The Heliocentric and Geocentric Model

Our planets remain one of the great wonders of science mostly unexplored by mankind. For
centuries, there was high levels of ambiguity circling the rotation of the planets and model of our
solar system. We now understand that all of the planets in the solar system orbit the sun which is
the centre of mass in the solar system, in a model like shown here. But the first model of the solar
system was very different and seems ridiculous considering what we now know to be true. It was
invented by a guy called Ptolemy, a well-known Roman philosopher and astronomer and supported
by Aristotle, a very famous Greek philosopher. It stated that the world was the centre of the
universe, that all the planets in the solar system and beyond rotated around it. To support this idea
two pieces of evidence were used. They were that:
1. From anywhere on Earth, the Sun appears to revolve around Earth once per day. While the
Moon and the planets have their own motions, they also appear to revolve around Earth
about once per day. The stars appeared to be fixed on a celestial sphere rotating once each
day about an axis through the geographic poles of Earth.
2. Earth seems to be unmoving from the perspective of an earthbound observer; it feels solid,
stable, and stationary.
According to this model, the moon was closest to the Earth, followed by Mercury, Venus, the Sun,
Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

But this model was soon proven incorrect in the 16th century by a mathematician Nicolaus
Copernicus, who discarded the theory based on the idea of retrograde motion. He argued that the
theory couldn’t account for retrograde motion, objects in space which from a particular point seem
to be moving contrary to the direction of other objects. Instead he proposed a more accurate but
still not entirely correct theory. He claimed that all of the planets rotated around the sun, as we now
know, except he also stated that the sun was the centre of the universe and did not move. In reality,
our sun us moving at a speed of nearly 800,000km/h and rather than being at the centre of the solar
system as this model claimed, it is far off. Despite this, the model was far more accurate than the
geocentric model.

It can seem funny now that such mistakes would have been made and humans would have been so
full of themselves to think that our earth was the centre of our solar system and universe, and
everything rotated around it. It seems funny to think about these theories now that we know the
truth.