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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvgaxQGPg7I[/youtube]
The gravitational effect between the sun and the planets is what draws the planets in orbit around it - this is the reference frame and basis for the heliocentric model of the solar system. The sun is also drawn in orbit around the galactic center of mass in another reference frame. When taken together, the planets trace helical paths through the galaxy (there is a helix pattern, but the properties of a vortex are not necessarily fulfilled), but their orbits are still meaningfully heliocentric.
slate.com/blogs/bad_astronom … wrong.html
astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2015/03/a … -that.html
The heliocentric model neither prohibits belief in our own uniqueness nor arises from a dogma of nihilism and self-marginalization (although it may be romanticized that way). The heliocentric model is simply judged a better scientific theory than the preceding geocentric one.
We have plenty of other reasons to think we may be unique in the universe. For instance, we are special and fortunate that earth has passed many filters that make the majority of planets uninhabitable for life. And the human brain, in particular the human neocortex, is arguably the most complex structure and most “densely ramified object” ever observed. We each have a unique point of view and a different foci of intention.
skakos, these earlier questions of mine were also left unanswered and I think they could help pinpoint our disagreement:
Choosing the place with the largest mass is a solution.
But again not even the heliocentric model follows this absolutely: it has two centers (every ellipsis has two centers) in one of which there is… nothing.
But there is a better criterion with which we can choose the center: The place where the conscious observer is.
When I was five or six years old, I can remember thinking (or maybe assuming would be a better word), that the small town where I lived was the most important place in the world. I don’t think I knew about the universe at the time. Obviously, I came to realise this wasn’t the case as I got older. I suppose that, to an immature mind, It isn’t surprising that this would just seem to be self evident.
Fantastic!
Would not exceed the speed of light, because relative to their size they are only going as fast as the person is spinning - ie. the photons are only going 30 miles per hour. Ie. you see a far away planet, and you spin around, the photons in your eyes are localized to your eyes, only spinning 30 miles an hour. You see a projection of the planet in your eyes, not the actual planet, you only see its photons, and once they are in your eyes its localized, so the planet is not going faster than light if you are spinning, because you arent actually seeing the planet move from millions of miles away, you are just moving it’s localized photons.
But everything - “reality” included - is subjective. And if quantum mechanics has showed us something is that we - as observers - formulate reality around us. For you back then this small town WAS the most important place in the world. Why deny it? In the same way, for us here, Earth is and should be the center of all observations. Stating otherwise is simply irrational if you ask me. It is like I am sitting in a moving car and stating the the “center” is is another bigger car next to mine…
Not at all true. The only thing that is subjective is the language we choose to use to describe reality.
What QM has shown us is that we can easily confuse each other into believe complete nonsense by making things complex enough.
Article except below
Geocentrism is a valid frame, but not the only one
I have two things to say that might surprise you: first, geocentrism is a valid frame of reference, and second, heliocentrism is not any more or less correct.
Surprise! Of course, the details are important.
Look, I’m human: I say “The Sun rose in the east today”, and not “the rotation of the Earth relative to the rest of the Universe carried me around to a geometric vantage point where the horizon as seen from my location dropped below the Sun’s apparent position in space.” To us, sitting here on the surface of a planet, geocentrism is a perfectly valid frame of reference. Heck, astronomers use it all the time to point our telescopes. We map the sky using a projected latitude and longitude, and we talk about things rising and setting. That’s not only natural, but a very easy way to do those sorts of things. In that case, thinking geocentrically makes sense.
However, as soon as you want to send a space probe to another planet, geocentrism becomes cumbersome. In that case, it’s far easier to use the Sun as the center of the Universe and measure the rotating and revolving Earth as just another planet. The math works out better, and in fact it makes more common sense.
However, this frame of reference, called heliocentrism, still is not the best frame for everything. Astronomers who study other galaxies use a galactic coordinate system based on our Milky Way galaxy, and the Sun is just another star inside it. Call it galactocentrism, if you want, and it’s just as useful as geo- or heliocentrism in its limited way. And none of those systems work if I want to know turn-by-turn directions while driving; in that case I use a carcentric system (specifically a Volvocentric one).
You use coordinate systems depending on what you need.
So really, there is no one true center to anything. I suppose you could say the Universe is polycentric, or more realistically acentric. You picks your frame of reference and you takes your chances.
Relatively speaking, you’re still wrong
So geocentrism is valid, but so is every other frame. This is the very basis of relativity! One of the guiding principles used by Einstein in formulating it is that there is no One True Frame. If there were, the Universe would behave very, very differently.
That’s where Geocentrism trips up. Note the upper case G there; I use that to distinguish it from little-g geocentrism, which is just another frame of reference among many. Capital-G Geocentrism is the belief that geocentrism is the only frame, the real one.
Geocentrists, at this point, fall into two cases: those who use relativity to bolster their claim, and those who deny it.
Those who use relativity say that geocentrism can be right and is just as valid as heliocentrism or any other centrism. That’s correct! But the problem is that using relativity by definition means that there is no One True Frame. So if you use relativity to say geocentrism can really be Geocentrism, you’re wrong. You’re using self-contradictory arguments.
Fail.
The other flavor of Geocentrist, those who deny relativity wholesale, are wrong as well. Relativity is one of the most well-tested and thoroughly solid ideas in all of science for all time. It is literally tested millions of times a day in particle accelerators. We see it in every cosmological observation, every star that explodes in the sky, every time a nuclear power plant generates even an iota of energy. Heck, without relativity your GPS wouldn’t work.
Relativity is so solid, in fact, that anyone who denies it outright at this point can be charitably called a kook.
So — you guessed it — either way, Geocentrism is wrong.
A little light warning
Those are really the strongest arguments against Geocentrism. You either have to misuse relativity, or deny it entirely, and either way you lose, GOOD DAY SIR!
There are other arguments used, and they seem like good ones but in fact they don’t work out in real life. For example, the most obvious one is that distant stars are light years away. If they circle us once per day, they must move faster than light, which is impossible! This is true even for Neptune; at its distance it would have to move at just faster than light to make one circle every 24 hours.
I thought about this, and wound up asking my friend the cosmologist and fellow blogger Sean Carroll. He confirmed my thinking: relativity says the math has to work out if you change a frame of reference, so if you do the detailed relativistic equations to look at the motion of distant objects, it still works. Things actually can move faster than light relative to the coordinate system, it’s just that things cannot move past each other with a relative speed greater than light. In the weird geocentric frame where the Universe revolves around the Earth, that is self-consistent.
In other words, the Neptune-moving-too-quickly argument sounds good, but in reality it doesn’t work, and we shouldn’t use it.
Uncommon sense
Sometimes, you can make things easier by simplifying. However, you can’t oversimplify, because in the end it makes things harder.
Some geocentrists assert the Earth doesn’t move because it’s just plain obvious. The stars appear go around us, so maybe they really just do. And that makes things simple. But it doesn’t. I mean, it makes calculating the times of sunrise and sunset easier, but it makes it a lot harder to send a space probe to Saturn, since according to them it’s moving at 1/3 the speed of light around us. Far easier to use a heliocentric coordinate system there.
And Geocentrists have to assume that all local phenomena are caused by cosmic motion. For example, the Coriolis effect, which makes hurricanes spin different ways in the northern and southern hemispheres, is relatively easy to explain if you assume a spheroidal rotating Earth. For a Geocentrist, you have to assume that the Universe itself is revolving around us, and affecting the weather here. Again, the math works out, but it’s standing a pyramid on its tip: you have it precisely backwards. And with one poke the whole thing falls over.
We also know earthquakes can affect the rotation of the Earth. That makes sense since they shift the mass around on the surface, and that changes how the Earth spins. To a Geocentrist, though, that earthquake affects the entire Universe.
That’s simpler?
They are not moving faster than light relative to the coordinate system. I already explained this. It is their localized photons which are moving, the actual bodies are not moving. The localized photons move at slow speeds.
More or less. But there is only one center of mass, around which everything in the system orbits: the barycenter.
Our sun has like 99% of the mass in our system - so the barycenter is approximately the sun itself.
If you were standing on the moon, then the moon would appear to be the center of everything. Same for Mars, the Sun, or an asteroid. This criterion yields lots of centers. In fact, it makes it impossible to choose the center. These are only centers of relative motion, anyways, and most of them are useless as functional models of astronomical systems. If you only care about how observable motion works (kinematics), then Earth is a fine makeshift center for many observations. But if you also care about why motion works and what laws might govern it (kinetics /dynamics), there is no sensible reason to think Earth is actually the center of the movement of the Sun, much less the galaxy or the universe.
So to keep the discussion moving, I’ll reply to the questions you don’t seem interested in answering.
Without the Sun, all the planets would fly off in various tangent vectors. Viewed from Earth, the other planets would appear to disperse from view and we would be the center of nothing.*
Yet without Earth, the remaining planets would presumably continue in near indifference in their orbits around the Sun.
*nothing except the two body system of the earth and the moon
It would be a good topic for a new thread imo.
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Since I think it’ll take away from the focus of this thread I’ll comment here.
What do you mean “as fast as the person is spinning?” Assume the person is standing on a motionless earth at the center of the universe.
Also where does the 30mph photon spin rate come from?[/tab]
Its not a topic, theres nothing to say. Its just a side topic telling you the facts. Theres nothing to discuss, its like making a topic about how the grass is greenblueish colored.
Well thanks for the facts. You have my comments above.
If the earth is motionless, then it is not spinning, and the stars and planets around it would not be spinning either.
The thirty mile and hour value is an arbitrary value I made up. For example, if a kid was spinning around at night looking at the stars, the photons in his head of the stars would be moving at 30 miles per hour or so. We dont say that because the earth is spinning, and the stars appear to be moving at the speed of light, that they are moving at the speed of light, they are nothing more than localised photons moving at 30 miles per hour.
People in this thread, seem to be confusing the actual stars with a projection of the stars. Just because the projection of the stars is moving…
But we’re not talking about stopping the earth’s spin, we’re imagining it was never moving in the first place.
So our model for how everything else is moving would have to be massively different. If the earth is not moving but the relative motion of far away stars appears the same, what is their speed?
We must first measure their movement relative to the aether which they reside. Naturally, the aether will be moving at increasing speeds, if the celestial bodies are spinning near it. Thus relative velocity is preserved, relative to the cosmic aether.
Earth cannot be the center.
The Galactic Center Is Not Earth
Earth Is Not The Galactic Center
I do care about HOW and WHY things move, but what does that have to do with selecting a center?
The HOW can be answered fine by choosing Earth as the center or any other point you wish.
The WHY is more of a philosophical question.
If you asked Zeno, things do not move at all.