Letters to the editor April 5

Galileo’s views

A simple response to Susan Cahill’s letter (Lessons of Galileo, March 24). In brief, many people wrongly believe Galileo proved heliocentrism. Unfortunately, he could not answer the strongest argument against it, which had been made nearly two thousand years earlier by Aristotle: If heliocentrism were true, then there would be observable parallax shifts in the stars’ positions as the earth moved in its orbit around the sun...