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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7471259" data-attributes="member: 16814">I have no idea where your idea of modern mathematical purity comes from, but it's entirely wrong.  There are lots and lots of theories that are based solely on mathematical models that do a pretty good job of predicting behaviors but aren't based on observation.  Heck, take the flow of electricity -- we still don't know what "direction" electricity flows or if it's even a net flow of electrons or a net flow of "holes" where electrons aren't.  But we have math that we can make work, and it does a good enough job that you can read this on your computer.  Don't even get started on RF communication theory.  Seriously, don't, there's a few things I was shocked to learn that we just use statistics because it results in a useful answer but can't even begin to describe the phenomenon -- and that's before we get to quantum theory.There's a modern belief that our science is really truth and should be held up.  That's wrong.  Science is a tool, a damn good one, but it's only as good as the craftsman using it.  Our theories may look just as stupid to future people in a few hundred years as Geo-centrism looks to us.   Nope.  You can't point to one piece of evidence that isn't supported by other necessary evidence and claim it's sufficient.  That's quackery.  At the time, even with the discover of moons around Jupiter, the overwhelming evidence was that the planets and the stars and the sun orbited the Earth.  It's normal to resist facts when they attack a strongly held belief in how things were, and you've likely always heard that Galileo proved helio-centrism and that the Church punished him to suppress it.  But, that's wrong.  Galileo gathered some evidence, but not enough, and was a loud quack with a good guess.  He got himself in trouble with the Church by mocking the Pope.  That's it.  The core evidence that things didn't orbit Earth is star parallax.  If thing really didn't orbit the Earth, they'd be in slightly different places relative to each other and their position in the sky as Earth went around the sun.  Direct telescope observation showed that this was NOT the case.  Stars didn't shift.  Now we know that's because they're so insanely far away that the shift is tiny and you need a very powerful and clear telescope to detect it, but that didn't mean the observational science of the time didn't do a good job and was upended because Galileo had an idea or saw some moons orbiting Jupiter.  Heck, the Church even acknowledged the Galilean moons at the time, so that wasn't it.  We keep giving Galileo prime place, but, again, Kepler did far better work that had even more evidence behind it.  He, though, was more humble, and didn't tell everyone he was right because he couldn't prove it and knew it.  All Galileo did was advance a theory that couldn't be proved.  Do you know what we do with those today?  Pretty much the same thing the Church did.</blockquote>

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