What Hacker News says

2b3a51Mar 2026

Owen Gingerich was a historian of astronomy who did a census of printed early editions of Copernicus' book De revolutionibus. He found a tradition of students copying annotations from teachers readings into their own copies of the book. I recollect that he was able to trace various traditions of commentary each stemming from a well known astronomy teacher.

I suppose that checking early printings of key works looking for annotations is a pretty standard thing to do now.

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lo_zamoyskiDec 2025

> it's possible that the beliefs and propositions of individual members of a greater body don't always align with the official stance

It is, and where they depart from or twist binding doctrine, it would be a matter of heresy.

But FWIW, the Catholic Church didn’t and doesn’t have a stance on the question of heliocentrism. Why would it? It is not a question with any religious importance. Who cares which orb rotates around which? Copernicus wasn’t doing anything forbidden (nor had he vindicated heliocentrism) and had high ranking friends and acquaintances in the clergy (including cardinals like Cardinal Schõnberg and Pope Clement VII) who took an interest in his work. De Revolutionibus was itself dedicated to Pope Paul III. If anything, Copernicus was wary of other academics who held to the Ptolemaic view at the time. Plus ça change…

No doubt, you have in mind the oft-repeated Galileo affair which has become one of those stubborn black legends that seems to stay afloat despite the lack of facts supporting it because of its instrumental value for sticking it to the Church. The Galileo affair was not about heliocentrism. It was about a clash of egos and personalities (Galileo’s being of them, as he liked to pick pointless fights, including some nasty personal attacks on his friend and benefactor Urban VIII) that spanned decades. It isn’t as piquant as the story as typically told would have you believe.

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the-mitrNov 2023

Parallax by Alan Hirshfeld is a good book which tracks various efforts to find the evidence for the rotation of earth culminating in evidence of parallax of nearest stars.

Also of interest is Book that Nobody Read by Owen Gringerich in which he explores the diffusion of Copernican ideas of heliocentric system after its publication. The book is also a personal journey of the author finding/cataloging extant copies of De Revolutionibus.

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gjsman-1000Aug 2022

Try here for a purely academic overview (no religious Catholic websites or other "biased" commentators for this), that was also very recent. There are plenty of other sources, but this was just what I found first that was academic in scope.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-30833-9_...

I would also recommend reading about Nicolas Copernicus (geocentrism before Galileo), as well as Georges Lemaître (Catholic Priest who had idea for Big Bang), and Gregor Mendel (before Evolution, experiments with Genetics).

Example: "In Spain, new cosmological discoveries and ideas were discussed at both the universities and at the Casa and Consejo. For example, Jerónimo Muñoz (ca. 1520–1591), who taught astronomy and mathematics at the universities of Valencia and Salamanca, was one of the many European scientists to observe and write about the supernova of 1572. For Muñoz, the supernova challenged the Aristotelian notion that change was impossible in the celestial realm. In some of his unpublished work and letters to other European astronomers like Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), he espoused an understanding of the relationship between the celestial and terrestrial realms drawn from Stoic philosophers. He denied the existence of celestial orbs and instead asserted that the planets moved through the heavens like birds through the air or fish through the water. He also discussed Nicolaus Copernicus’ (1473–1543) heliocentric system with his students, although he did not endorse it (Navarro-Brotóns 1995, 57). In fact, as Victor Navarro-Brotóns has shown, “the work of Copernicus circulated freely in sixteenth-century Spain, where its technical and empirical aspects were greatly admired and used” (Navarro-Brotóns 1995, 63). In 1561, the statutes of the University of Salamanca specified that in the second year of the astronomy course the professor must teach either “the Almagest of Ptolemy, or its Epitome by Regiomontanus, or Geber, or Copernicus,” and that the students could vote on which text they wanted (Navarro-Brotóns 1995, 55). In 1594, these statutes were amended and the teaching of Copernicus was made mandatory, no longer subject to the vote of the students (Navarro-Brotóns 1995, 59). The 1594, statutes were reproduced with no change in 1625, despite the prohibition of Copernicus’ work by the Roman Inquisition in 1616 (Navarro-Brotóns 1995, 60). In fact, De revolutionibus was “never placed on any Spanish Inquisitorial index” (Navarro-Brotóns 1995, 63), which does not mean Spanish astronomers were free to adopt heliocentrism but does indicate that it was possible to teach and discuss Copernicus in Spanish universities. As Navarro-Brotóns notes, only one Spanish scholar, Diego de Zúñiga (1536–1597), is known to have actually endorsed the Copernican system. Others used the Prutenic tables, which were calculated using Copernicus’ mathematical models, and other parameters drawn from De revolutionibus, in much the same way that Copernicus was taught at the University of Wittenberg (Navarro-Brotóns 1995, 59; Westman 1975). Finally, interest in Copernicus spread outside universities, because the Prutenic tables and other technical aspects of Copernicus’ work had applications in navigation. For example, Juan Cedillo Diaz (ca. 1560–1625), who studied at Salamanca and became chief cosmographer at the Consejo de Indias and professor at the Mathematical Academy in Seville in 1611, made a free Spanish translation of the first three books of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus sometime between 1620 and 1625 (Granada and Crespo 2019; Navarro-Brotóns 1995, 63; Esteban Piñeiro and Gómez Crespo 1991)."

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xcambarApr 2022

I'm saying that Copernicus wrote _de revolutionibus_ in 1543 and its contents were globally accepted not before around the 1700s.

So anyone in that timeframe were looking at the state of science with their best mind and rightfully questioned "who's right? Geocentrism or heliocentrism?". And there were debates.

To know what eventually came out of it is just a privilege of our time.

Future times will have the privilege of looking down to 2022 and look at our controversies with the confidence of those that know.

This is why I'm convinced that science moves forward with debates and consensus.

Just as general relativity made consensus year after year, if you want a modern example.

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qiskitApr 2022

> I'm saying that Copernicus wrote _de revolutionibus_ in 1543 and its contents were globally accepted not before around the 1700s.

That's because the telescope hadn't even been invented yet. And no scientific evidence could be gathered, no hypothesis could be tested, etc. The discovery of the telescope and the ability to find other planets and track their orbits is what ultimately undid heliocentrism. Not consensus.

> So anyone in that timeframe were looking at the state of science with their best mind and rightfully questioned "who's right? Geocentrism or heliocentrism?". And there were debates.

Yes. But what separates humanities from science is the debate gets settled by empirical evidence. Otherwise we'd debate forever and it'll be a matter of consensus.

> Just as general relativity made consensus year after year, if you want a modern example.

Because of the observed evidence. Not consensus.

There seems to be a confusion here. In humanities, the consensus makes the theory. In science, the evidence makes the consensus.

A group of nazi historians will say the US was the bad guys and germany was the good guys. A group of US historians will say the US was the good guy and germany was the bad guy. The narrative/"truth"/history entirely depends on consensus. Who is voting. That's not how science works. The experiment/data is what's important and the consensus follows from it. Doesn't matter who is voting.

Since you believe history is science, then historians are scientists?

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