4 ms·

Does it really take years and years of education to comprehend that the Earth is spinning around the sun?

• PhasmaFelis 10y ago
  It might take years to really understand it. It only takes a few minutes to hear something and decide to believe it without truly understanding, but is that really what we want people to do?
• averagewall 10y ago
  It's not obvious that the sun isn't spinning around the earth instead. You could use coordinate acceleration in an earth-centered frame and the sun would be spinning around the earth. That's equally as correct as the conventional view. So I think a test can be that if someone doesn't understand that the sun is spinning around the earth, then they probably don't actually understand at the earth is spinning around the sun - they just believe it. I'm a physics teacher, and most teenagers don't have a clue about this at all. They think astronauts float around in space because there's no gravity there. If there's no gravity, then how does the earth stay in orbit around the sun? That shows they really don't understand it at all. It's difficult and you have to actually think hard over a long time to make all the pieces fit together.
• metaphorm 10y ago
  examine this statement in more detail. consider that this discovery is only a few centuries old, was controversial at the time, and that astronomy had been practiced all over the world for thousands of years under the incorrect Geocentric Model because that model is deeply intuitive as well as explanatory up to a point. the level of precision and rigor, backed by advanced instruments and mathematics, needed to disprove the Geocentric Model is really quite high. you have taken your own education for granted.