> Ancient philosophers argued that it's vastly less likely for there to be such a huge distance separating celestial bodies than whatever their pet theory of the day was.
Is it me or is that a bit handwavy? The Greeks or whoever else got things awfully right and other things terribly wrong. We have the benefit of hindsight so we can point at the latter category. It doesn't negate the former.
Seems like you could take any statement and say "oh yeah? well the ancients got stuff wrong!"
You're not comparing apples to apples when you compare ancient "theories" and modern scientific theory. Predicting that the sun will come up tomorrow, and why the sun will come up tomorrow are two very different levels of detail and granularity. The latter will have far more predictive power than the former.
No ancient theories had anything like the predictive power of modern theories, so were far less powerful. So when we talk about how the ancients had theories for this - we're talking orders of magnitude less complexity.
An analogy: when we were kids my brother took part in a guess the weight of the cake. The answer was 1.010 kg. My brother had guessed 1.005 kg and another boy had guessed 1.04 kg. They tried give it to the other kid - well his difference was "3 different" whereas my brother's was "5 different". Obviously anyone with a brain could see there was an order of magnitude difference in the precision of the two predictions.
Ancient theories are like that. Orders of magnitude less precise and therefore less predictive than modern theories. The differences tend to lead to dramatic differences in outcome making them fail to interweave in ways that are useful for us in the modern world - this is why, after all, we moved to the modern theories and they led to everything we have today.
Ancient theories didn't tend to connect in philosophically logical ways as do modern theories - this is reflected in their lack of predictive power. So when I say that the problems with tying theories together that modern physicists have are vast in our minds, but really amount to splitting hairs when we compare them to the differences between theories that preceded them, this is why.
I think that's a bit of a strawman. The pattern described was that we are often wrong because there's some factor about which we do not yet have the slightest clue.
Given for how long we've thought that we knew everything, it should hardly be surprising to find out that there's more to things than we know.
Is it me or is that a bit handwavy? The Greeks or whoever else got things awfully right and other things terribly wrong. We have the benefit of hindsight so we can point at the latter category. It doesn't negate the former.
Seems like you could take any statement and say "oh yeah? well the ancients got stuff wrong!"