Cosmos throat-clearance (first of a series?)
Ahem, a-HEMM. No, this isn't about how intertia-less the ship of the imagination is, considering that it's carrying someone who wagged a finger about the accuracy of trajectories in "Gravity." And I must acknowledge that my third-of-a-century-ago memory of the original Cosmos is pretty ragged, so I don't know if Tyson and Druyan are specifically responsible for this. So I'll say that someone, perhaps more than one someones in different decades, didn't make it clear why heliocentricity describes the solar system accurately and geocentricity doesn't. It wasn't enough to say that Copernicus figured it out, and later on Galileo had a telescope, and spend all the time in between on the persecution of Giordano Bruno. It wouldn't have taken long, or taxed the special effects, to show that night-by-night observers learned that the apparent motions of the planets could only be made to seem geocentric through the postulation of "epicycles." Copernicus worked out that in a heliocentric model, the planetary orbits are single loops and everything makes more sense. A minute or two should have come out of the Bruno cartoon (which I found visually uninteresting and thematically redundant) so this point could have been made. In my grumble opinion, the case against orthodoxy is made more effectively if one shows that what orthodoxy is opposing is demonstrable reality. Ahh--HEMMMM.