The wind you feel and the earth is soaring through space.

the change of seasons combined with observations of postitons of stars and the sun, and especially other planets, that do the same thing than the earth. The winter and summer change indicates that there is more than just one kind of rotation. This means the earth is rotating around itself (for the days) and around the sun (for the year). If the sun rotated around the earth, it would only be one season every year.

wow - something about 3 elve's on the back of a space troll playing cards, never put too much stock in that as elve's are kown to be terrible card players

The merit of the idea is that it is a fact. "The earth revolves around the sun" is a true statement.

1) "The ideas presented by Copernicus were not markedly easier to use than the geocentric theory and did not produce more accurate predictions of planetary positions. They appeared to be contrary to common sense and to contradict the Bible. They did (with hindsight) accurately predict the relative distances of the planets from the Sun, but this meant abandoning the cherished Aristotelian idea that there is no empty space between the planetary spheres. Why then were Copernicus's ideas taken up by other astronomers? The key attraction was that Copernicus reintroduced the idea of uniform circular motion for the planets During the 17th century, three further discoveries eventually led to the complete acceptance of heliocentrism: - Johannes Kepler introduced the idea that the orbits of the planets were elliptical rather than circular; - Using the newly-invented telescope, Galileo discovered the four large moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus and the rotation of the Sun about a fixed axis as indicated by the apparent annual variation in the motion of sunspots. - Isaac Newton proposed universal gravity and the inverse-square law of gravitational attraction to explain Kepler's elliptical planetary orbits. " Source and further information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_heliocentrism 2) "The realization that the heliocentric view was also not true in a strict sense was achieved in steps. That the Sun was not the center of the universe, but one of innumerable stars, was strongly advocated by the mystic Giordano Bruno; Galileo made the same point, but said very little on the matter, perhaps not wishing to incur the church's wrath. Over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, the status of the Sun as merely one star among many became increasingly obvious. By the 20th century, even before the discovery that there are many galaxies, it was no longer an issue. Even if the discussion is limited to the solar system, the sun is not at the geometric center of any planet's orbit, but rather at one focus of the elliptical orbit. Furthermore, to the extent that a planet's mass cannot be neglected in comparison to the Sun's mass, the center of gravity of the solar system is displaced slightly away from the center of the Sun. (The masses of the planets, mostly Jupiter, amount to 0.14% of that of the Sun.) Therefore a hypothetical astronomer on an extrasolar planet would observe a "wobble" in his perception of the Sun's motion. Giving up the whole concept of being "at rest" is related to the principle of relativity. While, assuming an unbounded universe, it was clear there is no privileged position in space, until postulation of the special theory of relativity by Albert Einstein, at least the existence of a privileged class of inertial systems absolutely at rest was assumed, in particular in the form of the hypothesis of the luminiferous aether. Some forms of Mach's principle consider the frame at rest with respect to the masses in the universe to have special properties." Source and further information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliocentrism#The_view_of_modern_science