Pagan Tolerance? [Spirituality & Religion]

@Xuan12 thanks for the name correction, i confuse their names often. However, other people criticized Athenian leadership, Socrates wasn't alone. Why didn't they execute them? Also a plague hit Athens which athens attributed to poor favor from the gods. a lot of people died...and socrates was a very nice target for religious peoples. Regardless, religion was a significant factor in having socrates executed. im sure those other reasons are valid too.

The results Aristarchus came up with were not reproducible and the science at the time did not back his claims. Therefore not many people seriously considered his ideas. Had people taken his claims seriously, who knows what would had happened.

@SW-User You have to put Aristarchus in context. What he did was remarkable given what he had at his disposal.

I mean, his ratio of the sun to the earth was off by more than 10x. So what. 3rd century BC and he's doing this with no real equipment to measure small angular distances. He doesn't even have zero. Or trig tables.

An error of 10X is pretty good.

@SW-User Also the methodology of Aristarchus was pretty revolutionary at the the time. It was used for the same experiment by Hipparchus and Ptolemy centuries later.

Aristarchus got the distance to the moon being 20 earth radii. Hipparchus got 67. Ptolemy got 59. The real answer is about 60.

So Aristarchus is vindicated there.

@MasterDvdC Yeah, that's implied. medieval Europeans were mostly RC.