Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
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I will respond to questions and comments as time permits, but if you want to take issuewith any position expressed here, you first have to answer this question:
What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?
I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutabilityis one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific. Moreover,I have found it to be a great general-purpose cut-through-the-crap question to determinewhether somebody is interested in serious intellectual inquiry or just playing mind games.Note, by the way, that I am assuming the burden of proof here - all youhave to do is commit to a criterion for testing.It's easy to criticize science for being "closed-minded". Are you open-mindedenough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?
"Everybody knows" that medieval man believed the earth was flat, that the stars were not far away, and that the Ptolemaic system of accounting for the motions of the planets was cumbersome and became progressively more desperate and ad-hoc as astronomers struggled vainly to correct its errors.
"Everybody" is wrong. In his great book, the Almagest, Ptolemy statesexplicitly that the earth is a sphere (Book I, Chapter 4) and that, compared to the distance to the stars, the earth is a point with no size (Book I, Chapter 6). His system matched the motions of the planets surprisingly well and provided Copernicus and Kepler with a ready-made scale for the Solar System. The Alphonsine Tables, compiled in the late 13th Century by King Alfonso XII of Castile, were not overly cumbersome and required only a few quantities to be looked up.
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Created 21 January, 2003, Last Update 24 May, 2020
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