My dear Deacon Dean, while agreeing w your sentiments, the gnat strainer in me urges this post.
1- Very few learned men in the Western Hemisphere thought the earth was flat. It was well known to be a sphere by several simple observations (such as a ships's mast appearing to sink into the sea as it sailed away, and the shape of Earth's shadow and penumbra upon the moon). There were some early "Church Fathers" who held the Earth ti be flat, and this argument was known as the argument over the existence of "antipods" (that is, people whose feet where "anti" to ours).
The argument at Salamanca with Columbus was not the shape of the Earth, but it's size. The size of the Earth had been calculated by some Greek prior to Jesus' Incarnation, and varies from today's value by an amazingly tiny 5% Columbus thought it was 2/3 of it's true value. It was Columbus, and not the U of Salamanca, that was wrong. Columbus had some evidence on his side, such as the appearance of the world's largest seed on the canary islands after big storms, a seed for which there was no known progenitors since the tress that came of it were barren. What nobldy anticipated was the presence of 2 continents BETWEEN Asia and Europe. It was from the Americas where the seed came from, but there were no appropiate pollinators for it's flower in the old world.
You see, ships of that day would have been unable to make the trip from Europe to Japan sailing due west. It was only the fortuitous placement of the Americas that saved Columbus from starvation.
I'm sure there were plenty of uneducated sailors that thought the Earth was flat, but even among them, most knew it was spherical.
2- The Earth IS the center of the Universe. In fact, for me, my eyeballs are the center of the Universe, and everything else rotates around me. No, not because my massive bulk exercises such dramatic gravitational effects. Newtonian relativity, with it's quaint notions of a heliocentric solar system, is dead. Under the current "Theory of the Invariate" (Einstein's preferred term for his own theory of relativity), there are two types of frames of reference: that of an observer traveling at the speed of light, which is an Absolute, timeless and invariate perspective impossible to reach; and all other frames of reference. Therefore, as the sun does not rotate around the galactic core at the speed of light, a heliocentric frame of reference is no more "correct" than a geocentric one. Therefore, in current physics, it is equivalent to speak of a sunrise as an earthrise. One can choose whatever frame of reference is most convenient at the time. Only One frame of reference is Absolute, that of light, and within it all time is the same, as the clock stops. Interesting language from the physicists, methinks.
It turns out that even under the old Newtonian relativity, Galileo was wrong. All the RC asked him to do is admit that the Copernican system was just a theory, and that it had flaws. Galileo actually "fibbed" a number of his observations in support of Copernicus. For you see, all the models of planetary motion at the time posited orbits as "perfect" geometrical patterns, in a VERY Platonic fasshion of thinking. It was not until Kepler noted that allowing orbits to be ELLIPTICAL, a most anoyingly un-Platonic geometrical form, that observations began to line up with theory.
So, Galileo was wrong on several counts. And the RC inquisition, not my favorite bunch, actually got this one correct: there was NO adequate model at the time, and Galileo should stop lying.
JR
