Ignoring Inconvenient Truths In Astronomy

Metaphysically speaking, no one paradigm is innately any better than any other. A universe that began at 9 a.m. on October 10, 4004 B.C. (which was official back in the seventeenth century) is intrinsically no less valuable for those who live by a belief in it than is our present uncertain universe, perhaps built like a yo-yo, forever destroying and remaking itself in never-ending big bangs. Each of the cosmological theories has, at different times, found totally ironclad evidence to support it.

So, given that every paradigm in every place at every time has had epistemological reasons for being the only right one thus far, why does the boat get rocked time and again, why are waves made, why does change happen, when everything is fine as it is? Even if there are a few wrinkles in an otherwise fully adequate explanation of the universe, we try very hard to get around them.

For instance, something that bothered people back in the eighth century B.C. was the way the planets appear to go backwards from time to time. According to Aristotle, who worked out a general theory in the fourth century B.C., the sky was made up of eight concentric crystalline spheres, each one carrying a planet and the outermost one carrying the stars, which were supposed to rotate east to west. This circular motion, being heavenly, was perfect-except for these planets going what looked like backwards from time to time. Well, that particular little inconvenience was solved by putting each planet in a littie epicycle, or mini-orbit, spinning round and round while still remaining attached to its own individual main sphere, which still rotated east-west like it was supposed to. That way, the planets only appeared to go backwards sometimes.

The real explanation, that the Earth was moving as well and that this caused the appearance of retrograde motion, was unacceptable within the cosmological paradigm that was still operative in the Renaissance. It was unacceptable because it would have had philosophical and theological implications that were too hot to handle. The Bible would have been seen to be wrong, for example, because it said the Earth didn’t move. So epicycles fit the bill, and kept things the way they were supposed to be. However, you had to have over 70 of them, and even then they didn’t work absolutely perfectly.

In order to keep the Earth at the center of the Universe, theologians and astronomers had to come up with wild explanatory theories that did not fit the evidence.