Science Rather Than God: Riccioli's Review of the Case for and against the Copernican Hypothesis

Playfair J. , “Progress of mathematical and physical science”, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, supplement to the 4th, 5th, and 6th, editions with preliminary dissertations on the history of the sciences (Edinburgh, 1824), 1–127, p. 97.

Figuier L. , Earth and sea, transl. by Adams W. H. D. (London, 1870), 89.

Van Helden Albert , “Galileo, telescopic astronomy, and the Copernican system”, in The general history of astronomy, ed. by Hoskin M. A. , vol. 2A (Cambridge, 1984), 81–105, p. 103.

Grant Edward , Planets, stars, and orbs: The medieval cosmos, 1200–1687 (Cambridge, 1996), 63.

Linton Christopher M. , From Eudoxus to Einstein: A history of mathematical astronomy (Cambridge, 2004), 227.

Riccioli Giovanni Battista , Almagestum novum (Bologna, 1651). A high-resolution copy of this work is available at http://www.e-rara.ch/zut/content/pageview/140188. The 126 arguments in abridged form are listed in Part 2, Book 9, Section 4, chaps. 33 (pro-Copernican arguments with responses) and 34 (anti-Copernican arguments with responses), pp. 465–77. Each argument is numbered in these chapters, so from here forward references to arguments will be given as PC or AC with their number. Renditions into English used in this paper are by the author and Christina Graney. An unrefereed English rendition of the arguments is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.2057: Graney C. , “126 arguments concerning the motion of the Earth, as presented by Giovanni Battista Riccioli in his 1651 Almagestum novum”.

AC 12, AC 27.

AC 53.

AC 34.

AC 53.

AC 34.

Examples include PC 12, 15, 27, 41, and AC 59–62, 71–5.

PC 15. This is Galileo's argument that if the stars have diurnal motion, then those near the Pole move through small circles with small velocities, and those near the equator move through large circles with large velocities, and this is absurd — See Galileo Galilei [1632], Dialogue concerning the two chief world systems, transl. by Drake Stillman (New York, 2001), 138. The response Riccioli provides to this argument is that such is motion on any rotating sphere, be that the sphere of stars or the sphere of the Earth, and if anything, such varying speeds are more absurd on Earth than in the heavens.

Drake Stillman , Discoveries and opinions of Galileo (New York, 1957), 137. For a detailed discussion of this phenomenon, see Graney C. M. Grayson T. P. , “On the telescopic disks of stars: A review and analysis of stellar observations from the early 17th through the middle 19th centuries”, Annals of science , lxvii (2011), 351–73.

Graney C. M. , “The telescope against Copernicus: Star observations by Riccioli supporting a geocentric universe”, Journal for the history of astronomy, xli (2010), 453–67.

AC 67, 70.

Letter of 24 November 1589 from Tycho Brahe to C. Rothmann, in Brahe Tycho , Epistolarum astronomicarum libri (Nuremberg, 1601), 167. Also see Blair Ann , “Tycho Brahe's critique of Copernicus and the Copernican system”, Journal for the history of ideas , li (1990), 355–77, p. 364.

Letter of 18 April 1590 from C. Rothmann to Tycho Brahe, in Brahe Tycho , op. cit. (ref. 17), 186.

Vermij Rienk , “Putting the Earth in Heaven: Philips Lansbergen, the early Dutch Copernicans and the mechanization of the world picture”, in Mechanics and cosmology in the medieval and early modern period, ed. by Bucciantini M. Camerota M. Roux S. (Florence, 2007), 121–41, quotations on pp. 123–5.

Johnson Francis R. Larkey Sanford V. , “Thomas Digges, the Copernican system, and the idea of the infinity of the universe in 1576”, The Huntington Library bulletin, v (1934), 69–117, p. 78.

Ibid. I have quoted a version with somewhat modernized spelling found in Danielson Dennis Richard , The book of the cosmos: Imagining the universe from Heraclitus to Hawking (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 137.

Copernicus Nicolaus , On the revolutions of heavenly spheres , transl. by Wallis C. G. (Amherst, NY, 1995), 26–7.

AC 70.

Riccioli also does not accept the Copernicans' theology, and uses theology against them. He comments that God could choose means of showing His power less arcane than stars that appear to us to be so small and which we only deduce to be large by means of the Copernican hypothesis, and that God could have provided other pieces of information detectible by us that would allow us to come into certain acquaintance of this distance and size, since all astronomical phenomena could be explained without the Copernican hypothesis, and physical experiments involving falling bodies and projectiles “clearly refute that fraudulent hypothesis”, as will be discussed further (Almagestum novum, Part 2, Book 9, Sec. 4, chap. 30, p. 462; an unrefereed English rendition of this part of the Almagestum novum is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.2228: Graney C. , “Further argument against the motion of the Earth, based on telescopic observations of the stars: An English rendition of chapter 30, book 9, section 4, pages 460–463 of the Almagestum novum volume II of G. B. Riccioli”). He notes that scripture speaks of the Sun as the greatest heavenly body, and only mentions the numbers of the stars and says nothing about their size (ibid., 462–3).

PC 11. Also Almagestum novum, Part 2, Book 9, Sec. 4, chap. 30, p. 462.

Graney Grayson (ref. 14), 359–68.

Galileo , Dialogue (ref. 13), 216–18.

Indeed, in his Dialogue Galileo addresses what is now known as the Eötvös effect (after the nineteenth-century physicist) in a discussion of cannons fired at targets to the east and west, whose projectiles hit above and below their intended marks, respectively, owing to Earth's rotation (Dialogue (ref. 13), 209–12). The ship analogy does not explain away this phenomenon, which Riccioli discusses in AC 18.

AC 19.

AC 19. See also Graney C. M. , “Coriolis Effect, two centuries before Coriolis”, Physics today, lxiv (2011), 8.

AC 10.

AC 17.

Graney C. M. , “Contra Galileo: Riccioli's ‘Coriolis-Force’ argument on the Earth's diurnal rotation”, Physics in perspective (in press).

See the following for examples: PC 3, 14, 49, AC 1, 7–9, 23–5, 37–8, 42.

See PC 28, 29.

PC 43.

PC 48. Riccioli also refers the reader to a lengthy discussion of this question in the Almagestum novum, which we have not translated and which might be an interesting subject for further research. Note that the special commission appointed by Pope Urban Vill to investigate the Dialogue criticized Galileo's tidal theory because it suggests a twelve-hour rather than six-hour interval between high and low tides. See Finocchiaro M. A. , The Galileo Affair: A documentary history (Berkeley, 1989), 274.

PC 42.

PC 32.

Raphael R. , “A non-astronomical image in an astronomical text: Visualizing motion in Riccioli's Almagestum novum”, Journal for the history of astronomy, xlii (2011), 73–90, p. 74.