Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious
But seen from Earth, stars appear as dots of certain sizes or magnitudes. The only way stars could be so incredibly distant and have such sizes was if they were all incredibly huge, every last one dwarfing the Sun. Tycho Brahe, the most prominent astronomer of the era and a favourite of the Establishment, thought this was absurd, while Peter Crüger, a leading Polish mathematician, wondered how the Copernican system could ever survive in the face of the star-size problem.
.. Brahe had theorised that all planets circled the Sun, while it circled Earth. Locher noted that Brahe might be right, but what was clear was that the telescope supported Ptolemy.
.. But the telescopically discovered moons of Jupiter were proof of epicyclic motion: the moons rode in circles around Jupiter, while those circles rode with Jupiter on its orbit. The telescope had proven Ptolemy correct; it was just that Venus and sunspots (and maybe all the planets) had their epicycles centred on the Sun.
.. Unfortunately for Locher, he turned out to be wrong about the Earth not moving (the apparent sizes of stars would be shown to be spurious, an effect of optics).
Worse, Galileo in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) made sport of a certain ‘booklet of theses’, namely Locher’sDisquisitions, quoting from it without identifying its author or title. He caricatured Disquisitions, then ridiculed the caricature, portraying the ‘booklet’ as the work of a befuddled establishmentarian, hung up on the ancient idea of an immobile Earth. Galileo gave no clue that the ‘booklet’s’ author was complimentary to him, excited about new telescopic discoveries, encouraging further telescopic research, and wielding solid arguments against Earth’s motion. Locher was forgotten, while Galileo’s caricature became accepted as history, and applied to the entire debate over Earth’s motion.
That is unfortunate for science, because today the opponents of science make use of that caricature. Those who insist that the Apollo missions were faked, that vaccines are harmful, or even that the world is flat – whose voices are now loud enough for the ‘War on Science’ to be a National Geographiccover story and for the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to address even their most bizarre claims – do not reject the scientific process per se. Rather, they wrap themselves in the mantle of Galileo, standing (supposedly) against a (supposedly) corrupted science produced by the ‘Scientific Establishment’. Thus Locher matters. Science’s history matters. Anti-Copernicans such as Locher and Brahe show that science has always functioned as a contest of ideas, and that science was present in both sides of the vigorous debate over Earth’s motion.