Sep 14, 2020
The small, tidy Ptolemaic universe may have been psychologically comforting, but the universe is under no obligation to make us comfortable.
- Fundamentals of Astrophysics, by B. Ryden and B. Peterson (a lot of stuff like this that I post is from this book, sorry I haven't been citing it)
Because stellar parallax is so freaking small because the distances are so freaking huge, many astronomers, including Tycho Brahe and Ptolemy, thought both that the world was geocentric and that the universe was much smaller than it really is. But our nearest stellar neighbors are more than 270,000 astronomical units away. Such a distance, the thought of such a vast, unthinkable amount of space, may well have driven them mad.