[Avodah] Geocentrism

[Micha Berger]

On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 10:48:40PM +0300, Eliyahu Grossman wrote:
: Now, according to the Geocentrist view, the sun takes 365 days to go around
: the earth, and Saturn, that slow gas ball, takes 10,832 days to go around
: the Earth....

The sun rises daily, not annually. Each were thought to revolve around
the earth roughly daily: the sun was actually daily, the moon was roughly
daily, plus a one month epicycle. I don't know details, but Saturn also
had epicycles.

The Pythagorians believed the earth spin, but then, a number of them
were heliocentrists! So we're not talking about them.

The epicycles are actually a Fourier approximation of their actual orbits
as seen from earth. But that's not geocentrism, that's specifically
Aristotle or Ptolmy. And AFAIK, Chazal doesn't mention them one way or
the other. And your whole notion about which particular geocentric
map they subscribed to is not RMMS's topic -- Chazal don't say anything
about what form of geocentrism they switched to in Rebbe's day.

My point is, geocentrism replaces the earth's spin with an orbit around
the earth. Their heliocentric orbits are approximated by epicycles,
not replaced by orbits around the earth.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha