On orders of Pope Paul V, Galileo is ordered not to hold or defend the Copernican theory. Later, in 1624, Galileo was allowed to write about the Copernican theory provided that he treated it as a mathematical hypothesis. When Galileo published Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in1630, comparing the Ptolemaic and Copernican models, the Church stopped its distribution and condemned Galileo to house arrest for the rest of his life.

The final steps leading to the rejection of Aristotle and Ptolemy come from Johannes Kepler, Rene Descartes and Isaac Newton. Kepler's laws of planetary motion describe an elliptical form and operation of planetary orbits that contradict Aristotle's assertion that the orbits of the planets were round circles.

In 1637, Rene Descartes published Discourse of Method, a work setting forth the principles of deductive reasoning as used in the modern scientific method. In short, his method required (1) accepting...
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