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This was Tycho Brahe's famous and perfectly sound argument against the Copernican theory. 'The stars remain fixed in apparent position all the time, yet the Copernicans tell us that the earth from which we view the stars is circling once a year in an orbit many millions of miles in diameter; how is it that from so widely ranging a point of view we do not see widely different celestial scenery?
It is rather with the difference between the flat and the round worlds as conceptions in art and imagination that I am concerned. It is a very remarkable thing that none of us are really Copernicans in our actual outlook upon things. We are convinced intellectually that we inhabit a small provincial planet, but we do not feel in the least suburban.
We are inclined to think that, with respect to every great addition which has been made to the stock of human knowledge, the case has been similar; that without Copernicus we should have been Copernicans, that without Columbus America would have been discovered, that without Locke we should have possessed a just theory of the origin of human ideas.
But within a few years from the persecution of Bruno, Galileo was imprisoned, and the last years of his life made miserable, because it had become clear that in setting the earth adrift from its position as centre of the universe, he and his brother Copernicans were sanctioning the belief in other worlds than ours.
The Copernicans would have silenced these objectors at once if they had tried dropping a ball from the mast-head, since they would have found that it does fall exactly at the foot, as the theory requires; but no; they admitted the spurious fact, and struggled vainly to make out a difference between the two cases. “The ball was no part of the ship—and the motion forward was not natural, either to the ship or to the ball.
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