Navigation was an earth centered problem until the chronometer

Heliocentrism was made accurate by Copernicus. But even after Copernicus there was not much to make of it for a hundred years since navigation remained earth centered. Even before Copernicus, heliocentrism was widely suspected for hundreds of years. Up to invention of the chronometer, earth centered navigation was always accurate enough and simple enough to get folks around Europe and the continents.

 Then we invented the chronometer and Newton's method was began dividing clock ticks to small and smaller amounts.  The chronometer is what made everything fall together, it mader heliocentrism useful in navigation.

How did the planets stay on time? They needed inertia to do that, proposed by Kepler, I think. (I am just now going through the sequence). Inertia leads to a field concept, force. Force is a field theory and allows multiply to be computed at any scale at any point. We get velocity and momentum and calculus.