Originally a comment by Jim Baerg on Stuck in presentism.
It was only with Kepler’s elliptical orbits that a heliocentric model predicted planetary motions better than a geocentric model.
Galileo’s observation of Jupiter’s moons showed that there are at least some objects that definitely orbit something other than the earth. The phases of Venus are hard (impossible ?) to explain in a non-heliocentric model.
For a non-dogmatic thinker, it was really only the combination of all of those developments that would remove reasonable doubt about heliocentrism. Though the lack of observable parallax of stars bothered scientists until measurements became good enough to detect the parallax in the 19th century.
Similarly in the case of continental drift/plate tectonics. There was … Read the rest