Science vs. Science Setting Aside All Authority: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the Science against Copernicus in the Age of Galileo

摘要

LIKE MANY HISTORIANS of modern astronomy, I first encountered Giovanni Battista Riccio- li's Almagestum Novum (New Almagest) through the writ- ings of John Flamsteed. The New Almagest (1651) was the book against which Flamsteed formed his earliest ideas about mathematical and observational astronomy. Perhaps because of the role he assigned to it - a treatise to challenge rather than embrace - I've taken some of the more dismissive readings of the New Almagest at face value. Riccioli is often portrayed as just this side of foolish: swayed by religion, he denied the rationality of Copernican heliocentrism and promoted instead Tycho's hybrid geocentrism (not Ptolemy's strict geocentrism, but a system in which the Sun and Moon orbit the Earth while the planets circle the Sun). Moreover, he made this foolishness obvious in the New Almagest, a treatise filled with unconvincing anti-Copernican arguments.