Much thanks for the good historical info.

Lorentz thought his transformed time wasn't real because he was preserving the aether, which defined a particularly "real" time. Before Einstein's interpretation of the photoelectric effect the aether made a lot of sense, which seems like useful context.

I'm confused still. This one sounds consistent with what I said; a local time was useful in prediction but didn’t provide enough predictions in varied enough contexts for it to seem more sensible to believe in local time as a real world-constituent, rather than as a narrowly useful predictive device. Are you saying this wouldn’t have been true without the aether as a specific such context?

Hydrogen monoxide isn't something early chemists would have measured - maybe they measured hydrogen peroxide, though. Other examples for the law of multiple proportions would be carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.

Thanks. Fixed.

The Copernican model was not more accurate than the Ptolemaic model. Its inaccuracy was its major problem, in fact. The main reason it held on was that it, in its simplicity, felt more "real" - what you report was only thought later. Kepler's model, on the other hand, kicked butt and took names, which may be what you were thinking of.

Okay, thanks. I’ll fix that. Do you think historians of science are correct in thinking that the scholars at Wittenburg in fact engaged with the new theory, but not with the bit about heliocentricness?