This was not always the case. We often refer to the enlightenment period and scientific revolution as a deluge of new ideas, models, and inventions. However, I have found that not all of the things that were "discovered" during this era were original ideas.
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Heliocentricity was discovered long before Copernicus by the Indian astronomists. The earliest writings to support a heliocentric solar system was in the 8th-9th centuries of Vedic texts. This is several hundred years before Copernicus was even born. Unfortunately, The world was made of several isolated civilizations. This changed in the late 15th and 16th centuries when voyages of discovery began to connect the world.
The spread of information was often very slow before modern times. Discoveries such as the heliocentric model were rediscovered by several different civilizations because information took years, sometimes centuries to be shared. Today, new discoveries travel at the speed of light.
Image Credit: Solar System by WikiImages, licensed by Pixaby under CC
Honestly, if I didn't know the bigger picture of how the solar system worked, I think it would be pretty easy to get caught up thinking the Earth is the center. If you aren't thinking about it, the sun, moon, and stars look like they're going somewhere much more than the Earth is.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, I think this spread of information is still happening. There are all kinds of things that we dig up from time to time, like batteries from ancient Egypt, that we wouldn't have known existed, but figured out or invented on our own anyways.