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Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

Another reason why heliocentism was rejected is the lack of observable star parallax which it implies. No one had an idea stars could possibly be SO far away... and it took another 200 years to detect parallax and further 30 years to measure it first.

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That too. Several objections to Galileo's model were based on real observations, which means science. There were sound scientific reasons to reject his model despite the fact that the core of it was a vast improvement. It's an interesting scientific contradiction.

Then they should have just published their own objections. This in no way justifies the persecution of Galileo, which was basically akin to the Soviet persecution of Sakharov -- like him he was under house arrest and forbidden to interact with the scientific community at large.

Sakharov wasn't persecuted for his scientific views. Just because he became an anti-Communist (and a pretty crazy one).

In a way the same is true for Galileo: he was only really prosecuted after writing a book in which he called the pope (who was up til that point friendly and open to his views) a fool.

Bad lesson from this (completely valid) analogy: by 1970s, Communism has become a full-blown religion, with it's pseudo-scientific roots being thoroughly debunked, but politicians resting on them stubbornly refusing to give way.

That's not even a bad lesson: it is possible to interpret Communism as a radical Christian sect, which, having done away with God altogether, tries to build Heaven on earth. This way, its core beliefs do make sense...or rather, they're internally consistent.

And what observations were these?

(And I wish you'd stop this nonsense of implying that Galileo had his own special heliocentric model. He didn't; he was advocating the model of Copernicus.)

"it took another 200 years to detect parallax"

However, the aberration of starlight was detected in the early 1700s. Although no one had thought to predict its appearance, people quickly realized it only made sense if the Earth was in motion, and was impossible to produce in a geocentric model.

(And, of course, heliocentric elliptical orbits of Kepler explained planetary motion much better than any geocentric system.)

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