RT> KK> As for me personally, if I'd had to use one of Galileo's extremely
RT> KK> primitive telescopes, I wouldn't have discovered _anything_!
RT>Maybe, maybe not. Who's to say?
What I was getting at was that the telescope has just been invented,
and Galileo had to grind the lenses for all the scopes he made, and
their quality was awful by modern standards.  If I'd been Galileo and
that's what I'd had to use, we'd still be living in the Middle Ages.  
RT>                        You might have discovered the moons orbiting
RT>Jupiter that disproved the belief at that time that everything in the 
cosmos
RT>orbited earth. Mind you there was already rough mathematical evidence that 
th
RT>sun was the centre of the solar system by then anyway if my memory serves 
me
RT>correctly, so you might have had a reason for looking if you were aware of 
it
IIRC, Jupiter's moons were a compelling but not conclusive argument
for the heliocentric model.  I think what pushed Galileo over the
edge into accepting Copernicus were the phases of Venus.
The first time you see Venus with good magnification is a real shock,
because you're expecting a disk, and what you typically see is a
distinct crescent.  IOW Venus has phases just like the moon.
AFAIK there is no way to explain this except by a model that has
Venus orbiting the sun.  But even in Galileo's time I think it
could still be argued that all the other planets orbited the
sun, but the sun orbited the earth.
BTW, a propos PHILOSOPHY,  in Newton's time the real shocker
when his work was published was not really the mathematical neatness
of his model, but soemthing that would never occur to us today.
It was "well known" in that time that affairs on earth ran according
to one set of vulgar earthly rules, but that heavenly affairs
operated according to ways and means that had nothing to do with
mere earthly ways.  This was of course a very old, essentially
religious view, but it was as basic to human thought as anything
could be.  Newton showed that the heavens -- or the planets at
least -- obeyed the same "rules" as earthly things.  That was
as profound a paradigm shift as relativity or QM.
 * SLMR 2.1a * If evolution is outlawed, only outlaws will evolve.
--- PCBoard (R) v15.4/M 5 Beta
(1:301/45)
---------------