"In writing the history of science, we rightly study canons of thought
and the changes produced therein by the greatest creative thinkers. It
may, however, be instructive to examine how less imaginative men
responded to changing ideas.

"Christopher Heydon (15??-1623), a writer on astrology, is one such
ordinary man. In his extensive correspondence are preserved his
reflections on astronomy. As an undergraduate, he was considered a
promising mathematician. He never fulfilled this promise, but he
became an associate of Edward Wright, the expert on navigation, and of
Henry Briggs and John Bainbridge, the first Savilian Professors of
Geometry and Astronomy at Oxford.

"With Wright, he made observations of the fixed stars and of Mars, and
concluded, like Tycho, that published positions and tables were
incorrect. He owned a large library and read the latest books on
astronomy as they were published. He sent Kepler a letter
complimenting him on his _Astronomiae Pars Optica_ (1604). By June of
1610, he was using a telescope to observe the heavens. Within months
of its publication in 1609, he read Kepler's _Astronomia Nova_.
Heydon, though he barely understood the significance of the book,
pointed out to Briggs the importance of Kepler's second law of
planetary motion, which passed unremarked by any other Englishman for
at least two generations.

"Though Heydon proclaimed his willingness to depart from Aristotle's
teachings, his intellectual security depended on his maintaining
traditional views, except when he considered contradictory evidence to
be overwhelming. Thus, he was not a Copernican, and though he accepted
the demonstrations that, contrary to Aristotle, comets were
supralunary, he believed that Kepler was wrong to make their paths
straight lines, because supralunary bodies had to move in circular
paths. Heydon, then, reflects in microcosm the struggles of the
Scientific Revolution."

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1982BAAS...14Q.897A

--
Comment at http://groups.google.com/group/whits/topics
Subscribe to http://inamidst.com/whits/feed