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Concept

Copernican heliocentrism

Copernican heliocentrism
Copernican_heliocentrism_diagram.jpg: Own work from Copernicus 1543 derivative work: Professor marginalia (talk) · Public domain · source

Overview

concept that the Earth rotates around the Sun

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.

  1. The same principle, the attraction of the Sun, which thus accounts for the motions of the Nodes, connects, too, another very perplexing irregularity in the appearances of the Moon; the perpetual variation in the inclination of her orbit to that of the Earth. As the Moon revolves in an ellipse, which has the centre of the {381} Earth in one of its foci, the longer axis of its orbit is called the Line of its Apsides…

    Adam Smith, The Essays of Adam Smith

    States what Copernican heliocentrism is.

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  2. The circular orbit of the sun as he passes about the moon, which sometimes coincides with the line dividing her visible and invisible parts, and at other times rises to right angles with that line so as to cut those parts in two, and in turn be cut by her, produces her gibbous and crescent phases by the varying inclination and position of the bright part relatively to that in shadow. This proves beyond all question…

    Plutarch, Selected Essays of Plutarch, Vol. II.

    The author is tied to Copernican heliocentrism in the knowledge graph.

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  3. Only by the aid of this hypothesis, equally untrue, but capable of accounting more nearly for the appearances, and so of inducing more accurate observations--only thus did it become possible for Copernicus to show that the heliocentric theory is more feasible than the geocentric theory; or for Kepler to show that the planets move round the sun in ellipses. Yet again, without the aid of this approximate truth…

    Herbert Spencer, Illustrations of Universal Progress

    Close in meaning to Copernican heliocentrism; the term itself is not named.

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Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Deductive-nomological model.

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