Movers and resters
From Mr Theo Theocharis Sir: Both of the recent letters on Galileo (9 June and 16 June) use outdated terminology. Galileo was 'wrong' in the 17th century; Galileo became 'right' in the 18th and 19th centuries; but in the (post-)modernist 20th century Galileo became 'extra-paradigmatic'. The paradigm-shift was brought about by Einstein (Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics, CUP, 1938, p. 224):
The struggle, so violent in the early days of science, between the views of Ptolemy and Copernicus [is] then [seen to] be quite meaningless. Either co-ordinate system [can now] be used with equal justification. The two sentences, 'the sun is at rest and the earth moves'. or 'the sun moves and the earth is at rest', simply mean two different conventions concerning two different co-ordinate systems.
Theo Theocharis
London SW18
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