and the fixed stars would be wasted. And if the annual parallax of a star of the third magnitude was as great as one minute, such a star, which he believes to have an angular diameter of one minute, would be as large as the annual orbit of the earth. And how big would the brightest stars have to be, which he believes to have diameters of two or three minutes? And how enormously large would they be if the annual parallax was still smaller?[1] It was also very difficult to conceive the so-called "third motion" of the earth, which Copernicus (so needlessly) had introduced to account for the immovable direction of the earth's axis.
Tycho alludes in several places to the difficulty of reconciling the motion of the earth with certain passages of Scripture.[2] He was far from being the only one who believed this difficulty to be a very serious one against accepting the new doctrine. The Roman Church had not yet taken any official notice of the Copernican system, but in Protestant countries the tendency of the age was decidedly against the adoption of so stupendous a change in cosmological ideas. Nobody cared to study anything but theology, and theology meant a petrified dogmatism which would not allow the smallest iota in the Bible to be taken in anything but a strictly literal sense. Luther had in his usual pithy manner declared what he thought of Copernicus,[3] and even Melanchthon, who was better able to take a dispassionate view of the matter, had declared that the authority
- ↑ Tycho had in vain tried to find an annual parallax of the pole star and other stars. Letter to Kepler, December 1599, Kepleri Opera Omnia, viii. p. 717.
- ↑ Epist., p. 148. He says here that Moses must have known astronomy, since he calls the moon the lesser light, though sun and moon are apparently of equal size. Therefore the prophets must also be assumed to have known more about astronomy than other people of their time did.
- ↑ "Der Narr will die ganze Kunst Astronomiä umkehren! Aber wie die heilige Schrift anzeigt, so hiess Josua die Sonne still stehen und nicht das Erdreich."—Luther's Tischreden, p. 2260.
