Who discovered that the earth moves around the sun?

Question

While my teacher said it was fiqured out in ancient times.....Copernicus only knew how to explain it.

Answer 1

Your teacher is correct! Apollonius, among others, hypothesised a spherical earth centuries ago...

Answer 2

This question was asked and answered before, read this page for more details;

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?...

Answer 3

The first notable one was Copernicus.

Answer 4

It depends on what you mean by "discovered".

Certainly many ancient societies had philosophers who put forward the hypothesis. Amongst the Greeks, both Aristarchus and Pythagoras supported the idea.

Copernicus revied this idea in his model of the solar system, but he did not have proof.

Even Galileo, whose observations showed that not everything orbits the earth (e.g. phases of Venus, moons of Jupiter) di not have direct evidence of the earth's motion.

One could argue that Kepler's Laws (the first 2 have their 400th anniversary next year) were the first time someone had come up with a model that truly explained the apparent motions of the planets and was predictive.

However, if we are talking about evidence for earth's motion, that came even later, with the detection of stellar aberration and the changing doppler shift of starlight.

Answer 5

i think this acient sumarian tablet would prove ur teacher right.

this is over 7000 years old. created by the ancient sumarians, whoe were the first ever sivelisation. they started math,astronamy, agriculture, law government..etc.

in this tablet there are 3 people. solar sytem is between the 2 men on left. and notice the man sitting down and how tall he would be if he stood up. the sumarians called those people the anunaki (those from heaven to earth came) they were from a planet called nubiru(the planet of the crossing) and thats who they say tought them all that they know. in other tablets the planets of our solar system are described in color, size, and location. trip out on that..Copernicus eat ur heart out.