How to make the Earth orbit the Sun in 1614
Abstract
In 1614 Johann Georg Locher, a student of the Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner, proposed a physical mechanism to explain how the Earth could orbit the sun. An orbit, Locher said, is a perpetual fall. He proposed this despite the fact that he rejected the Copernican system, citing problems with falling bodies and the sizes of stars under that system. In 1651 and again in 1680, Jesuit writers Giovanni Battista Riccioli and Athanasius Kircher, respectively, considered and rejected outright Locher's idea of an orbit as a perpetual fall. Thus this important concept of an orbit was proposed, considered, and rejected well before Isaac Newton would use an entirely different physics to make the idea that an orbit is a perpetual fall the common way of envisioning and explaining orbits.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1902.04617,
title = {How to make the Earth orbit the Sun in 1614},
author = {Christopher M. Graney},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.04617},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
13 page, 11 figures. Originally submitted version of paper published in the Journal for the History of Astronomy, posted to arXiv per SAGE Publishing's Archiving and Sharing Policy