The "clockwork" view is objectively incorrect due to being the wrong scale. (Some) Accurate scale models of the solar system get played out across city blocks.

If it's a tinkertoy style model or a drawing within a book, it's made up BS. There are no books large enough to actually show it to scale.

Edit: For the pedants of the world, I have added "(Some)" to my sentence. "Not all accurate scale models" of course. Some are even larger than that.

2nd edit: Folding another comment in here as well that I deleted :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System_model

The Sweden solar system scale is listed as 1:20,000,000. Others have used a different scale and been fit into less than an entire country. There are several around the world.

In York, it is spread across 6.4 miles:

https://astrocampus.york.ac.uk/cycle-the-solar-system/

There's another in Greater Boston:

https://foursquare.com/eric_odea/list/museum-of-science-bost...

Here's a Cody's Lab video showing a "to-scale" solar system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCSIXLIzhzk

It's astounding that astronomers have mapped out the skies just by looking up. It's like as if I mapped out my entire city just by looking out the windows of my house.

If your city was 99% empty by volume and your house rotated every day it wouldn't be THAT difficult :)

"We can only speculate as to what is on the far side of the house on 123 Anytown Road. Human exploration is needed."

City blocks? Sweden has a scale model of the solar system that stretches across the entire country - north to south. And even then it isn’t actually big/long enough for the entire solar system.

The best view of the solar system I've experienced that could be incorporated into classroom learning is a VR tour. It not only shows you the relative distance really well, it also shows you the size of the planets relative to each other and you really get an intuitive sense of the massiveness of the sun (and other stars), for example.

Depends how small you’re willing to make the bodies. In Sweden the Sun is a huge spherical building.

and if it was smaller the planets would be invisible.

It could be made smaller without risking invisibility of any of the planets. The smallest planet is Mercury at 25cm.

I read Doreen's comment as at least city blocks.

Sweden was, last I checked, larger than a city block.