DrakBibliophile wrote:I don't remember any planets mentioned but if there are other planets around Safehold's sun their movement around Safehold is explained in the Writ with epicycles.
Also, it maybe that the Writ mentions that Langhorne gave some of the other planets moons of their own.
While David Weber hasn't (to the best of my knowledge) said anything about Safehold astronomy, he has said that the Writ gives enough information concerning the World that Safeholdians likely won't "see a need" to seek out explanations.
IMO telescopes are an easily foreseen development (and too useful to be banned) that the Writ would explain what they might see in the sky with such telescopes.
While the heliocentric model is a simpler system to describe what we see, the Writ's explanation (including epicycles) could be "what marvels Langhorne has created".
IE Langhorne could have created a simpler system but included epicycles to give mortals something to marvel at.cralkhi wrote:From OAR, describing the Writ's version of the Ptolemaic model of the universe:
"Langhorne had created the world as a round ball at the center of the crystal spheres of the moon, sun, stars, and God’s own Heaven"
This is interesting in that it doesn't mention any planets. Does the Kau-zhi system not have any planets other than Safehold, or at least none bright enough to see from Safehold?
If so, that would make the Ptolemaic model pretty unassailable (on observational grounds rather than just "Merlin/Owl say so") without quite advanced astronomical technology.
With no planets to see retrograde motion in to make the system even require epicycles... with no equivalent of Jupiter's moons to see clearly orbiting something other than Safehold...
They'd have to have instruments/measurements precise enough to make it entirely clear that stellar aberration/parallax wasn't just observational error (whereas we were specifically looking for parallax for centuries, and discovered stellar aberration in the process). And even then, I doubt they'd realize that it meant heliocentrism without Merlin/Owl... we'd already had the heliocentric model for centuries, and without those planets' retrograde motion, there would never have been any reason to develop it in the first place.
The Holy Writ uses Ptolemey's deferents, epicycles, and equants but with the Writ supplying the "official" distances to the other system bodies in order to ensure that all the epicycles work out to the same distance as the sun's apparent orbit around Safehold. The other planets aren't planets like Safehold; instead, they are worlds which might have become other homes for Man, as Safehold did, if only Shan-wei hadn't fallen and led the rebellion against God's plan. Had Shan-wei not rebelled, those additional inhabited worlds would have orbited in Safehold's heavens against the magnificent backdrop of the stars forever.
As for the apparent motion of the stars, that, too, is a deliberate gift from God, a vast tapestry set to change forever in Safehold's heavens.
No telescope which can be fabricated without first violating the Proscriptions is going to disprove any of the above. People asking the right questions even without telescopes could undoubtedly unravel it, but first they'd have to have a reason to ask the questions in the first place. The model they have works; this is a society which absolutely accepts the accuracy of the Writ and all of the firsthand accounts left by 8,000,000 Adams and Eves; and there is very little likelihood that anyone would ask those questions under those circumstances. There is even less likelihood that he would ask them twice once the Inqusition had a word with him.
The system isn't perfect or infallible, but, then, Langhorne's entire plan assumed a degree of infallibility that was inherently unobtainable. It is pretty well thought out, however, and the Church was instituted as the checking mechanism intended to keep his intellectual dykes from sprouting leaks.
