Halley/Newton

I am watching a current reboot of Sagan's Cosmos and the packaged history presented to the wider population as fact although it is nothing like the actual technical nor historical details which surround planetary dynamics.

This is not a dispute about something as worthless as priority or celebrity nor mechanical innovations as the Cosmos program has it, this is what distinguishes empirical approaches to planetary dynamics from each other. The TV program has Halley meet Newton and up pops the 'laws of motion' however about 18 years before this,John Wallis was discussing motions as 'laws' as a matter of course -

http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.o....full.pdf+html

To really discover what distinguished Wallis's decent approach to the Newton's assault on astronomy really requires going back to the Galileo affair and even further back to Copernicus where issues arose as to the validity of planetary dynamics in tandem with the system which predicts astronomical events such as eclipses,transits or something more immediate like the Moon's phases and motions which our ancestors noted affected terrestrial events such as the tides as Wallis noted.

"When the ordinary man hears that the Church told Galileo that he might teach Copernicanism as a hypothesis which saved all the celestial phenomena satisfactorily, but "not as being the truth," he laughs. But this was really how Ptolemaic astronomy had been taught! In its actual place in history it was not a casuistical quibble; it was the refusal (unjustified it may be) to allow the introduction of a new and momentous doctrine. It was not simply a new theory of the nature of the celestial movements that was feared, but a new theory of the nature of theory; namely, that, if a hypothesis saves all the appearances. It is identical with truth." Barfield 1957

How do you attract the type of personality who is aware that the rotating celestial sphere system built around the Equatorial coordinate system is brilliant for predicting events and always has been however it cannot be used to prove the daily and annual motions of the Earth ?. Is it too difficult ?,too time consuming ? or is it just that an overreaching vicious strain of empiricism to which humanity is currently chained to is more appealing than actual astronomy where cause and effect comes under normal perceptions and rules ?.

The readers in sci.astro.amateur have a much better documentary picture of astronomy and so what if readers show their appreciation by walking away from the forum,it will be there for those who take great satisfaction in innovations and creative endeavors.