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There are multiple separate weird gravitational observations besides galexy rotation such as galaxy clusters structure formations etc and while dark matter expl

• dnautics 6y ago
  explaining more does not necessarily mean better. I can explain all of the motions of all of the celestial bodies (better even than newton-einstein gravity can!) using epicycles, but that's trivial because really epicycles are just fourier transforms under another name and all continuous-valued functions have well-defined fourier transforms. 1 - give me a prediction, not just an explanation. Can you take epicycles and project the motions of any given body better than newton? No. 2 - Give me a multimodal observation. Imagine the world before we unified terrestrial gravity with heavenly motion - these were two separate phenomena. Could epicycles explain things outside of the category which it is designed to explain (heavenly motion)? No. Newton's theory also explains why if you throw a book across the room it will fall to earth, which epicycles do not.
  • The_rationalist 6y ago
    Off topic and minor question: Aren't epicycles using trigonometric functions, which is a different paradigm than fourrier transform? I don't remember the difference with Taylor series btw
    • dnautics 6y ago
      I misspoke because epicycles are actually fourier series, but both are trig functions. Fourier's initial formulation of the transform was with trig functions remember e^it = cos t + i sin t