It is important to get the history right when we are teaching physics. I feel compelled to point out, though, that in attempting to correct physicists’ understanding of the history, Mano Singham’s article “The Copernican Myths” actually creates a new myth: namely, the idea that physicists distort history when they present the development of the heliocentric solar system.
Singham begins with a “breezy version of the Copernicus story,” supposedly the version related in numerous physics textbooks, and then informs us that, “apart from the final sentence, not much” of that version is true. He only gives one reference for the “breezy” version: the introductory text by Paul Fishbane and coauthors. 1 If we check the pages Singham references, however, almost nothing of that version can be found. On page 1, Fishbane and coauthors write, “Blind reverence for authority impedes scientific progress,” but they clearly have in mind the issue of scientific, not religious, authority.
Little of Singham’s version of the “myth” can be discerned in the other pages of Fishbane and coauthors referred to by Singham (pages 320 and 321). Religious authority is not mentioned at all. Fishbane and his coauthors could be faulted for their apparently derogatory use of the phrase “culturally imposed belief”—couldn’t we equally well say that Paul Dirac’s theory of the electron was based on a culturally imposed belief in differential equations?—but their history, brief as it is, is essentially correct.
I have checked the other introductory physics texts on my shelf, and I find even less of Singham’s “breezy” picture in those books. I can only conclude that Singham’s version is a straw man, an invention of Singham’s. The “Copernican myths,” it seems, are completely mythical.
Historical context can be useful in introductory physics as a way to motivate discussion of a topic and to provide color and promote interest. Teachers and authors should certainly strive to present history correctly. But it is a disservice to textbook authors to ascribe to them errors they did not commit. And there is no point in creating new myths in the attempt to correct the old ones.
