I was digging through my iBooks library and accidentally caught on a passage in a book by Golovin (Evgeny Golovin; the book was Approaching the Snow Queen, Приближение к Снежной королеве), where he, among other things, reflects on the trial of Galileo. I caught on it because he voices an interesting thought there: that Copernicus, supposedly, did not place the Sun at the centre of his system, but rather a certain “focus of a secret fire”. From this the author draws a whole bunch of conclusions, each very important to him.
What snagged me, though, was that the phrase would have suited Bruno much better (or even one of the Pythagoreans) than Copernicus. So, being a modern person, I asked Claude to look up the original. And, as it happens, he found it: “In medio vero omnium residet Sol”. Here even my Latin is enough to understand the meaning of Sol. What’s more, thanks to the Library of Congress (and to Claude, who handed me a direct link), you can check for yourself that the book above, and the diagram too, really is there in Copernicus’s book. That is, unless you assume a larger conspiracy theory.
In short, in a few years a very large number of authors are going to have a hard time, to put it mildly, since even basic LLMs will be able to “tear apart” their works in no time.
And it even makes me curious: how much of our basic knowledge, about science, the world, nature, and ourselves, rests on this kind of distorted quotation and cherry-picking on the authors’ part?