Copernicus Coverup?

I just read in a "Book Of Facts" by Isaac Asimov that, when Copernicus wrote De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, which talked about the planets revolving around the sun, not Earth, he talked about the Greek, Aristarchus. Aristarchus was an Ancient Greek astronomer who had developed and recorded a solar system model. Yet, later, Copernicus eliminated that passage.

Has anyone ever heard anything about this? Why would he remove information about a person before him who had this same theory? This just got me wondering if Copernicus hadn't just rediscovered Aristarchus's theories and reintorduced them to the world as his own.

Copernicus himself originally gave credit to Aristarchus in his own heliocentric treatise, De revolutionibus caelestibus , where he had written, "Philolaus believed in the mobility of the earth, and some even say that Aristarchus of Samos was of that opinion." Interestingly, this passage was crossed out shortly before publication, maybe because Copernicus decided his treatise would stand on its own merit.

The wrightings of both Aristarchus and Archimedes were well known amongst the educated of the time. He was aware of this and really just brought it into popular discussion again.

My favorite bit of info on Copernicus is that, when he introduced the heliocentric model, it was in fact a lot more wrong than the currect geocentric model at the time. Who would've thunk!

We don't know why he did, possibly to protect himself or possibly to take more credit. As if he needed to do that.

Re Aristarchus

......violently fought, his heliocentric model fell quickly into oblivion, for he was accused of departing from the principles of Aristotle's laws of motion. These laws gave "proof" of the Earths motionlessness that was unanimously convincing to the philosophers.

I would like to think that he omitted it so as not to give any help to the "debunkers" of the time. Nothing wrong with what he did.

I don't think it was Copernicus trying to rip off Aristarchus.

In Copernicus's time Aristarchus was well known, even if he wasn't given enough credit by the historians of his time.

Here is an excellent biography of Aristarchus.

www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk...


Some quotes from the link:

Historians of mathematics have, as a rule, given too little attention to Aristarchus of Samos. The reason is no doubt that he was an astronomer, and therefore it might be supposed that his work would have no sufficient interest for the mathematician. The Greeks knew better; they called him 'Aristarchus the mathematician'.

Aristarchus of Samos is a little-known but often cited precursor of Copernicus. All information about him derives from a handful of scattered references in Classical writers, plus a short treatise of his which does not mention heliocentrism. Accordingly historians often mention him, cite one or two facts and move on to another subject - after providing a few words of explanation that reveal much about the historians' biases.

Here's a good passage explaining why he isn't given credit for his heliocentric model.

The only surviving work of Aristarchus, On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon, is not based on the sun centred theory and unfortunately his work on that sun centred theory referred to by Archimedes has been lost. On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon provides the details of his remarkable geometric argument, based on observation, whereby he determined that the Sun was about 20 times as distant from the Earth as the Moon, and 20 times the Moon's size. Both these estimates were an order of magnitude too small, but the fault was in Aristarchus's lack of accurate instruments rather than in his correct method of reasoning.

No, I haven't... But that doesn't mean that it hasn't happend, right...? Might very well be...

Anything good is not original, anything original is not good. - A.R.

Building an idea on another's idea is no cause to say 'covereup'.

Yeah right...

There is a conspiracy here. It was conspired amongst all those who knew the geocentric view was incorrect, but it served their purposes to tell people the opposite for a LONG time (more than a few hundred years)

They turned it into a tenet of religious authority, which was also planned.

Aristarchian Model? No way, that name sucks. Copernicus and Capricorn, naah. There is no relation there...

Copernicus was given the task of putting forth the theory again, and he did so admirably. It doesn't mean we should give him credit, any of us could have come up with it, if we had lived on more than one continent (and thus, you knew the seasons existed at the same time)

Lets not even get into what was known in ancient times about our solar system far away and long before ancient Greece.