Historical Background
The discovery of the aberration of light in 1725 by James Bradley was one of the most important in astronomy. It was totally unexpected, and it was only by extraordinary perseverance and perspicacity that Bradley was able to explain it in 1727. Its origin is based on attempts made to discover whether the stars possessed appreciable parallaxes. The Copernican theory of the solar system – that the Earth revolved annually about the Sun – had received confirmation by the observations of Galileo and Tycho Brahe (who, however, never accepted heliocentrism), and the mathematical investigations of Kepler and Newton. Brahe did not accept heliocentrism because Galileo's observations only confirmed that other planets, specifically Venus, revolved around the Sun, not Earth.
Read more about this topic: Aberration Of Light
Famous quotes containing the words historical and/or background:
“After so many historical illustrations of the evil effects of abandoning the policy of protection for that of a revenue tariff, we are again confronted by the suggestion that the principle of protection shall be eliminated from our tariff legislation. Have we not had enough of such experiments?”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)