  In 1614 Johann Georg Locher, a student of the Jesuit astronomer Christoph
Scheiner, proposed a physical mechanism to explain how the Earth could orbit
the sun. An orbit, Locher said, is a perpetual fall. He proposed this despite
the fact that he rejected the Copernican system, citing problems with falling
bodies and the sizes of stars under that system. In 1651 and again in 1680,
Jesuit writers Giovanni Battista Riccioli and Athanasius Kircher, respectively,
considered and rejected outright Locher's idea of an orbit as a perpetual fall.
Thus this important concept of an orbit was proposed, considered, and rejected
well before Isaac Newton would use an entirely different physics to make the
idea that an orbit is a perpetual fall the common way of envisioning and
explaining orbits.
