The Earth but a Satellite of the Sun

Extract

New ideas of a really fundamental character are always received with horror and alarm by the general public, and are vigorously repudiated. When Fred Hoyle, in a brilliant series of broadcasts, remarked that his physico-mathematical calculations indicated that newly created hydrogen was being continuously injected into the Universe, the B.B.C. had to take hasty countermeasures. A well-known authoress of detective stories and religious pl ys, followed by a respected professor of science, declared on the air that the earlier t lks had been merely speculative. A similar role was filled in 1543 by the theologian Andreas Osiander, who added a Preface to Copernicus's startling book De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (the author having just died), to the effect that he had only intended as a mathematical hypothesis, not as a matter of fact, to picture a rotating globe revolving round the Sun. From the point of view of pure geometry it was, it is true, merely a matter of a change of coordinates. People settled back comfortably for another sixty or seventy years, until Galileo made certain awkward observations with his new telescope.