Copernius, Galileo wrong. Church right. Any apologies?

[Linusthe2nd]

Apart from Vatican Observatory there are several sources which say the Pope apologized and several others which say he later formally acquitted Galileo.

Other reports say the Church planned a statue of Galileo in the Vatican gardens in 2008. There are also several glowing references to Galileo by Pope Benedict (search vatican.va).

When I have time I’ll start a free blog and copy all of the citations there so that they meet this thread’s standards of evidence. Also I’ll copy the NT to the blog so I don’t have to INTERPRET its words by actually reading them. I never realized the power of the blog. Or maybe we’re not in Kansas anymore. :takeoff:

Doesn’t this qualify as a valid opinion? You neglected to comment on it. The author is quite qualified.

Originally Posted by Ashok K. Singal
Is there a violation of the Copernican principle in radio sky?

Ashok K. Singal
Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) observations from the WMAP satellite have shown some unexpected anisotropies, which surprisingly seem to be aligned with the ecliptic\cite {20,16,15}. The latest data from the Planck satellite have confirmed the presence of these anisotropies\cite {17}. Here we report even larger anisotropies in the sky distributions of powerful extended quasars and some other sub-classes of radio galaxies in the 3CRR catalogue, one of the oldest and most intensively studies sample of strong radio sources\cite{21,22,3}. The anisotropies lie about a plane passing through the two equinoxes and the north celestial pole (NCP). We can rule out at a 99.995% confidence level the hypothesis that these asymmetries are merely due to statistical fluctuations. Further, even the distribution of observed radio sizes of quasars and radio galaxies show large systematic differences between these two sky regions.
The redshift distribution appear to be very similar in both regions of sky for all sources, which rules out any local effects to be the cause of these anomalies. Two pertinent questions then arise. First, why should there be such large anisotropies present in the sky distribution of some of the most distant discrete sources implying inhomogeneities in the universe at very large scales (covering a fraction of the universe)? What is intriguing even further is why such anisotropies should lie about a great circle decided purely by the orientation of earth’s rotation axis and/or the axis of its revolution around the sun? It looks as if these axes have a preferential placement in the larger scheme of things, implying an apparent breakdown of the Copernican principle or its more generalization, cosmological principle, upon which all modern cosmological theories are based upon.

Linus2nd

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[Rick09]

Here are Robert Sungenis’ 8 response essays to geocentrismdebunked.

galileowaswrong.com/?s=david+palm&x=8&y=6

Making a response doesn’t mean that one has actually provided a satisfactory answer. I read a few of these previously and found them grossly wanting. Several of his essays neglected major arguments put forward by Palm and he never answered several of Palm’s newer articles at all.

But I’ll grant that Sungenis filled a lot of pages. He seems to think that arguments are actually won by word count or sheer endurance.

 

[Rick09]

Here are Robert Sungenis’ 8 response essays to geocentrismdebunked.

Making a response doesn’t mean that one has actually provided a satisfactory answer. I read a few of these previously and found them grossly wanting. Several of his essays neglected major evidence and arguments put forward by Palm and he never answered several of Palm’s newer articles at all.

But I’ll grant that Sungenis filled a lot of pages. He seems to think that arguments are actually won by word count or sheer endurance.

But, hey, it’s your life. If you want him, you can have him and his partner geocentrists. Moon landing denial, 9-11 conspiracy theories, dinosaurs walking with human theories, Jewish conspiracy theories, oceans rising because we’re not reading the King James Bible enough theories, and all.

 

[inocente]

You are welcome to your prejudiced opinions and interpretations.

If you were serious then that would be unfair, uncharitable, and certainly not philosophy.

But knowing you, I’ll take it you’re in humorous mood and doing an impression of Lady Bracknell in one of her “A Handbag???” moments (“Mr. Worthing. I must confess that I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me. To be born, or at any rate bred in a handbag, whether it have handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life which reminds one of the worst excesses of the French revolution, and I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to?” ).

 

[inocente]

Doesn’t this qualify as a valid opinion? You neglected to comment on it. The author is quite qualified.

Ashok K. Singal
Is there a violation of the Copernican principle in radio sky?

Singal’s question (pdf) is on arXiv.org, which is an automated publishing system. It is moderated but not peer reviewed, and lets researchers communicate their ideas quickly. In June alone this year, over 870 papers have been uploaded to the astrophysics section so far. That’s a lot of opinions. Singal uploaded his paper in May 2013 but according to Google Scholar it only has one citation and hasn’t been published in any peer reviewed journal. In summary, we shouldn’t get carried away.

Another point is we don’t work in the field, so we shouldn’t get fooled into cherry picking. Without emailing him we don’t even know if Singal found an error in his paper since. And lest we forget, WMAP, from which Singal takes his stats, more or less wrote the book on the current cosmological model - map.gsfc.nasa.gov/

But also there’s a problem which (I think) hildegaard raised earlier - we can only make observations from our own neck of the woods, we can’t send a WMAP to make measurements from other galaxies. It could well be that no matter where we were in the universe, we would always find anomalies and interpret them as implying we were at the center. So yon axis of evil indicates we’re missing something, but we don’t yet know what.

 

[Bahman]

It is very simple to conclude that one cannot suggest the position of Earth as initial point. The most accurate measurement has a error of 1% in estimating the distance of a Galaxy. Please read this. The average distance between Galaxy is as order as 10 million light years. Diameter of our galaxy is about 100,000 light years which is the 1% of 10 million light year hence the estimate of position of center of universe if there is any has a error which is as big as size of our galaxy.

 

[hildegaard]

But also there’s a problem which (I think) hildegaard raised earlier - we can only make observations from our own neck of the woods, we can’t send a WMAP to make measurements from other galaxies. It could well be that no matter where we were in the universe, we would always find anomalies and interpret them as implying we were at the center. So yon axis of evil indicates we’re missing something, but we don’t yet know what.

This is true, but the WMAP and Planck researchers all realize this. The signal is not an anomaly related to our measurement point, in fact both WMAP and Planck were at L2 over 1.5 million kilometers from earth. The correlations are specific to the equinox and ecliptics. The entire scanned field of the CMB is partioned by these planes. Lawrence Krauss said it pretty well:

edge.org/conversation/the-energy-of-empty-space-that-isn-39t-zero

“But when you look at CMB map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That’s crazy. We’re looking out at the whole universe. There’s no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun — the plane of the earth around the sun — the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe.”

Our near centrality to the CMB is for all planes not just those specific ones. And those planes are, in currently accepted theory, not related to our centrality to the observational limit.

 

[Bahman]

This is true, but the WMAP and Planck researchers all realize this. The signal is not an anomaly related to our measurement point, in fact both WMAP and Planck were at L2 over 1.5 million kilometers from earth. The correlations are specific to the equinox and ecliptics. The entire scanned field of the CMB is partioned by these planes. Lawrence Krauss said it pretty well:

edge.org/conversation/the-energy-of-empty-space-that-isn-39t-zero

“But when you look at CMB map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That’s crazy. We’re looking out at the whole universe. There’s no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun — the plane of the earth around the sun — the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe.”

Our near centrality to the CMB is for all planes not just those specific ones. And those planes are, in currently accepted theory, not related to our centrality to the observational limit.

That only means that there is an anisotropy in distribution of mass in universe which can cause an anisotropy in any sub-structure. It doesn’t mean that Earth is in center of the world and everything is rotating around it.

 

[LogisticsBranch]

Apart from Vatican Observatory there are several sources which say the Pope apologized and several others which say he later formally acquitted Galileo.

Other reports say the Church planned a statue of Galileo in the Vatican gardens in 2008. There are also several glowing references to Galileo by Pope Benedict (search vatican.va).

Hello inocente. I suggest you visit The Pontifical Academy of Sciences! They have a great search engine. Here are two documents from thier website:

1. Address to the Plenary Session on ‘The Emergence of Complexity in Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Biology’ by John Paul II, Blessed

casinapioiv.va/content/accademia/en/magisterium/johnpaulii/31october1992.html

1. Here is another one I like:
   casinapioiv.va/content/accademia/en/magisterium/johnpaulii/3october1981.html

Good luck with your blog.

 

[Linusthe2nd]

Singal’s question (pdf) is on arXiv.org, which is an automated publishing system. It is moderated but not peer reviewed, and lets researchers communicate their ideas quickly. In June alone this year, over 870 papers have been uploaded to the astrophysics section so far. That’s a lot of opinions. Singal uploaded his paper in May 2013 but according to Google Scholar it only has one citation and hasn’t been published in any peer reviewed journal. In summary, we shouldn’t get carried away.

Another point is we don’t work in the field, so we shouldn’t get fooled into cherry picking. Without emailing him we don’t even know if Singal found an error in his paper since. And lest we forget, WMAP, from which Singal takes his stats, more or less wrote the book on the current cosmological model - map.gsfc.nasa.gov/

But also there’s a problem which (I think) hildegaard raised earlier - we can only make observations from our own neck of the woods, we can’t send a WMAP to make measurements from other galaxies. It could well be that no matter where we were in the universe, we would always find anomalies and interpret them as implying we were at the center. So yon axis of evil indicates we’re missing something, but we don’t yet know what.

And since you and I must take everything on faith, since neither of us are scientists, and since neither of us can do much more that simple algebra, I prefer to think of the earth as the center of the universe. And why not, man is God’s greatest ( which he often has regreted ) creation, why shouldn’t man be the center of the universe? You can believer your old stuffed shirts, most of whom doubt the existence of God - though they certainly seem adamant that they have the right view of everything else.

P.S. I do appreciate and envy your literary style .

Linus2nd

 

[inocente]

Hello inocente. I suggest you visit The Pontifical Academy of Sciences! They have a great search engine. Here are two documents from thier website:

1. Address to the Plenary Session on ‘The Emergence of Complexity in Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Biology’ by John Paul II, Blessed

casinapioiv.va/content/accademia/en/magisterium/johnpaulii/31october1992.html

1. Here is another one I like:
   casinapioiv.va/content/accademia/en/magisterium/johnpaulii/3october1981.html

Hi! Thanks for those links. I didn’t know they have such a great online library. Found a commentary by the great Paul Dirac on Georges Lemaître, once president of the Academy of course. Dirac gives a blow by blow account of how Lemaître’s primeval atom hypothesis, now of course the big bang theory, came about from Lemaître and the other old stuffed shirts (as Linus calls them) trying to make sense of the data.

Dirac makes an interesting aside (page 14): “Once when I was talking with Lemaître about this subject [big bang] and feeling stimulated by the grandeur of the picture that he had given us, I told him that I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion. After thinking it over he suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”

I too like that 1981 speech. JPII understands that the big bang theory doesn’t state how the universe began (point 2, third paragraph). And in the last sentence of the previous paragraph, he repeats the saying that the Bible teaches how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go - which (having googled it) was recorded by Galileo from a conversation with Cardinal Baronio.

Good luck with your blog.

 

[inocente]

P.S. I do appreciate and envy your literary style .

As one old stuffed shirt to another, all I can say is

 

[Oreoracle]

Linus, I think you’re entirely missing the point. This has nothing to do with heliocentrism vs. geocentrism, although it makes me cringe a bit just to pretend that geocentrism still has support. No, what the Church did would have been wrong even if Galileo had been incorrect. The reason is that we don’t punish people for expressing their own conclusions and publishing their research. It has nothing to do with who was right, but rather freedom of speech and the integrity of scientific discovery.

If we put every scientist who had ever been wrong about something under house arrest, science wouldn’t have progressed very far, since the failures are necessary for success. (We wouldn’t have Relativity without the flawed Newtonian mechanics, for example.)

 

[PRmerger]

Linus, I think you’re entirely missing the point. This has nothing to do with heliocentrism vs. geocentrism, although it makes me cringe a bit just to pretend that geocentrism still has support. No, what the Church did would have been wrong even if Galileo had been incorrect. The reason is that we don’t punish people for expressing their own conclusions and publishing their research. It has nothing to do with who was right, but rather freedom of speech and the integrity of scientific discovery.

You are, of course, correct.

We ought not punish people for expressing their own conclusions and publishing their research.

However, the Church at that time was a political entity as well as a religious one. And using the norms of acceptable political sanction, she did what she thought she had to do to protect truth.

That was what people did back then. Sinful people, all.

 

[Linusthe2nd]

Linus, I think you’re entirely missing the point. This has nothing to do with heliocentrism vs. geocentrism, although it makes me cringe a bit just to pretend that geocentrism still has support. No, what the Church did would have been wrong even if Galileo had been incorrect. The reason is that we don’t punish people for expressing their own conclusions and publishing their research. It has nothing to do with who was right, but rather freedom of speech and the integrity of scientific discovery.

If we put every scientist who had ever been wrong about something under house arrest, science wouldn’t have progressed very far, since the failures are necessary for success. (We wouldn’t have Relativity without the flawed Newtonian mechanics, for example.)

I never said that the Church was correct. I said there were historical reasons why it was done. Conditions which no longer exist. I also think that the charge that the Church stifled the advance of science is over played. And of course for the last four hundred years the exact opposite condition has prevailed. It is now the secular world that is doing all it can to stifle the influence of the Church.

Linus2nd

 

[inocente]

Linus, I think you’re entirely missing the point. This has nothing to do with heliocentrism vs. geocentrism, although it makes me cringe a bit just to pretend that geocentrism still has support. No, what the Church did would have been wrong even if Galileo had been incorrect. The reason is that we don’t punish people for expressing their own conclusions and publishing their research. It has nothing to do with who was right, but rather freedom of speech and the integrity of scientific discovery.

Careful, you are making an absolutist moral claim, that’s usually the province of religions.

If we look back and judge our great-great-etc-grandparents by today’s moral standards, we have no defense against our great-great-etc-grandchildren judging us bad by their future moral standards.

And they most certainly will, unless we today just happen by amazing coincidence to live at the only time in the whole of history when ethics are finally perfected and will never change no more indeedy.

 

[Oreoracle]

However, the Church at that time was a political entity as well as a religious one. And using the norms of acceptable political sanction, she did what she thought she had to do to protect truth.

Two points here: Firstly, almost every evil action could be defended on the basis that the person who did it thought it was right. Hitler thought he was doing what was in the best interest of Germany, for example. The human gift to rationalize our own actions is endless.

Secondly, the truth needn’t be “protected”. In modern civilized societies, people are allowed to declare absurdities from the rooftops, yet truth still prevails. It prevails because acting with information is more effective than acting with misinformation. It’s one of the insights of democracy that truth is established naturally through free discourse rather than bureaucratic mandate.

I never said that the Church was correct.

That’s strange, especially considering the title of your thread and your insistence that we apologize to the Church.

I said there were historical reasons why it was done.

Yes, and there were historical reasons for slavery. That’s not a defense of slavery.

Careful, you are making an absolutist moral claim, that’s usually the province of religions.

I’m as entitled to my own view of morality as any church, am I not?

If we look back and judge our great-great-etc-grandparents by today’s moral standards, we have no defense against our great-great-etc-grandchildren judging us bad by their future moral standards.

The problem is that the Church’s knowledge, if it indeed comes by God’s revelation, should be timeless. What happened to all of this supposed infallibility?

Of course our ancestors have made mistakes. We note those mistakes to avoid them in the future. We don’t attempt to defend them or insist that everyone apologize to them. I wouldn’t want my children to defend my mistakes.

 

[PRmerger]

Two points here: Firstly, almost every evil action could be defended on the basis that the person who did it thought it was right. Hitler thought he was doing what was in the best interest of Germany, for example. The human gift to rationalize our own actions is endless.

Firstly, do not mistake my comments regarding the cultural norms at the time as a defense of the actions of the Church.

The members of the Church acted sinfully. No one ought deny that.

Secondly, one ought not confuse moral absolutes (“It is always wrong, in all cultures, in all places, to view an entire race of people, as subhuman”) with a moral norm which has evolved (“It is good to allow people to express their views and to publish their scientific research.”)

 

[PRmerger]

Of course our ancestors have made mistakes. We note those mistakes to avoid them in the future. We don’t attempt to defend them or insist that everyone apologize to them. I wouldn’t want my children to defend my mistakes.

You seem to be operating under some grave misapprehensions regarding what constitutes God’s revealed Word, as well as the Church’s teachings on infallibility.

The Church is imperfect.

Her teachings are not.

(Or, to put it without the double negatives: the Church’s teachings are perfect, when defined infallibly).

 

[Oreoracle]

Firstly, do not mistake my comments regarding the cultural norms at the time as a defense of the actions of the Church.

The members of the Church acted sinfully. No one ought deny that.

Great, we can agree on that much.

Secondly, one ought not confuse moral absolutes (“It is always wrong, in all cultures, in all places, to view an entire race of people, as subhuman”) with a moral norm which has evolved (“It is good to allow people to express their views and to publish their scientific research.”)

I don’t think one precludes the other. To uphold some moral standard is to say that, all else being equal, a society that adheres to that standard will be better than one that doesn’t, no matter how much time has elapsed in making that comparison. The fact that morals evolve doesn’t diminish anyone’s enthusiastic support for their own version of morality.

(Or, to put it without the double negatives: the Church’s teachings are perfect, when defined infallibly).

As far as I know, the Church doesn’t explicitly state whether a particular teaching is infallible or not, at least when the claim being made is falsifiable. I mean, the Church will never make a testable claim about the universe and tack a “by the way, this teaching is infallible” onto it. This means the Church can always backpedal if it’s wrong, while still getting the benefit of an ambiguous definition of infallibility in the meantime.