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I wonder why people hate on believing that the sun revolves around the earth. It would make for more complicated equations of motion, but is not unscientific or

by jayzee 14y ago

I wonder why people hate on believing that the sun revolves around the earth. It would make for more complicated equations of motion, but is not unscientific or wrong to believe that to be the case. It just turns out that the math is easier when you believe that the sun is at the center.

gms7777 14y ago
Especially when you consider that both are, in fact, "wrong". In a two-body system, they both revolve around around the center of mass. (Though truly our solar system is far beyond a two-body system).
- jayzee 14y ago
  True. I think that people who think that they are scientific like to believe certain things just as much as people who are not scientific. I am sure that if you sat Jonah down and asked him to prove any of these things there would be a squirt in his 'A.C.C.' circuit!
codebaobab 14y ago
I heard once that the circles-on-circles construction of the motion of the bodies of solar system when Earth is taken as its center is merely the Fourier transform of the ellipses that describe the solar system with the Sun as its center. Unfortunately, I never saw the actual derivation, so that idea is basically hearsay.
- Locke1689 14y ago
  I think you misheard. The epicycle system is, in essence, an n-termed complex Fourier series (not transform). The point that the person who told you this was trying to make was that any path can be represented using enough terms in a complex Fourier series, so it's a fairly bad system for deriving physical laws.
Locke1689 14y ago
It's certainly unscientific. Believing something to be true despite evidence to the contrary is fundamentally unscientific. Edit: Since people don't seem to understand my point, there is more to the theories of celestial mechanics than just path prediction. Our understanding of the path mechanics is derived through our understanding of gravity. To believe that the Sun revolves around the Earth one would have to completely upend our theories of gravity, which have been shown by experiment to agree with predictions in almost all cases.
ricardobeat 14y ago
Not when you have billions of stars as references to prove the opposite.
D_Alex 14y ago
Well if you want to be pedantic, they both revolve around their centre of mass, sort of (complicated by the fact that there are many other bodies influencing the motion). But the intuitive view referred to in the article is that the sun revolves around the Earth once per day, as observed from Earth. That you cannot make work by fancy maths, without running into conclusions which contradict other observations.
Dn_Ab 14y ago
In terms of curious cosmologies, a certain formulation of the concave hollow earth theory is fun. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Earth#Concave_hollow_Earths http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Earth#Concave_hollow_Ear... In one chapter of his book On the Wild Side (1992), Martin Gardner discusses the hollow Earth model articulated by Abdelkader. According to Gardner, this hypothesis posits that light rays travel in circular paths, and slow as they approach the center of the spherical star-filled cavern. No energy can reach the center of the cavern, which corresponds to no point a finite distance away from Earth in the widely accepted scientific cosmology. A drill, Gardner says, would lengthen as it traveled away from the cavern and eventually pass through the "point at infinity" corresponding to the center of the Earth in the widely accepted scientific cosmology. Supposedly no experiment can distinguish between the two cosmologies.

by jayzee 14y ago

gms7777 14y ago

Especially when you consider that both are, in fact, "wrong". In a two-body system, they both revolve around around the center of mass. (Though truly our solar system is far beyond a two-body system).

jayzee 14y ago
True. I think that people who think that they are scientific like to believe certain things just as much as people who are not scientific. I am sure that if you sat Jonah down and asked him to prove any of these things there would be a squirt in his 'A.C.C.' circuit!

codebaobab 14y ago

I heard once that the circles-on-circles construction of the motion of the bodies of solar system when Earth is taken as its center is merely the Fourier transform of the ellipses that describe the solar system with the Sun as its center. Unfortunately, I never saw the actual derivation, so that idea is basically hearsay.

Locke1689 14y ago
I think you misheard. The epicycle system is, in essence, an n-termed complex Fourier series (not transform). The point that the person who told you this was trying to make was that any path can be represented using enough terms in a complex Fourier series, so it's a fairly bad system for deriving physical laws.

Locke1689 14y ago

It's certainly unscientific. Believing something to be true despite evidence to the contrary is fundamentally unscientific. Edit: Since people don't seem to understand my point, there is more to the theories of celestial mechanics than just path prediction. Our understanding of the path mechanics is derived through our understanding of gravity. To believe that the Sun revolves around the Earth one would have to completely upend our theories of gravity, which have been shown by experiment to agree with predictions in almost all cases.

ricardobeat 14y ago

Not when you have billions of stars as references to prove the opposite.

D_Alex 14y ago

Well if you want to be pedantic, they both revolve around their centre of mass, sort of (complicated by the fact that there are many other bodies influencing the motion). But the intuitive view referred to in the article is that the sun revolves around the Earth once per day, as observed from Earth. That you cannot make work by fancy maths, without running into conclusions which contradict other observations.

Dn_Ab 14y ago

In terms of curious cosmologies, a certain formulation of the concave hollow earth theory is fun. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Earth#Concave_hollow_Earths http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Earth#Concave_hollow_Ear... In one chapter of his book On the Wild Side (1992), Martin Gardner discusses the hollow Earth model articulated by Abdelkader. According to Gardner, this hypothesis posits that light rays travel in circular paths, and slow as they approach the center of the spherical star-filled cavern. No energy can reach the center of the cavern, which corresponds to no point a finite distance away from Earth in the widely accepted scientific cosmology. A drill, Gardner says, would lengthen as it traveled away from the cavern and eventually pass through the "point at infinity" corresponding to the center of the Earth in the widely accepted scientific cosmology. Supposedly no experiment can distinguish between the two cosmologies.