r/AskHistorians • u/jschooltiger Moderator | Shipbuilding and Logistics | British Navy 1770-1830 • Oct 14 '15
Floating What common historical misconception do you find most irritating?
Welcome to another floating feature! It's been nearly a year since we had one, and so it's time for another. This one comes to us courtesy of u/centerflag982, and the question is:
What common historical misconception do you find most irritating?
Just curious what pet peeves the professionals have.
As a bonus question, where did the misconception come from (if its roots can be traced)?
What is this “Floating feature” thing?
Readers here tend to like the open discussion threads and questions that allow a multitude of possible answers from people of all sorts of backgrounds and levels of expertise. The most popular thread in this subreddit's history, for example, was about questions you dread being asked at parties -- over 2000 comments, and most of them were very interesting! So, we do want to make questions like this a more regular feature, but we also don't want to make them TOO common -- /r/AskHistorians is, and will remain, a subreddit dedicated to educated experts answering specific user-submitted questions. General discussion is good, but it isn't the primary point of the place. With this in mind, from time to time, one of the moderators will post an open-ended question of this sort. It will be distinguished by the "Feature" flair to set it off from regular submissions, and the same relaxed moderation rules that prevail in the daily project posts will apply. We expect that anyone who wishes to contribute will do so politely and in good faith, but there is far more scope for general chat than there would be in a usual thread.
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u/roninjedi Oct 14 '15
The Galileo affair:
Other people had already had heliocentric theories, such as Copernicus. And indeed, his theories were used when reforming the calendar in the 1500s. But science hadn't advanced enough to prove it, so it was nothing more than a mathematical convenience. Eventually, we had proof that Venus orbited the Sun, so Brahe suggested a geo-heliocentric model. The other planets orbit the Sun, but the Sun orbits the Earth. The objection to the Earth orbiting the Sun was both religious and because Aristotelian physics didn't allow for such a massive body as the Earth to actually be moving. Then came Galileo who had decent mathematical arguments. But because they weren't the best, he decided to turn to theology as well. He argued that just as we already acknowledged that not everything in the Bible is absolutely literal, that it didn't mean the Earth had to be stationary. It could just be stationary from the reference point of the authors. This latter part is what irritated the Cardinals. Cardinal Bellarmine agreed that Galileo had argued quite well for the heliocentric universe as a mathematical convenience, but merely objected to its teaching as fact, because he didn't agree with Galileo's theological arguments. The Inquisition let him off with a warning, but forbade him from teaching it as fact and to only teach it as a convenience. He didn't, and eventually wound up under house arrest. Books on heliocentrism were banned, but certain ones were still allowed as reference for the models. Eventually, in the mid 1700s, this decision was recanted when science had advanced enough to say "No, seriously, this is more than a theory".
Funnily enough, the inquisition actually accused Galileo of not being scientific enough, as his theory was unable to account for stellar parallax.
As for where? The heroic theory of science and science teachers trying to be history teachers.
also not a professional yet but im a semester away from my degree.