There are fragments of this post that may be germane, so I'll note them.
On Sun, 7 Sep 2008 03:48:31 UTC, spudnik
hotmail.com> wrote:
> no-one seriously questioned Copernicus,
> who did not try to get his friend, Pope Urban, to put his stuff
> into the writ.
Hard to see how this is relevant, since Galileo didn't do that either.
Oh, and that's not really true, since a number of people, Catholic and
Protestant, were really opposed to Copernicus' new-fangled theory. But it
didn't get to be an important issue till after 1609, which by an amazing
coincidence is the time when quantities of serious new evidence came into
play, and the issue started getting publicity.
Galileo would not even reply
> to a respectful query from Kepler -- talk about your sleepwalkers!
This is silly. Galileo and Kepler each failed to reply to the other's
correspondence on an occasion or two. The enmity between them is an
invention.
>
> Newton merely algebraized Kepler's three orbital constraints, and
> stole the solution from Hooke, to boot -- on the shoulders of a giant,
> who was physically a dwarf; hence, the joke.
Wrong again, but excusably, since that meme has spread widely. Read the
"shoulders" bit in context, and you can see it was not an insult.
As to Newton's failure to contribute anything new: I welcome you to slug
it out with Jerry Kraus. It will give him a chance to be right about a
significant issue.
the British lagged
> by a hundred years in the use of calculus, it is said, because
> they refuzed to use Liebniz's notation, after creating the
> "controversy,"
> politically out of the Royal Society.
>
> anyway, Cardinal Bellarmine apparently instigated the helio/geocenter
> hoax,
> because of Galileo's promotion of atomism.
There is a book that claims that, and there is an old document that
supports the idea that somebody didn't like Galileo's atomistic
tendencies. That's Signor Somebody You Never Heard Of. The big conspiracy
theory seems to have little more to go on; certainly not the Inquisition's
documents on the accusation and trial.
...
