and Gottfried Leibniz- the co-discoverer of the calculus. Although an astounding genius, Newton was a deeply flawed human being, what you could call a “scientific pope” and a religious heretic to boot as well.
Even today, such egotism in cosmology is much defended, one can call to mind Prof Stephen Hawking and his battles against scientific newcomers, in order to preserve his own legacy on black-hole theories, the spinning plugholes where we will all be sucked into one day. His mantra: Oh to “know the Mind of God” ~ but a God he didn’t believe to exist anyway.
Now we have to listen to the dismal world of Prof Brian Cox: everything is dying away, becoming grains of sand then turning to dust, the Universal Light flickers and goes out ~ everything diessssssssssss after trillions of years. Sad isn’t it? Well, Things can only get Better!
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But in reality it is the rotten branches of the tree of knowledge that need to be sawn off, perhaps even down at its lower trunk. God did that often, once with the Babylonian-Dream Kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 4:10-15, 19-22). Today, we now appear to live in a “Scientific- Cosmological Kingdom” who’s time has now come to fruition. Let’s shed some New Light on the matter and where the axe may fall.
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Interestingly enough in 1987, a Norman-Setterfield paper on “Light problems” was published, and another paper on light speed appeared, written by a Russian, V. S. Troitskii. Troitskii not only postulated that the speed of light had not been constant, but that light speed had originally been about 10^10 times (that’s 10 to the power of 10) faster than now. ~~~ What!!
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Since then, a multitude of papers on cosmology and the speed of light have shown up in journals and on the web. The theories abound as to what is changing, and in relation to what, and what the possible effects are. There is one person who is continuing to work with the data, however. As the storm around the 1987 report settled down, Barry Setterfield got back to work in Australia, investigating the data rather than playing around with pure theory. E=MC^2, might not be a safe branch for egotistical Einstein to perch on any longer.
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Meanwhile, halfway around the world from Australia, in Arizona, a respected astronomer named William Tifft was finding something strange going on with the redshift measurements of light from distant galaxies. It had been presumed that the shift toward the red end of the spectrum of light from these distant galaxies was due to a currently expanding universe, and the measurements should be seen as gradually but smoothly increasing as one went through space. That wasn’t what Tifft was finding. The measurements weren’t smooth. They jumped from one plateau to another. They were quantized, or came in quantities with distinct breaks in between them.
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When Tifft published his findings, astronomers were incredulous and dismissive. In the early 1990s in Scotland, two other astronomers decided to prove him wrong once and for all. Guthrie and Napier collected their own data and studied it. They ended up deciding Tifft was right. What was going on? Barry Setterfield read the material and studied the data. The universe could not be expanding if the red shift measurements were quantized. Expansion would not occur in fits and starts. So what did the red shift mean? While most others were simply denying the Tifft findings, Setterfield took a closer look. And it all started to make sense. The data was showing where the truth of the matter was. While many articles continued to be published regarding theoretical cosmologies, with little regard for much of the data available, Setterfield was more interested in the data anomalies.
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The “Scientific Papacy base in its Vatican at CERN, and from its Cathedrals of science elsewhere” moved quickly, and swung about to block this new heresy. Any new creed over the speed of Light must be stopped, but then large branches of the “Tree of Knowledge” are now beginning to sag, to go rotten & fall off, taking cherished reputations and erstwhile funding, with them.
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There is a reason that Setterfield’s work is not being referenced by mainstream scientists – or even looked at by most. If he is right about what the data are indicating, we are living in a very young universe. So we shouldn’t expect intergalactic messages coming from far-distant civilisations. This inevitable conclusion will never be accepted by “fossilised tree” standard science, as Evolution requires billions of years to sort itself out.
by Colin Mansfield, FBCS.
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Colin,
I have Barry Setterfield’s 1987 paper “Atomic Constants, Light, and Time” and have placed a photocopy on my study door since then of his graph plotting the historical results showing the decay in the speed of light. His brief comment on this can be read here http://www.setterfield.org/cdkcurve.html
The history of the long debate about the decay in the speed of light, and Barry’s place in it, part of which you have inserted in your comment, can be read in context here: http://www.khouse.org/articles/2002/423/
More comment can be found here: http://thecreationclub.com/the-frauds-of-evolution-9-the-decreasing-speed-of-light-barry-setterfield-and-the-age-of-the-universe/
Setterfield’s work and Russell Humphreys’ “Starlight & Time: Solving the Puzzle of Distant Starlight in a Young Universe”, see https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=russell+humphreys+space+time
are significant Christian contributions to cosmology.
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Hi Donald,
I’ve put Barry Seterfield’s findings in this month’s magazine (bringing in tomorrow at HAS). I then wondered if the measurement of the moon-earth distance would show up a discrepancy, a variance over a year due to slower light between the 2 fixed objects (earth, moon). So looking at measurements from wikipedia (astronomy):
the moon gets further away from earth by 3.8cms every year (lidar measured to mirrors left on the moon). Average earth to moon distance = 385,000.6 kms.
Annual rate of movement as a fraction = 3.8/(385000.6 x 100000) all in cms
= 9.87 x 10 to power minus 11
Rounding up, ergo annual rate of deceleration of Light = 1 x 10 to power of minus 10 if the 2 bodies are fixed in place and the light speed is itself slowing down.
This is similar to Chuck Missler’s (& others) calculation that Light was 10 to power 10 faster in the past.
The possible implications of this is that the Universe is/was/willbe in a steady state and eternal, not a big-bang coming from a microscopic particle going to a nasty end!
Perhaps Prof Fred Hoyle was right after all.
Kind regards
Colin.
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Einstein’s worldview — Is it true?
If the speed of Light is decreasing (and is not a constant value for all time) then we should not be in doubt that some particles, data information, or events, can travel faster than our current speed of Light depending on their source. We are living in a “slowed down world” fitting for our material physical existence. To the rest of the Universe, it would seem as if we are like insects embedded in amber. Light and Time are inseparable? But, if the speed of Light varies then our assumption of the steady flow of Time flies out of the window. Particles could outstrip the “current limit of light speed” and cause effects that defeat our notion of a “sensible” universe.
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Since the 1970s, physicists have tested the plausibility of local realism by using experiments called Bell tests, first proposed in the 1960s by Irish physicist John Bell. To conduct these Bell tests, physicists compare randomly chosen measurements, such as the polarisation of two entangled particles, like photons, that exist in different locations. If one photon is polarised in one direction (say, up), the other will be going sideways only a certain percentage of the time.
If the number of times that the particle measurements mirror each other goes above that threshold regardless of what the particles are or the order in which the measurements are selected, that suggests the separated particles “choose” their state only at the moment they are measured. And it implies that the particles can instantly communicate with each other, the so-called spooky action at a distance that bothered Einstein so much.
These synchronised responses thereby contradict the notion of genuinely independent existence, a view that forms the foundation of the principle of local realism upon which the rules of classical mechanics are based. But, time after time, tests have shown that entangled particles do demonstrate correlated states that exceed the threshold; that the world is, indeed, spooky; and that Einstein was wrong.
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A ground-breaking quantum experiment recently confirmed the reality of “spooky action-at-a-distance” the bizarre phenomenon that Einstein hated, in which linked particles seemingly communicate faster than the speed of light.
And all it took was 12 teams of physicists in 10 countries, more than 100,000 volunteer-gamers and over 97 million data units all of which were randomly generated by hand.
The volunteers operated from locations around the world, playing an online video game on Nov. 30, 2016, that produced millions of bits, or “binary digits” the smallest unit of computer data.
Physicists then used those random bits in so-called Bell tests, designed to show that entangled particles, or particles whose states are mysteriously linked, can somehow transfer information faster than light can travel, and that these particles seem to “choose” their states at the moment they are measured.
Their findings, recently reported in a new study, contradicted Einstein’s description of a state known as “local realism,” study co-author Morgan Mitchell, a professor of quantum optics at the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona, Spain, told Live Science in an email.
“We showed that Einstein’s world-view of local realism, in which things have properties whether or not you observe them, and no influence travels faster than light, cannot be true, at least one of those things must be false,” Mitchell said. This introduces the likelihood of two mind-bending scenarios: Either our observations of the world actually change it, or particles are communicating with each other in some manner that we can’t see or influence. “Or possibly both,” Mitchell added.
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From a certain standpoint (a God point, or a Mind node) in the Universe, it would be possible then for the “End” to determine the “Beginning” or in other words for the Effect to specify and influence the Cause, rather than our traditional and classical view of the Universe, wherever that leads us,
by Colin Mansfield.
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Thanks Colin,
This is a useful post to which one can link an enquirer.
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