"[…]that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it."
Isaac Newton
“Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available…a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.“
Fred Hoyle
"You wonder that there are so few followers of the Pythagorean opinion [that the earth moves] while I am astonished that there have been any up to this day who have embraced and followed it.
Nor can I ever sufficiently admire the outstanding acumen of those who have taken hold of this opinion and accepted it as true:
they have, through sheer force of intellect, done such violence to their own senses as to prefer what reason told them over that which sensible experience plainly showed them to be the contrary.
For the arguments against the whirling [the rotation] of the earth we have already examined are very plausible, as we have seen; and the fact that the Ptolemaics and the Aristotelians and all their disciples took them to be conclusive is indeed a strong argument of their effectiveness.
But the experiences which overtly contradict the annual movement [the movement of the earth around the sun] are indeed so much greater in their apparent force that, I repeat, there is no limit to my astonishment when I reflect that Aristarchus and Copernicus were able to make reason so conquer sense that in defiance of the latter, the former became mistress of their belief."
Salviati
"Many have been able to see through the delusions of modern astronomy. Letters from various parts testify that, in some cases, men and women have begun to make use of their brain-power, which had been stunted and dwarfed by acceptation, without the slightest proof, of the unscientific, unreasonable, unnatural and infidel teachings of men foisted upon a credulous public in the name of ‘Science.’ Others again, tell that the writers have thrown to the moles and to the bats the world-wide and almost universally believed hoax that we are living on a whirling sea-earth globe, revolving faster than a cannonball travels, rushing through ‘space’ at a rate beyond human power to conceive, and flying – with the whole of the so-called ‘solar system’ – in another direction twenty times the speed of its rotation."
Thomas Winship
"When we consider that the advocates of the earth’s stationary and central position can account for, and explain the celestial phenomena as accurately, to their own thinking, as we can ours, in addition to which they have the evidence of their senses, and scripture, and FACTS in their favour, which we have not; it is not without a shew of reason that they maintain the superiority of their system. [....] However perfect our theory may appear in our estimation, and however simply (?) and satisfactorily the Newtonian hypothesis may seem to us to account for all the celestial phenomena, yet we are here compelled to admit the astounding truth that, if our premises be disputed, and our facts challenged, the whole range of Astronomy does not contain the proofs of its own accuracy."
Dr. Robert Woodhouse