The Tycho Solar System, Revisited

I always thought Tycho Brahe was the greatest pure astronomer, so I was surprised to find this new paper trashing him:

The Tychonic system, an implausible theory
Gabriele Vanin

Several scholars have accorded the Tychonic System a prominent place, considering it a credible alternative to the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems. In recent years, there have even been some enthusiastic contributions in support of Brahe, which have sought to show how his solutions were the most suitable for providing scientifics support to the new observations that were accumulating between the late 16th century and the mid-17th century.

Tycho had a model where the Sun went around the Earth, and Mercury and Venus went around the Sun.

At a time when Copernicus had already published his hypothesis, it could not but be considered a step backwards, a return to the past, a naive and useless compromise. That is, as an ad hoc theory (the kind that sci- entists gladly do without if they can, and, in this case, they could) contrived on purpose to have the best of both worlds, i.e. the immobility of the Earth and the concentric motion of the planets around the Sun, as a geometrically and physically poorly founded expedient. After Copernicus finally have the courage to declare that in the homocentric spheres, in epicycles and deferents lies hidden the orbit of the Earth, does Brahe return to the starting point, swapping the orbit of the Earth with that of the Sun again? It would be a bit as if, in the aftermath of the publication of the On the Origin of Species, someone had said that yes, evolution was acceptable, but that the evolution of man had occurred on a parallel track, not descending from the first common life-form, but from another one, completely different, and had developed quite independently.

This is ridiculous. There were good arguments for and against the motion of the Earth.

The paper later complains that Kepler's third law, discovered in 1619, could be applied to Saturns moons, discovered in 1656-84, and that would seem to falsify the Tychonic system. Tycho died in 1601.

I have seen others trash Tycho for being too stupid to accept Copernicanism. I wonder about what their idea of science is.

Tycho had the best pre-telescope astronomy observations of anyone. By far. The stars had been tracked for thousands of years, but Tycho's data was so good that it made all preceding data worthless.

A geocentric model is not necessarily wrong. Motion is relative. We say the Earth goes around the Sun, not because it is a fact, but because dynamic models make more sense in a center-of-mass frame. It makes more sense to say the smaller object is orbiting the larger object.

Tycho was creating a more accurate model of the solar system. He did not know about gravity. But without him, it is hard to see how Kepler and Newton could have accomplished what they did.

To me, science is all about collecting data, and constructing explanatory and predictive models. Tycho did this, possibly more brilliantly that any other astronomer in history. And yet people want to trash him as unscientific.

A scientific theory can be extremely good, even if the interpretation is not quite right. For example, Murray Gell-Mann is famous for his theory of quarks, but originally he did not even believe in quarks. As the quarks cannot be isolated, it is a philosophical issue whether they are real or not. Now everyone says they are real, but Gell-Mann was not really wrong to treat them as theoretical constructs.

IBM Plans to Scale Up Quantum Computing

The WSJ reports:

International Business Machines has spent a decade building, testing and improving in the once-theoretical realm of quantum computing at its glass-paneled laboratory complex in upstate New York.

This year, the company is laying the groundwork to turn that technology into a fully-fledged, scalable business from an expensive science project.

IBM said last month it plans to form a new independent subsidiary called Anderon, a foundry to produce the silicon wafers needed to make quantum-computing processors. The venture is seeded by a $1 billion investment from the Trump administration and another $1 billion of IBM’s own cash.

Anderon will give the company a new line of business in selling wafers to other quantum-computing companies. It will also provide a steady stream of wafers to continue developing its own quantum technology, positioning IBM to capture part of what the Boston Consulting Group projects will be a $90 billion to $170 billion market for quantum-computing providers by 2040.

The venture will begin with an expansion of the company’s in-house facility in Albany, N.Y., which makes wafers for IBM’s internal research. “Now we have to scale it,” IBM Director of Research Jay Gambetta said in an interview.

The company also plans to spend an additional $9 billion over five years to advance the final stages of its quest to build a quantum-mechanics-powered computer capable and reliable enough for widespread use, a goal known as fault tolerance. That computer, named Starling, is being targeted for 2029.

With Anderon, IBM is thinking beyond Starling, or even a more powerful quantum computer planned for 2033.

I don't see how IBM can be scaling up, when they do not have a working technology, and do not have applications for the scale up.

Dr. Bee has a new video trashing the prospects for quantum computing, and in particular, IBM for quietly shifting goals. It is still committed, but cannot achieve its previous goals.