What were its arguments? Do you have enough of an understanding of astronomy to know whether it actually made good arguments that are grounded in scientific understanding, or did it just write persuasively in a way that looks convincing to a layman?

> I've had success getting it to offer the Carthaginian perspective in the Punic Wars.

This is not surprising to me. Historians have long studied Carthage, and there are books you can get on the Punic Wars that talk about the state of Carthage leading up to and during the wars (shout out to Richard Miles's "Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization"). I would expect an LLM to piggyback off of that existing literature.

Extensive education in physics, so yes.

The most compelling reason at the time to reject heliocentrism was the (lack of) parallax of stars. The only response that the heliocentrists had was that the stars must be implausibly far away. Hundreds of billions of times further away than the moon is--and they knew the moon itself is already pretty far from us-- which is a pretty radical, even insane, idea. There's also the point that the original Copernican heliocentric model had ad hoc epicycles just as the Ptolemaic one did, without any real increase in accuracy.

Strictly speaking, the breakdown here would be less a lack of understanding of contemporary physics, and more about whether I knew enough about the minutia of historical astronomers' disputes to know if the LLM was accurately representing them.