How astronomy came of age: changing models of the solar system

This film examines the changing models of our solar system.

Commencing with the ancient Greeks, it explores how observations that wouldn't fit led to the development of the current model.

This film explores how our models of the solar system have changed over the centuries.

The ancient Greeks visualised the Earth as being at the fixed centre of perfect, revolving spheres bearing the moon, sun and stars. The only problem was the presence of wanderers ("planetos" in Greek) that meandered to and fro across the sky – which we now know to be planets.

The Guardian

reply to post by ollncasino

It's pretty lame when the guy draws circles in the sand with a stick, when we have cheap and easy modern computer animation available that would be much better.

Also he dances around the Ptolemaic model but doesn't really show it...why not? He could have shown the model in the time it took him to dance around it. That's an important historical model for numerous reasons...one being that it shows a wrong model can still make reasonably accurate predictions. That model is shown in this slightly longer video which is drier but more informative, and the narrator speaks more clearly.

History of astronomy


Better still is Alex Filippenko's coverage of the topic in his TTC course, which may be out of print now but a search may show it's available at other sources. It's an interesting and important subject which 7 or even 12 minutes doesn't do much justice, and I think Filippenko spends more time on it.