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I don't get his point. Yes the World Map has Northern and Southern Hemisphere and the North is arbitrarily at the top. That is a convention primarily due to the

I don't get his point. Yes the World Map has Northern and Southern Hemisphere and the North is arbitrarily at the top. That is a convention primarily due to the people that drew the map lived there. What he seems to have discovered is that conventions are not facts. There are facts present in the map however such as how all the land masses are positioned in relation to each other. No convention can change the fact that Australia is closer to New Zealand than it is to the US. This does not change whichever convention is used regarding North, South, projection etc. This is something akin to Kellyanne Conways "Alternative Facts" where she confuses alternate interpretations of what can be inferred from facts with distorting actual facts. So her phrase would more accurately be "Alternative too Facts".

behnamoh 3y ago
Thanks for your comment. I didn't mean all facts are conventions—but the majority of truths I was taught at school like how the Earth looks like, the existence of seasons, and the Earth rotating around the Sun were just conventions. Yes, you can (and people have done it) assume the Earth is at the center and the Sun and other planets revolve around the Earth. Your equations would just be more complicated. It's all relative.
- al2o3cr 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 3y ago
    Yikes, posting like this will get you banned here, no matter how wrong another comment is or you feel it is. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it. Edit: it looks like we've had to warn you about this kind of thing many times in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29545379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29545379 (Dec 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23901052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23901052 (July 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21104010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21104010 (Sept 2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17008730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17008730 (May 2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13867757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13867757 (March 2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11724575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11724575 (May 2016) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11320181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11320181 (March 2016) Unfortunately, it also looks like you've been continuing to post flamebait-and-snark-style comments quite a bit. We need that to stop if you want to keep posting here.
- dekhn 3y ago
  are you actually saying that heliocentrism is as good a model as our current model of the universe, and is likely to be an accurate representation of the true reality? No. We have multiple sources of evidence demonstrating that the earth is not the center of movement for the rest of the universe. If any one of those sources was wrong, it would completely overturn entire areas of physics. We didn't know what the Earth looked like from space in the past. It wasn't until the mid-to-late 1960s that we knew what it looked like in detail. And that came from direct imaging. Nothing about that was "convention" or relative. The existence of seasons? I mean, sure, seasons aren't perfectly well-defined things that last 3 months and then turn into the next season. I live in the bay area- late October is "summer" and our winters are wet, with no snow. So, clearly, there is some aspect of convention in deciding on 4 seasons- but you can look at plots of temperature over time, and other metrics, and clearly see that there are variations that correspond to what we call seasons. Not interesting at all to argue about this. The earth rotating around the sun happens due to the objective laws of physics, not convention. You can do centripital to centrifugal conversions and relative frames of motion all you want, but we have wide range of evidence that the sun does not rotate around the earth.
  - behnamoh 3y ago
    > are you actually saying that heliocentrism is as good a model as our current model of the universe, and is likely to be an accurate representation of the true reality? No, I meant it doesn't really make a difference to assume the Earth is at the center and think of the movement of other objects relative to the Earth. The orbits wouldn't be simple though. In general, all models are wrong, it's just that some are more useful than the others.
- strangattractor 3y ago
  What your teachers failed to do is teach logic and basic reasoning. It is not that I think you are wrong or stupid. People a great deal smarter than myself have thought about this issue since ancient Greece. A "truth" is a quality of something. The statement "The phone is on the kitchen table." Is either True or False. Saying that the Earth is 92 million miles from the Sun is true. The that we all agree on how long a mile is a convention. Similarly the hemisphere of a tilted Earth starts to warm at a certain part of the Earth's orbit each year is True - that we (English speakers) call it Spring is a convention. A better example for your argument might be that Newton's equations of motion is highly accurate at velocities much slower that the speed of light. Einstein's Relativity is a much better fit at the high velocities. But again if you use Einstein's equation at low velocities they look a lot like Newton - you see that Newton's results still hold so they are still considered true. If you model the Earth at the center of the solar system you can derive a complicated system that fits that model but it starts to fall apart in a lot of other places which makes it not true and or useful. Stuff like why the we get seasons would be difficult to explain indeed (the Sun changes temperature cyclicly during the year I guess). That is why Newton's Equation are considered such an achievement - they solve use cases that where never considered when they were created. Some things are a lot more right than others. The fact that you think about such things is great - most people don't bother.

behnamoh 3y ago

Thanks for your comment. I didn't mean all facts are conventions—but the majority of truths I was taught at school like how the Earth looks like, the existence of seasons, and the Earth rotating around the Sun were just conventions. Yes, you can (and people have done it) assume the Earth is at the center and the Sun and other planets revolve around the Earth. Your equations would just be more complicated. It's all relative.

al2o3cr 3y ago
[flagged]
- dang 3y ago
  Yikes, posting like this will get you banned here, no matter how wrong another comment is or you feel it is. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it. Edit: it looks like we've had to warn you about this kind of thing many times in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29545379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29545379 (Dec 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23901052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23901052 (July 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21104010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21104010 (Sept 2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17008730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17008730 (May 2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13867757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13867757 (March 2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11724575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11724575 (May 2016) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11320181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11320181 (March 2016) Unfortunately, it also looks like you've been continuing to post flamebait-and-snark-style comments quite a bit. We need that to stop if you want to keep posting here.
dekhn 3y ago
are you actually saying that heliocentrism is as good a model as our current model of the universe, and is likely to be an accurate representation of the true reality? No. We have multiple sources of evidence demonstrating that the earth is not the center of movement for the rest of the universe. If any one of those sources was wrong, it would completely overturn entire areas of physics. We didn't know what the Earth looked like from space in the past. It wasn't until the mid-to-late 1960s that we knew what it looked like in detail. And that came from direct imaging. Nothing about that was "convention" or relative. The existence of seasons? I mean, sure, seasons aren't perfectly well-defined things that last 3 months and then turn into the next season. I live in the bay area- late October is "summer" and our winters are wet, with no snow. So, clearly, there is some aspect of convention in deciding on 4 seasons- but you can look at plots of temperature over time, and other metrics, and clearly see that there are variations that correspond to what we call seasons. Not interesting at all to argue about this. The earth rotating around the sun happens due to the objective laws of physics, not convention. You can do centripital to centrifugal conversions and relative frames of motion all you want, but we have wide range of evidence that the sun does not rotate around the earth.
- behnamoh 3y ago
  > are you actually saying that heliocentrism is as good a model as our current model of the universe, and is likely to be an accurate representation of the true reality? No, I meant it doesn't really make a difference to assume the Earth is at the center and think of the movement of other objects relative to the Earth. The orbits wouldn't be simple though. In general, all models are wrong, it's just that some are more useful than the others.
strangattractor 3y ago
What your teachers failed to do is teach logic and basic reasoning. It is not that I think you are wrong or stupid. People a great deal smarter than myself have thought about this issue since ancient Greece. A "truth" is a quality of something. The statement "The phone is on the kitchen table." Is either True or False. Saying that the Earth is 92 million miles from the Sun is true. The that we all agree on how long a mile is a convention. Similarly the hemisphere of a tilted Earth starts to warm at a certain part of the Earth's orbit each year is True - that we (English speakers) call it Spring is a convention. A better example for your argument might be that Newton's equations of motion is highly accurate at velocities much slower that the speed of light. Einstein's Relativity is a much better fit at the high velocities. But again if you use Einstein's equation at low velocities they look a lot like Newton - you see that Newton's results still hold so they are still considered true. If you model the Earth at the center of the solar system you can derive a complicated system that fits that model but it starts to fall apart in a lot of other places which makes it not true and or useful. Stuff like why the we get seasons would be difficult to explain indeed (the Sun changes temperature cyclicly during the year I guess). That is why Newton's Equation are considered such an achievement - they solve use cases that where never considered when they were created. Some things are a lot more right than others. The fact that you think about such things is great - most people don't bother.