Me an’ ol’ Copernicus:
It had always struck me as rather odd that it took so long for anybody to come up with the idea that the earth circles the sun. Mercury, named for the god of speed, moves fastest and stays close to the sun. Venus, which is very bright, gets farther from the sun but never on the opposite side of the sky. The other planets move slowly and can indeed cross the opposite side of the sky from the sun. Seems like a cheap shot to say we are all circling the sun.
I once amused myself by trying to devise an inside-out earth that was hollow and had the sky inside. This however required having light refracted as it went through the air at different altitudes. Well it does get refracted, but it curves the wrong way. That sort of took the fun out of it. So I was stuck with a heliocentric universe. So I tended to go along with the party line we were taught that for centuries in Europe there was a conflict between superstition – in the guise of religion – and science. After all, anybody who thought about it should have seen at once that the sun is generally standing still while the earth circles it. It turns out that things are not so simple. There is a marvelous article laying the story out. (Dennis Danielson and Christopher M. Graney The Case Against Copernicus SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN vol. 310 no. 1 January 2014 page 70)
It turns out that there were legitimate objections, based on readily observed evidence, that raised problems for the sun being in the middle. And most surprising to me, those objections were not laid to rest until well into the nineteenth century. Toss that in to the hopper with the fact (if memory serves) that the theory of the atom was not actually nailed down until Einstein did so in the early twentieth century. And at that time there was a bitter quarrel between evolutionists and geneticists about whether species could really change.
So our basic notions of just what is going on around us have undergone enormous changes until quite recently. I mean the nineteenth century is hardly gone, really. And we continue to face enigmas such as the fact that relativity and quantum mechanics, both of which are well established, really can’t both be true, and that most of the matter in the universe is unobserved and that most of what is real is actually a kind of magical energy that has the opposite effect on objects from what real energy has. It’s pushing us around. Well sure, energy can push. Look at a comet. Material from it is being pushed out into a tail by energy of some sort coming from the sun. But remember old E = MC2; energy has a mass equivalent. Light is bent passing the sun, so the sun and the light are pulling on each other. But “dark energy” cannot pull, only push. This, fair reader, is a problem.
The fact that Copernicus was so long in getting accepted thus is not just a matter of stubbornness. There was contrary evidence. To bring it home, there is no question that fertility falls as kinship falls and that this accumulates over generations. That’s in the books with no conflicting evidence. The only question is how important it is.
I say it is totally important, easily dwarfing everything else I have mentioned. On that point I could be challenged. But I have evidence, and there is no conflicting evidence.
There is really no excuse for anybody who looks at the evidence and ignores it. Write me. Scream at me. Revile me and persecute me and say all manner of evil against me falsely, fair enough. But don’t just shrug and say you don’t care. If you care about anything, you must care about this.
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