Flicking through the channels this evening and I came across a program by a theorist called 'The Grand Design'. The first episode was titled I am god , I mean - Do we need a God ?, which wasn't a question but a statement using the usual voodoo and bluffing.

What was remarkable about the episode in his attempt to pit the Catholic Church against science was that he mentioned Aristagoras as the real discoverer of the heliocentric system, entirely bypassed Copernicus and went straight to Galileo's observations of Jupiter.



"...just as Cleanthes thought it right that the Greeks collectively should impeach Aristagoras the Stoic, of impiety, for overthrowing the altar of earth, because the fellow attempted to account for visible phenomena by supposing that the sky remains fixed, and that the earth rolls round down an oblique circle, turning at the same time upon its own axis." Plutarch

http://thriceholy.net/Texts/Moon.html

What defines empirical theorists is not a right/wrong issue but how they can simply manufacture history to promote an agenda and it seems in imitation of what Newton did but not entirely, Newton simply manufactured his own design by misusing terms and insights of the original Sun-centered astronomers.

It is no wonder the science fantasists have found a home in this newsgroup as the formal academic history of theorists is basically science fiction. It may be an addiction or a cult, I cannot say, but that it is easily undone using the original texts of the great astronomers with time lapse, imaging and graphics allows generations to bypass the interruption to astronomy by the theorists and the Right Ascension/ Declination framework.

Maybe viewers won't have to suffer these celebrity theorists and their awful mangling of genuine achievements and history.