instead of the other way around.

Even now, if one just goes out and looks up at the celestial sphere, it seems Quite Clear that the universe is rotating around an immobile Earth

It was only after millenia of peoples all over the world looking at the stately and awe-inspiring movements of the night sky that it first became possible to predict many of these movements, and to then begin to explain why most of the movements *were* predictable. Comets remained a problem, and were simply ascribed to being Signs from God(s).

It is interesting to realize that when first developed the Copernican heliocentric model was less accurate in predicting planetary motions than the much older Ptolemaic geocentric model which had been adjusted for well over a thousand years using epicycles (circles within circles) to make things come out right. This is because Copernicus retained the "perfect motion" of a circle for his orbits and thus still had to use some epicycles—although fewer. Not until Kepler replaced circular orbits with the "less perfect" but actually existent elliptical orbits was this resolved.

This change only occurred almost a century after Copernicus when Kepler (who was a student of Tycho Brahe, and whose observations allowed Kepler to develop his Laws of Planetary Motion) realized that replacing circles with ellipses allowed all epicycles to be discarded.

Also interesting, is that Brahe supported neither the Copernican nor the Ptolemaic models, but had worked out his own (as best I know) compromise of a geo-heliocentric solar system.

https://media.sciencephoto.com/image/c0145205/800wm/C0145205-Epicycles_of_Moon_s_orbit,_1708.jpg
Credit ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY (Can't make this autoshow on DU, it's worth clicking on though!)

I'd say moving away from the "flat Earth" belief was the biggest leap of all.

Just googled Galileo, seems he' the father of science, knowledge, astronomy...the whole works.

...we give credit to Greeks, Romans and Europeans for discoveries made long before by other cultures such as Chinese, Indian and Arabian.

The Pythagorean Theorem, for example, was known to the Babylonians about 2000 BCE and to the Indians in about 800 BCE. Pythagoras lived from ~570-495 BCE.

Iranians were questioning Ptolemy's earth-centered universe by the 11th Century.

Also fun to note is that an ancient Greek (Aristarchus, from the same city where Pythagoras was born a few centuries earlier) outlined his idea of a sun-centered solar-system (and, also the universe) in about 200BCE

the flat earth belief was still held by some...I mean with some early maps showing sea monsters waiting for unfortunate wayfarers to venture into their domain.