Like all histories  the history of science has its fair share of ‘nearly-men’ They find themselves scattered amongst the heroes like Galileo  Newton  Darwin and Einstein There’s Tycho Brahe  for example  the finest naked-eye astronomer of all time  who observed the motions of the planets with greater accuracy than anyone before him  but failed to realise – like Copernicus did – that the Earth was itself a planet  revolving around the Sun  and not the centre of the cosmos