Ep 105: David Deutsch’s “The Fabric of Reality” Chapter 4 “Criteria for Reality” Part 1
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Galileo and the Inquisition
There's no reason for postulating the reality of these things other than to try and match what's really going on in reality. Galileo believed that the planets move in circles, while in fact, their orbits are very nearly ellipses. The data did not fit the heliocentric theory that galileo was defending either. So much then for his having been convinced by accumulated observations,. But for all that the church took no position on this controversy, the inquisition did not care where the planets appeared to be. They cared where the planets really were. And they wanted to understand the planets through explanations, just as galileo did.
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