Contra Galileo: Riccioli’s “Coriolis-Force” Argument on the Earth’s Diurnal Rotation

Graney, Christopher M.

doi:10.1007/s00016-011-0058-5

Cited by 21 publications

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“…But both Riccioli and Newton would certainly have been surprised by just how difficult such effects are to detect, thanks to aspects of physics that would not be fully understood until centuries after the Almagestum novum. 33 The star size and projectiles/falling bodies arguments show that, contrary to the epigraphs to this paper, Riccioli had real arguments to support the geocentric system (in Tychonic form) -and neither biblical/theological arguments nor the authority of the Church played any significant role in them. He presents the Copernican and Tychonic hypotheses as including more than circles of planetary movements -as also including the stars and the realm of physics (that is, the Aristotelian elements).…”

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

Graney

2012

Journal for the History of Astronomy

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… [he was] an enemy to the Copernican system, and has the discredit of having measured the evidence for and against that system, not by the weight but by the number of the arguments…. 1 … Riccioli put forward a series of arguments in contradiction of the Earth's movement … marvellously absurd. "Would the birds … dare to rise in the air if they saw the earth passing away from beneath them?" From such a specimen we may judge of the rest of the egregious structure…. 2 … Riccioli's treatment of the cosmological controversy was a sterile exercise. Astronomical issues could no longer be settled by a preponderance of scientific and scriptural authority or by any number of decrees from Rome. 3In Riccioli's ultimate acceptance of the immobility of the earth, biblical and theological arguments proved decisive. 4[Riccioli] produced forty-nine arguments that were in favour of heliocentrism, and seventy-seven that were against, and thus the weight of the argument favoured an earth-centred cosmology! 5 These quotations, dating from the early nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, illustrate the long-standing reputation of the Italian Jesuit astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598-1671), as concerns his analysis of the case for and against the Copernican hypothesis in his 1651 Almagestum novum. This reputation is undeserved. Contrary to these statements, Riccioli's analysis was not based on the number of arguments but on their weight; it was not absurd; it was not dependent on either authority or scripture. Rather, it hinged on two key arguments -both scientific in nature, both difficult to refute at the time, and both destined to be matters of scientific investigation into the nineteenth century, long after the debate over the world system hypothesis was settled. Riccioli's work illustrates an interesting aspect to that debate: that the geocentric hypothesis, in the form advocated by Tycho Brahe, was backed by real and strong arguments in 1651.Riccioli discusses 126 arguments in his analysis in Almagestum novum: 49 proCopernican, 77 anti-Copernican. 6 For each argument, Riccioli provides the opposing side's response to that argument, if he believes a valid response exists, as is usually the case. Thus, while Riccioli does note the issue of birds keeping pace with a moving Earth as an anti-Copernican argument, he also notes that there is a simple response to this argument -that the Earth, the birds, and the air all share a common motion. 7 Thus Riccioli is not presenting the birds issue as an argument having real weight, but as simply an argument that has been proffered in the world system debate. JHA, xliii (2012)

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confidence: 68%