Aristotle was one of the early Greek philosophers who calculated the circumference of the earth. But he apparently thought the earth was at the center of everything.
Aristarchus proposed a heliocentric view. This proposition was influenced, it is said, by Philolaus, who is said to have proposed that there was a big burning fire at the center of the universe, and that the sun was just one of many stars moving around that fire.
Can you imagine that Philolaus might have somehow been shown something like one of our artists' renderings of the galaxy, and given a description of the intense radio source at the galactic center?
I can imagine that, and I think I have reason.
The ancient prophet Helaman, in the Book of Mormon, understood that the earth moved in relation to the sun.
And thus, according to his word the earth goeth back, and it appeareth unto man that the sun standeth still; yea, and behold, this is so; for surely it is the earth that moveth and not the sun.
I wonder, if Joseph Smith had had the phrase "frame of reference" in his vocabulary, and the semantic "relative to the sun", might he have read that, instead, as
... for surely it is the earth that moves relative to the sun.
"Relative" does not seem to be a word much used in the Book of Mormon, although the concept can be read in some scriptures.
As I understand it, many of the ancient philosophers were shown such things by angels. The Pearl of Great Price describes such visions given to Moses and Abraham, although their reporting of the visions is not very instructive relative to modern astronomy -- beyond our the general interpretation that the sun is a star and that there are worlds in orbit around other stars.
It is difficult for us to find a meaningful interpretation of Abraham's reporting of suns as planets, partly because of linguistic issues, and partly because we keep trying to fit it all into the frame of our modern understanding of astronomy. (In particular, we don't have anything in our astronomical catalogues to associate directly with Kolob.) But we can see that he was shown that there are stars and planets orbiting them.
And this is what I'm getting at here. If I understand it correctly, God reveals to us what we ask. In the days before modern astronomy and the Internet, God should people who were prepared visions of His creations. Now we have the Internet and youtube and astrophysicists doing the math and the videos, so we don't need that. We don't go to the effort of asking.
Asking takes effort. It takes preparation, and it takes homework.
God still reveals things to us when we ask.
