Contra galileo: Riccioli's 'Coriolis-force' argument on the Earth's diurnal rotation

摘要

In 1651 the Italian astronomer and physicist Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598-1671) published his encyclopedic book, Almagestum novum, in which he presented seventy-seven arguments against the Copernican theory of the movement of the Earth, one of which foresaw an effect that physicists today attribute to the Coriolis force. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), Isaac Newton (1642-1727), and Robert Hooke (1635-1703) investigated this argument, which raises significant questions about the nature of the opposition to the Copernican theory in the seventeenth century.