Watching Mercury today

On Saturday, January 26, 2019 at 4:01:38 PM UTC-7, Mike Collins wrote:

How have you managed to miss his years of vilifying Newton for stating that
from the Sun there are no retrogrades?

It's true he does that, but that doesn't mean what you think it means.

His complaint is that Newton is expressing the truth given us by Copernicus in
an invalid way, because he drags in an "imaginary observer".

Thus, he takes another statement by Newton, and a virtually identical one by
Kepler, and says that Newton's statement is bad while Kepler's statement is
good. He is not disputing the phenomena, but instead the mind-set that views the
Solar System as a physical system... and a few other things that even I have not
yet been able to comprehend.

John Savard