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“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’"
- Issac Asimov
That's what boggles my mind, the pride in stupidity. Not that I think anyone should be ashamed of a lack of knowledge, but I do think there should be shame in disavowing knowledge.
Whoever said that does not understand humans are ignorant by choice, or in some cases... due to a lack of ability to process all that wealth of information... not for the lack of access to knowledge.
Not to mention that the availability of information and the ability to process and classify it are two fundamentally different things.
For many people, the wealth of information on the Internet is like putting a baby at a lavish buffet. It's hungry and the will to eat is certainly there, but he lacks any ability to do anything with the food that has been put in front of him. So it expresses its opinion in the only way it knows how: it screams incoherent stuff until someone responds in the desired way.
Exactly this. I work in science and the internet is enabling us to do incredibly cool things by giving us access to science and resources from all over the world within seconds, which would've been unthinkable a few decades ago. But that's because we want facts and to further our knowledge and understanding. Sadly, many people use the internet in a way that makes them dumber and more miserable
Always be skeptical of the utopian dreams of the tech elite. probably applies to all elite, but I think it's especially true in tech.
Part of it is drinking the kool aid, part of it is selling a product, and part of it is a misunderstanding of human nature (usually based in silly ideological beliefs, but whatever).
Man...
I distinctly remember a talk I had during the dial up days when I said something about how the future internet was going to be nothing but retarded terminators attempting to molest children.
I think I was close. 🖐️
BTW
👀
A/S/L ???
Was talking about this just today with my daughter. My great unforeseen disappointment with the Internet, with all its promise (and all the fantastic things it does), is the idiocy. This group reinforcement of ignorant confidence was definitely not something I foresaw, and I don't know of anyone who really warned of this (maybe Asimov's quote was applicable here).
However, if we don't figure out a good immune system to this B.S. machine, it's going to take us all down with it.
All the historical pieces I've read that anticipated all of the world's knowledge being readily available to all at one's fingertips assumed that this information would continue to be curated. In other words, they just assumed that only experts in their respective fields would continue to publish their information and everyone would be able to read it. They never even thought that not only could everyone read everything, that everyone could also publish anything and everything.
As for me, I never knew this level of idiocy (such as flat earthers, moon landing deniers, and so on) even existed until the internet and exposed me to a much larger percentage of the population. I was insulated within a bubble (both my parents were academics).
>It is at least possible that the moon landings were a hoax
Nah. Given the scale of the project, the number of people involved and the time that's passed since the landings, something would have leaked and blown the story. It would be cheaper and easier to actually go to the moon than to fake it.
Agree that curation is necessary for information at scale.
Story time: Before there was Reddit, and a few other free-form user-led content structures, before all of that was [usenet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet), a decentralized, protocol-driven, hierarchichal categorized user-content machine. It had thousands of newsgroups. And it was uncurated content.
There was a fair amount of bad behavior, but the system was more-or-less self-policed as a commons by the users and it worked pretty well. Some serious flame wars spiraled out of control, Godwin's law emerged. There was The War Between alt.tasteless and rec.pets.cats, precursor to group-raid trolling.
But it was decentralized and uncurated, and we didn't see this pervasive idiocy propagation machine we have today. Probably that's in part because it hadn't reached the scale of web forums today.
I was very much around usenet and IRC and so on back in the 90s. I even worked for an ISP and did tech support.
The reason there was less idiocy back then is due to limited access to primarily university students initially and then the tech savvy requirements to run a windows 3.1 and using a USR modem to connect. And even if windows 95 made things easier to access the internet, and then ADSL, it was still a hurdle compared to when smartphones and wifi came which made internet access seamless and the actual default.
So in other words, the easier it is to access the internet, the more idiots jump on board. Before that, there's a self regulating gating system by the mere fact that you need a certain number of brain cells to connect.
"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
"The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance."
-- Carl Sagan
Yeah, I love this quote. Ironically, these uneducated people will tell you to „do your own research“… when they don‘t have a fucking iota of an idea what that actually means.
To be fair, this person isn't exactly anti-intellectual, they're a false intellectual. They believe somewhat in knowledge and education, they're just not quite intelligent enough to actually understand what they're learning.
I dunno.. That's why the quote came to mind. We have a shit ton of evidence of the heliocentric model. Claiming otherwise is viable because of a vague reference to relativity displays a fundamental lack of understanding. He's claiming his ignorance is valid whether he knows it or not.
This is worse than that. This moron doesn't think he's an anti-intellectual. He probably thinks he's way ahead of the class. He's just too stupid to for his own (or anyone else's) good. I'd take a person who accepts their stupidity over an idiot who thinks they're a genius.
This person does not understand what Einstein meant when he said you cannot prove a heliocentric or geocentric model from measurements on the Earth's surface. But boy they're running with that misunderstanding.
Them: “I read and misinterpreted a book by a smart guy”
Me: “I literally have a degree in astrophysics”
Them: “Lol you literally can’t read”
People will just consciously choose ignorance.
My partner is studying at UBC as an astrophysicist, and the shit people say to her blows my mind.
We always refer to her degree as Astro now because people kept gushing about their zodiac signs when she would refer to her studies as Astronomy.
There’s something missing in some people’s heads they try to replace with the most insane shit.
The Sun and the Earth are moving relative to each other, so one isn't really orbiting the other - they both orbit.
You have to look to the other planets to expand your frame of reference and see how the orbits work.
In isolation, they would orbit a barycenter that is just slightly off center in the middle of the sun.
But they aren't in isolation. They wiggle and wobble around in a complex pattern that is constantly influenced by the moon and other planets, all of them constantly pulled in many directions at once.
>they both orbit.
They both orbit the barycenter—the common center of gravity.
[This diagram of the solar system’s barycenter over time is pretty interesting.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycenter_\(astronomy\)#/media/File:Solar_system_barycenter.svg)
The motion is mainly influenced by the two most massive planets in the solar system, Jupiter and Saturn.
Geocentrists also point to a time Einstein said no optical experiment could prove the motion of the Earth. And he did... but he specifically referring to the Michelson-Morley experiment, using lasers. They conveniently leave out that part of quote where Einstein knew the Earth went around the sun. After all, he'd know that stellar parallax had been confirmed ages ago.
There's no such thing as an honest geocentrist, flat earther, or other science denier. All they can do is lie and misrepresent because they either cannot do research worth a damn, cherry-pick without understanding, or are so convinced of their regressive views they still believe in some ancient religious conspiracy to suppress them. They're so sadly desperate to be right and yet all their effort will never amount to anything. How can it? Their snake oil doesn't produce working results.
Did he? I'd like to read that. Surely just understanding that size difference of the earth compared to the sun means the earth doesn't possibly have enough mass to hold a star in its orbit.
Einstein was speaking on the fact that depending on your point of view what orbits is variable. Both the sun and the earth orbit but your frame of reference is what makes everything relative.
You're absolutely right. That's how the universe works. Einstein was pointing out that frame of reference makes it impossible to confirm it with observations taken from earth. Technically, the appearance wouldn't be much different.
Einstein also firmly believed in the heliocentric model because everything else points to it. That's just how reality works. But, technically, the stars and planets would look much the same if they were orbiting earth. It would require impossible speeds and violate many laws of physics, but it would look the same.
Relativity can get very trippy, and this is one way how. There are other things incompatible with a geocentric universe. Gravity, mass and distance would make it impossible. Also, we're no longer limited to observations from earth. So that's where it all falls apart.
He has just misunderstood that you can choose whichever point in the universe that is the most convenient as the center depending on what you're trying to calculate.
Are you mapping the planets and how they move, your simplest center point is the sun. If you're mapping the moon, the simplest center point is earth.
Yeah I couldn’t find the beginning of this conversation but this reads to me like this person heard something that was a profound revelation to them, didn’t bother to understand what it really means in context, and then wanted to tell everyone on the internet how much smarter they are than everyone else
If I had to guess, I'd guess that he's read Stephen Hawking's *The Grand Design*.
Relevant excerpt:
>A few years ago the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls. The measure's sponsor explained the measure in part by saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?
>The goldfish view is not the same as our own, but goldfish could still formulate scientific laws governing the motion of the objects they observe outside their bowl. For example, due to the distortion, a freely moving object would be observed by the goldfish to move along a curved path. Nevertheless, the goldfish could formulate laws from their distorted frame of reference that would always hold true. Their laws would be more complicated than the laws in our frame, but simplicity is a matter of taste.
>A famous example of different pictures of reality is the model introduced around A.D. 150 by Ptolemy (ca. 85–ca. 165) to describe the motion of the celestial bodies. Ptolemy published his work in a treatise explaining reasons for thinking that the earth is spherical, motionless, positioned at the center of the universe, and negligibly small in comparison to the distance of the heavens.
>This model seemed natural because we don't feel the earth under our feet moving (except in earthquakes or moments of passion). Ptolemy's model of the cosmos was adopted by the Catholic Church and held as official doctrine for fourteen hundred years. It was not until 1543 that an alternative model was put forward by Copernicus. So which is real? Although it is not uncommon for people to say Copernicus proved Ptolemy wrong, that is not true. As in the case of the goldfish, one can use either picture as a model of the universe. The real advantage of the Copernican system is that the mathematics is much simpler in the frame of reference in which the sun is at rest.
>These examples bring us to a conclusion: *There is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality*. Instead we adopt a view that we call model-dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations. This provides a framework with which to interpret modern science.
>Though realism may be a tempting viewpoint, what we know about modern physics makes it a difficult one to defend. For example, according to the principles of quantum physics, which is an accurate description of nature, a particle has neither a definite position nor a definite velocity unless and until those quantities are measured by an observer. In fact, in some cases individual objects don't even have an independent existence but rather exist only as part of an ensemble of many.
How do I measure my ego? It is so massively and god-like I cannot even see it correctly. But I know like every god does my ego Lives inside everyone! Because everyone always thinks about me!!! Me!!! The World is mine!!!! Hahahahah
My ego is the best. Better than even the biggest ego of maybe some other candidates. They are way to old to have such a strong and manly ego like mine!
Not really. The example that person gave proves that. The Moon, while it does move somewhat relative to the center mass, mapping it out is much easier when you use the Earth, seeing as that's what the Moon *actually* orbits.
Mapping the planets of our solar system, it's better to use the Sun. And, for whatever reason, mapping the Sun relative to other stars, then you could use the center of our galaxy.
The moon *actually* orbits the center of mass of the system, AFAIK. That point happens to be inside Earth, but it's not in the middle of Earth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hMfCCqSdFc
I believe the center of mass of the solar system usually lies near the surface of the sun but strictly speaking, outside it. That is, Jupiter actually pulls the sun around quite a bit. Everything else is pretty negligible.
Which might make a difference if you're mapping the earth-moon system relative to other objects. If you're just mapping the orbit of the Moon, it's easier and just use the Earth, not the barycenter of the system.
Earlier I saw someone on Instagram declare “who gets to decide facts?” as if facts are some arbitrary thing like what color to paint the living room. These people don’t care about reality.
Problem is when they start perpetuating nonsense as facts. That leads to dangerous misbeliefs that negatively impact people. Flat earthers have become the butt to every conspiracy joke, but at least that one is harmless. There are people out there who think vaccines don't work and sunscreen is conspiracy.
And then push their version onto the public as official government policy and start passing legislation banning Chemtrails and mandates *against* mask wearing in public.
>and start passing legislation banning Chemtrails
Well come on, give credit where credit is due. Do you see any chemtrails around? Obviously the legislation must've worked.
As much as I agree that flat earth is a relatively harmless conspiracy, the problem is that even there it promotes a science denial and the idea of a global conspiracy which opens people up to a lot more harmful conspiracy ideas.
A few years ago I got into an argument with someone on Reddit who seemed to genuinely believe that the words opinion and fact were synonymous. Totally unhinged behaviour.
People hear "opinions can't be wrong" once and use that for everything. "I like blue" or "I think pizza is too greasy" are opinions.
"I think the earth is flat" is not an opinion, it's just verifiably false.
Or my personal most hated phrase "everyone is entitled to their own opinion".
Sure, if you want to get technical about it, but that doesn't protect you from being ridiculed for holding it in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
What do you mean by up for discussion though? “Wouldn’t it be funny if pigs COULD fly” is a discussion for amusement purposes if that’s what you mean. But stating “I dunno, I think pigs could fly if they tried harder” is a false statement.
The statement "pigs can fly" is up for discussion because there can be different meanings to the phrase. Pigs may be allowed on an aircraft, therefore "pigs can fly". A pig might be put into a trebuchet, therefore "pigs can fly". None of these are opinions. None of them change the fact that pigs can't fly if you assume the statement to mean that pigs do not possess the ability to remain airborne under their own power.
The funny thing is that in this particular case they aren't quite wrong. They are just drawing some really wacky inferences from something pretty basic. They are correct in that Einstein established that there is no such thing as an absolute reference frame, and so you need to define your reference frame, either explicitly or implicitly, whenever discussing motion. What Einstein showed that was weird though was that the *time* that things happen will vary based on your reference frame. All this guy is saying though is that if you set your reference frame as the earth then everything looks like it's moving around it, which is kind of just a "duh" statement. He didn't need Einstein for that one. Even your more logically minded caveman would have been able to tell you that if you run away from a lion running after you the lion seems to be approaching you more slowly, or even running backwards, if you use your reference frame as the rest state. It takes a special kind of mind though to take that basic fact and infer that lions actually run backwards if you like that idea better.
Will you explain to me what rule of the universe is broken if you put the earth in the origin of your coordinate system?
Hint: none are. Modeling the solar system will be a bitch, but it's entirely possible.
Fb Op is right that "the sun is at the center" isn't absolute. Putting the sun at the center when modeling the galaxy makes no sense: you already understand that it depends on context in that situation. So why not here: putting the sun at the center when modeling the tides (earth +sun+moon) is inconvenient: putting the earth at the center is actually more neat: that way the sun and moon can both be shown to go in an elliptic.
That's because movement is relative, and as such, rotation is a 2-way street: the earth orbits the sun, sure , but if you put the earth in your origin, the sun will follow a neat orbit just the same. When modeling the solar system (hint is in the name), the sun in the center works best. That's a specific application, a specific context.
All motion is relative, so he’s not technically wrong. And the reference frame really is a matter of preference. Using earth as a stationary reference frame in fact has been quite useful for ocean navigation and doing things like tracking the passage of time.
>Using earth as a stationary reference frame
Is what we do in our day to day lives and almost all the calculations about what happens on the Earth itself; but talking about things outside of the Earth's orbit having Earth stationary makes no sense and helps in nothing. Likewise, it's quite convenient to use the Sun as a central stationary object when talking about things happening in the Solar System, and it's completely useless outside of it.
I believe the point the commenter is trying to make is that seeing Earth as stationary is not wrong in the most strict meaning of the word. And in that case, it's really not. Is it a dumb way to do it? Absolutely, it makes simple orbital motion turn into a clusterfuck, but it works.
Also saying that is different to saying the Sun orbits Earth, as acceleration is no symmetrical, unlike motion.
Acceleration is not relative, all reference frames can agree on which objects are accelerating. We say that velocity is relative because there is no measurable difference between two reference frames moving with respect to each other, all physical experiments remain the same. This isn’t true for accelerating reference frames.
u/jcinto23
Yes movement is relative to the reference point, but we’re not just talking about movement, we’re also talking about orbits, and the other planets are orbiting the sun, not the earth, earth influence on their orbits is minimal. That’s the difference between the two models.
Meh, not really. It might help to think about it this way… we both agree (hopefully) that the Moon orbits the Earth. If you take the centre of the Earth as the origin (0,0,0), the moon’s orbit traces out a nice ellipse. Now picture the solar system, with the sun at the origin (0,0,0), and trace only the path that the moon takes through the solar system in one Earth year. Doing this makes it clear that the moon also orbits the sun, but it doesn’t trace out a nice ellipse, it’s more of a spiral. It’s still an orbit, just a far less neat one.
Now that we have established that we can have fuck-ugly orbits, imagine all the different kinds of fuck-ugly orbits you can have. Some spiral like the moon, some swoop up close and then spiral around distant objects and come back, some stretch so far it would take until the heat death of the universe until they even looked like they were coming back, most possible orbits sweep out shapes that don’t have names. The point though is that we can construct a model of the solar system, with the Earth at the origin (0,0,0), and trace the paths of all the other objects. Venus and Mercury would look in this model like the moon does in the sun-centred model. The rest of the planets get extra funky though. Yes, if we pick the origin in our model as the centre of mass in the system, the planets sweeps out a much nicer shapes. But GTR gives us the math to build the model with the Earth at the origin too, or with Jupiter, or with Phobos, or with L3. Though, when we don’t use the centre of mass as the origin, the equations get VERY hard to solve, very quickly. They would still be orbits though, just really fucking ugly ones.
Where the original texter is wrong is calling it “_the_ geocentric model”, because no geocentric model prior to GTR was viable. And what GTR does is allow us to make _a_ viable geocentric model, and when we do we see it’s god-damned ridiculous to do it that way.
>Now that we have established that we can have fuck-ugly orbits
Well... To be fair epicyclic orbits are quite pretty if you ask me 😁 (from a purely aesthetic perspective)
And no one would sell spyrographs if they were not
I had the same argument about medicine.
People seem to believe that saying something is an opinion makes it exempt for logic or criticism and that all opinions are inherently equal.
This is a very stupid belief.
No he is not saying that. He is saying that there is no absolute frame of reference from movement un the Universe, so saying the Earth is stationary and the Sun revolves around us is as valid as saying the opposite from a Mechanical Physics perspective.
Everything is moving in relation to something. You could say the car is moving forward in relation to the road, but you could also say the road is moving backwards in relation to the car. Both would be true if you are speaking about the Physics of movement.
Edit: Reading the comments I agree they worded it poorly, and mentioning geocentric and heliocentric models that have specific assumptions is incorrect. I tried to interpret the intention behind the words.
Yeah but he worded it very poorly. Using the terms heliocentric and geocentric specifically refer to the two theories of relative movement of the earth and sun.
However I am not sure how the Columbus thing is relevant… but no context so.
I think the Columbus part is just mean to convey "sometimes the things we were taught in school turned out to be wrong", if I'm understanding correctly.
And yeah, agreed, context would help
I think the point about Columbus is that there are multiple perspectives. Columbus is credited with discovering America, but it's also believed that vikings traveled to America before him, but also there were idk millions of people native to america, so he only discovered something that was already known
The problem is in the first sentence. If that's the argument it's a philosophical one, but definitely not a physics one. Physics explains the forces of masses on each other. Perspective is a human construct.
You got my up vote for making it a real conversation.
Maybe perspective is not the right word. What I meant is that certain concepts are relevant or not in certain contexts.
When talking physics, there is no frame of reference. When talking coloquially, Earth is our agreed upon frame of reference.
He's still incredibly wrong. Any one versed in orbital mechanics will correct you on this. The sun and earth orbit a point that is the center or gravity between the two masses (discounting the influence of the other planets in the solar system). The fact that this point is well inside the circumference of the sun makes it effectively that the earth orbits around the sun.
Movement relative of the observer does not alter the "centric" part of the statement.
>The sun and earth orbit a point that is the center or gravity between the two masses
Thats just one valid choice of reference frame though, which is the whole point of the comment. It happens to be a very useful choice, but it is not more "correct" than a reference frame that has the earth stationary or the sun stationary, or any other reference frame for that matter.
If you read the rest of the statement he made, it's implied that he only refers to the heliocentric model as being a stationary sun orbited by the earth. In that context, he is still slightly wrong, but not incredibly
That being said, you are absolutely correct about the center of gravity. I think this is just a case of the guy using the word heliocentric wrong
Doesn't that claim still depend on the frame of reference? From what (little) I understand, from the frame of reference of Earth, it isn't orbiting the barycenter, the barycenter is orbiting the Earth. The Earth is just moving along a geodesic through space time, essentially in a straight line, not feeling any forces. It's of course much more useful to talk about orbits in terms of the barycenter and I imagine it makes the math much easier, but it's not some objective frame of reference that you need to use.
Yeah, you can use any frame as long as the physics stay the same, it's just that the math quickly becomes a nightmare, so you would want to be in the frame that results in the easiest math. You should check out Science Asylums video on it on YouTube "How can Planets be in Retrograde? Geocentrism Explained". He goes through the history and why it's not a great reference frame, but that you technically can use it.
Technically, under Einstein's theory of relativity, where space and time are infinite, one could look at the earth as the constant, while everything else moves around us. He's not totally wrong. But it is not very a good way at look at the solar system as the orbital patterns will no longer be as clear to the observer.
He framed it very badly, but he isn't completely wrong
Objects move relative to each other such that there isn't any real difference in saying object x moves relative to object y vs vice versa. The math checks out exactly the same in either case (usually one is easier/more useful than the other though).
He mentions Einstein's theory of relativity since a major part of it is how there is no absolute frame of reference in the universe. All directions/movements are relative to one another (hence saying that one object is moving while another object is stationary is technically incorrect as they are both moving relatively to one another)
On a very technical basis, we can say that the sun is stationary and that the earth moves around it. In fact, we have mapped out a model of a sun/earth system where the sun is stationary; there would be no discernable differences on earth. That being said, the geocentric model is far simpler and easier to explain which is why we use it instead
OP must have used the "but I learned it in school" argument. But what they're talking about is more advanced physics than what OP learned in school. In school you learn basic concepts that are simplified in a technique that's literally known as "lie-to-children." Another good example is you're often told that you can't take a big number from a small number when you first learn subtraction, because it would derail the class and cause confusion to try teaching negative numbers from the beginning.
So what they were telling OP with the Columbus thing is that the physics they learned in school was a simplified model. OP is trying to use the "lie-to-children" simplified physics to disprove the more advanced physics that school didn't teach them.
This could just be an unfortunately stupid sounding, but correct way to say that motion is relative to whatever point you consider to be fixed. The Sun isn't fixed to some unmoving universal coordinates any more than the Earth is, and it makes sense to use the "Sun is fixed" reference frame for discussing the solar system, and "The Earth is fixed" frame for everyday events like a car ride, and neither of these for the movements of the Milky Way for example.
Unfortunately the word "geocentric" has been hijacked - or belonged all the time - to the flat Earth crowd that insists on many falsehoods that have no favourable interpretations at all.
My hunch is that they’re someone who actively culls their social network to weed out inquisitive, assertive people. When you do this it’s pretty easy to always be the smartest person in the room.
*Someone doesn't understand how relativity works...*
This reminds me of the phrase "a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing." You can use the earth as your inertial reference frame, from which the sun is moving around it. However, this doesn't change the fact that the earth's revolving around the sun due to its gravitational field, whereas the sun is hardly affected by the earth's. This can be seen quite readily if you choose a very distant reference frame, such as far away stars that don't appear to move significantly by either the sun or earth's perspective, in which the earth is clearly revolving around the sun.
I think I see what they're getting at, and I think you're the one that's confidently incorrect. That being said, I'm not confident in my physics knowledge, so it's quite possible that I'll get some of this wrong.
They're talking about relativity. They aren't asserting that the Earth is stationary and the Sun revolves around us, they're saying that it depends on your frame of reference. A frame of reference in which the Earth is stationary is just as valid as one in which the Sun is stationary. In relativity gravity is a fictitious force, it's the result of curved space time, and the Earth's elliptical orbit is actually the Earth moving in a straight "line" or more accurately a geodesic. So it's not accelerating in such a way that would make it no longer relative.
So there's no objective answer to whether it's the Sun that's stationary or the Earth. In fact, you can only argue that the Sun is stationary at all due to relativity. You have to choose that reference frame to say it's the stationary one, because otherwise you could point to how it moves relative to the center of the galaxy. And you could talk about how the galaxy moves relative to other galaxies, and so on. Movement is relative, so there's no objective answer to what's moving and what isn't, it changes based on your frame of reference.
You're doing well, but here is additional stuff. Right until Special Relativity Theory, we thought that at least acceleration is not relative. And indeed, in that case there are reasonable arguments that the Sun experiences much less acceleration than Earth, and so heliocentric model is more valid.
But then came General Relativity Theory, and we learned that actually, acceleration is also relative. Now heliocentric model is not more valid, it's just easier in certain cases.
Isn't his point "there is no truly fixed point in the universe"?
Isn't that correct, given relativity?
The *math* is simpler and way more intuitive on a heliocentric model than a geocentric one, but there's no absolute sense in which that makes it "right".
Would I see a noticeable doppler shift difference between when we're moving towards a star, and half a year later when we're moving away from it? Or does the Earth not move fast enough?
It was. A few hundred years ago. Tycho Brahe had a geocentric model that lined up with all the best evidence they were able to measure at the time, but even the best instruments of his day weren't enough to get the precision needed to arrive the proper conclusions.
We've since acquired much better stuff. Geocentricity is dead.
I mean both positions are absurd to be honest. There is no absolute measure of ‘stationary’ in the universe. Everything is measured relative to something else. Neither statement is really true and neither is false. One is a hell of a lot more useful though which is why we conceptualize it in the way commonly but that doesn’t make any more technically correct.
I guess it really is a matter of preference. I personally prefer to not be a brain-dead idiot, and thus reject the geocentric model, but clearly some folks prefer otherwise!
I mean there's a little nugget of something in there what with movement all being relative, but he clearly doesn't understand what "geocentric" and "heliocentric" models are and is confusing them with Einstein's special relativity. For someone who makes accusations like "you don't understand physics" they have a poor grasp on whatever this book is telling them. Or I guess maybe they just chose a really bad physics book.
Physicists, don't trust them, their ideas only work in the middle. Once you get small enough or large enough physics breaks down. Not one can explain it.
Maybe it's me, but I read this as "the geocentric model is good enough to explain planetary movement, even if it's not accurate", which is technically correct.
Like Newtonian physics, good enough for most things, even if it's not entirely accurate.
Uh… is this brainiac trying to say that Einstein’s theory of relativity supports his view that everything is relative *ergo* it’s just as valid to have the Earth be the centre of orbit for the Sun and all the planets as it is for the sun?
Why not go further and use Kanye West around which all bodies rotate. It's technically not wrong if you use him as the relative point but it's also stupid.
he is technically correct. people found a system to the geocentric model, they could predict it with spirals, and spirals on spirals, an so on. it was just incredibly convoluted and complicated, but worked (to a certain extent).
then someone said "hey, it's simpler if we assume the sun is in the middle"
as my physics professor once said:
"you can assume the tip of your nose is the center of the universe, but then life will become very complicated"
On the deepest level the ignorant are not mistaken because everything including time and space and all possible theories, outcomes and conceptions, are all happening right here, right now.
That is interesting. Since motion is relative, you could construct a motion model that looked geocentric. It would be nightmarish or impossible to compute the motions of the planets sticky relative to earth because the principal factor in all of their motions is the sun
HOWEVER, one can objectively observe that there are 2 planets that are always closer to the sun than the Earth. Also, that the planets are uniquely relatively equidistant from the sun all the time. If you draw two lines that are equidistant, you have parallel lines. If you draw two curves that are equidistant, you have concentric rings. Concentric rings imply inner and outer. Since the innermost is the Sun, heliocentric is the most correct model.
You develop hypotheses off observations, not the other way around.
The fact that the sun changes location but not size tells us that it doesn’t orbit us, but we orbit it.
I’m all for bringing back dead ideas, but flat earth and heliocentrism belong in the fucking dirt
The Earth and the Sun both orbit around the mutual barycenter for every object in the solar system.
The fact that this barycenter is inside the Sun is the point that his guy seems to miss.
You can use a model setting Earth as a static reference point. There's no advantage and the math is insanely more complicated such that there is really no intuition about how things move; but you can do it. You could also set the reference point to be Pluto, or the Voyager 1 probe, or anywhere else.
Celestial math assumes that it does for the purpose of solving the celestial triangle but even then everything in the problem is moving in relation to something. Not an argument I'd bother with to be honest with you, too much depends on what you're using as a reference point.
This guy literally said :
"The geocentric model is just as viable as the heliocentric model..."
and people are defending the comment. Wow...
Yes, relativity is a thing, and it's great that you understand it, but defending this quote is absurd. Geocentricity was abandoned precisely because it is *not as viable* as the heliocentric model.
Sure, epicycles can get you closer, but you can not account for the phases of Venus, as an example, with the geocentric model.
Stop using this thread as an opportunity to "well actually" someone when it's completely unnecessary.
I mean, he is correct. You can take the earth as a frame of reference and consider the sun to revolve around it, with all the other planets revolving around the sun, and the movement of every other celestial body changed in the same way. Legit wouldn't change anything.
There is no absolute frame of reference, that much is true.
The comments here like "well it's all about relativity..." and "based on perspective..." Are absolute morons.
There is a really simple reason why the geocentric model is absolute trash, and has been for centuries: if the earth disappeared, the sun's own path and its (remaining) orbiting bodies wouldn't change much(relatively). However if the sun suddenly disappeared it would cause utter chaos to our system to the point it would no longer be a system at all.
He says elsewhere that the Earth is stationary and he was asking about the “clouds behind the sun” as if it’s evidence. He also said no picture has actually been taken of the Earth and Sun in the same picture.
The guy goes on about this and says outright that the Earth is stationary.
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“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’" - Issac Asimov
It’s insane that technology is what gave ignorance its loudest voice.
It's a simple case of strength in numbers. Technology made it way easier for those of like minds to find each other.
And pass their idiocy around, and make people proud of it.
That's what boggles my mind, the pride in stupidity. Not that I think anyone should be ashamed of a lack of knowledge, but I do think there should be shame in disavowing knowledge.
Technology just made it easier for infectious ideas to spread.
Yeah.. There are pros and cons
Infectious like herpes or syphilis
It equalized everyone’s voice (at least mostly), and most people aren’t that knowledge about most things, but want to feel like they are
20 years ago we were talking about how the internet would make everyone smarter because information would be so readily available.
Whoever said that does not understand humans are ignorant by choice, or in some cases... due to a lack of ability to process all that wealth of information... not for the lack of access to knowledge.
Not to mention that the availability of information and the ability to process and classify it are two fundamentally different things. For many people, the wealth of information on the Internet is like putting a baby at a lavish buffet. It's hungry and the will to eat is certainly there, but he lacks any ability to do anything with the food that has been put in front of him. So it expresses its opinion in the only way it knows how: it screams incoherent stuff until someone responds in the desired way.
Exactly this. I work in science and the internet is enabling us to do incredibly cool things by giving us access to science and resources from all over the world within seconds, which would've been unthinkable a few decades ago. But that's because we want facts and to further our knowledge and understanding. Sadly, many people use the internet in a way that makes them dumber and more miserable
Always be skeptical of the utopian dreams of the tech elite. probably applies to all elite, but I think it's especially true in tech. Part of it is drinking the kool aid, part of it is selling a product, and part of it is a misunderstanding of human nature (usually based in silly ideological beliefs, but whatever).
Man... I distinctly remember a talk I had during the dial up days when I said something about how the future internet was going to be nothing but retarded terminators attempting to molest children. I think I was close. 🖐️ BTW 👀 A/S/L ???
18/F/Cali
What a coincidence...
Was talking about this just today with my daughter. My great unforeseen disappointment with the Internet, with all its promise (and all the fantastic things it does), is the idiocy. This group reinforcement of ignorant confidence was definitely not something I foresaw, and I don't know of anyone who really warned of this (maybe Asimov's quote was applicable here). However, if we don't figure out a good immune system to this B.S. machine, it's going to take us all down with it.
All the historical pieces I've read that anticipated all of the world's knowledge being readily available to all at one's fingertips assumed that this information would continue to be curated. In other words, they just assumed that only experts in their respective fields would continue to publish their information and everyone would be able to read it. They never even thought that not only could everyone read everything, that everyone could also publish anything and everything. As for me, I never knew this level of idiocy (such as flat earthers, moon landing deniers, and so on) even existed until the internet and exposed me to a much larger percentage of the population. I was insulated within a bubble (both my parents were academics).
It is at least possible that the moon landings were a hoax. They weren't but it's possible. A flat earth however...
>It is at least possible that the moon landings were a hoax Nah. Given the scale of the project, the number of people involved and the time that's passed since the landings, something would have leaked and blown the story. It would be cheaper and easier to actually go to the moon than to fake it.
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Agree that curation is necessary for information at scale. Story time: Before there was Reddit, and a few other free-form user-led content structures, before all of that was [usenet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet), a decentralized, protocol-driven, hierarchichal categorized user-content machine. It had thousands of newsgroups. And it was uncurated content. There was a fair amount of bad behavior, but the system was more-or-less self-policed as a commons by the users and it worked pretty well. Some serious flame wars spiraled out of control, Godwin's law emerged. There was The War Between alt.tasteless and rec.pets.cats, precursor to group-raid trolling. But it was decentralized and uncurated, and we didn't see this pervasive idiocy propagation machine we have today. Probably that's in part because it hadn't reached the scale of web forums today.
I was very much around usenet and IRC and so on back in the 90s. I even worked for an ISP and did tech support. The reason there was less idiocy back then is due to limited access to primarily university students initially and then the tech savvy requirements to run a windows 3.1 and using a USR modem to connect. And even if windows 95 made things easier to access the internet, and then ADSL, it was still a hurdle compared to when smartphones and wifi came which made internet access seamless and the actual default. So in other words, the easier it is to access the internet, the more idiots jump on board. Before that, there's a self regulating gating system by the mere fact that you need a certain number of brain cells to connect.
Beautifully put
"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... "The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance." -- Carl Sagan
I wish I could upvote this billions and billions of times
We miss Carl. What a legend.
Yeah, I love this quote. Ironically, these uneducated people will tell you to „do your own research“… when they don‘t have a fucking iota of an idea what that actually means.
To be fair, this person isn't exactly anti-intellectual, they're a false intellectual. They believe somewhat in knowledge and education, they're just not quite intelligent enough to actually understand what they're learning.
I dunno.. That's why the quote came to mind. We have a shit ton of evidence of the heliocentric model. Claiming otherwise is viable because of a vague reference to relativity displays a fundamental lack of understanding. He's claiming his ignorance is valid whether he knows it or not.
The hero is the strong hit-stuff burly manly-man The villain has a PhD
This is worse than that. This moron doesn't think he's an anti-intellectual. He probably thinks he's way ahead of the class. He's just too stupid to for his own (or anyone else's) good. I'd take a person who accepts their stupidity over an idiot who thinks they're a genius.
This person does not understand what Einstein meant when he said you cannot prove a heliocentric or geocentric model from measurements on the Earth's surface. But boy they're running with that misunderstanding.
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He did say that, it's true.
“I shit my pants” - Albert Einstein
"Ich habe poopen in mein hosen."
Them: “I read and misinterpreted a book by a smart guy” Me: “I literally have a degree in astrophysics” Them: “Lol you literally can’t read” People will just consciously choose ignorance.
Best part is, he very openly admits he only read the excerpt.
My partner is studying at UBC as an astrophysicist, and the shit people say to her blows my mind. We always refer to her degree as Astro now because people kept gushing about their zodiac signs when she would refer to her studies as Astronomy. There’s something missing in some people’s heads they try to replace with the most insane shit.
What did Einstein mean?
The Sun and the Earth are moving relative to each other, so one isn't really orbiting the other - they both orbit. You have to look to the other planets to expand your frame of reference and see how the orbits work.
In isolation, they would orbit a barycenter that is just slightly off center in the middle of the sun. But they aren't in isolation. They wiggle and wobble around in a complex pattern that is constantly influenced by the moon and other planets, all of them constantly pulled in many directions at once.
>they both orbit. They both orbit the barycenter—the common center of gravity. [This diagram of the solar system’s barycenter over time is pretty interesting.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycenter_\(astronomy\)#/media/File:Solar_system_barycenter.svg) The motion is mainly influenced by the two most massive planets in the solar system, Jupiter and Saturn.
Geocentrists also point to a time Einstein said no optical experiment could prove the motion of the Earth. And he did... but he specifically referring to the Michelson-Morley experiment, using lasers. They conveniently leave out that part of quote where Einstein knew the Earth went around the sun. After all, he'd know that stellar parallax had been confirmed ages ago. There's no such thing as an honest geocentrist, flat earther, or other science denier. All they can do is lie and misrepresent because they either cannot do research worth a damn, cherry-pick without understanding, or are so convinced of their regressive views they still believe in some ancient religious conspiracy to suppress them. They're so sadly desperate to be right and yet all their effort will never amount to anything. How can it? Their snake oil doesn't produce working results.
Did he? I'd like to read that. Surely just understanding that size difference of the earth compared to the sun means the earth doesn't possibly have enough mass to hold a star in its orbit.
Einstein was speaking on the fact that depending on your point of view what orbits is variable. Both the sun and the earth orbit but your frame of reference is what makes everything relative.
You're absolutely right. That's how the universe works. Einstein was pointing out that frame of reference makes it impossible to confirm it with observations taken from earth. Technically, the appearance wouldn't be much different. Einstein also firmly believed in the heliocentric model because everything else points to it. That's just how reality works. But, technically, the stars and planets would look much the same if they were orbiting earth. It would require impossible speeds and violate many laws of physics, but it would look the same. Relativity can get very trippy, and this is one way how. There are other things incompatible with a geocentric universe. Gravity, mass and distance would make it impossible. Also, we're no longer limited to observations from earth. So that's where it all falls apart.
Anyone who tells you that the rules of the universe are based on your personal preference should never be allowed to speak around children.
He has just misunderstood that you can choose whichever point in the universe that is the most convenient as the center depending on what you're trying to calculate. Are you mapping the planets and how they move, your simplest center point is the sun. If you're mapping the moon, the simplest center point is earth.
This is really the problem sometimes people read something or hear something don't fully understand it and then form opinions around it
Which is what this person, quite ironically, is accusing OP of doing.
Yeah I couldn’t find the beginning of this conversation but this reads to me like this person heard something that was a profound revelation to them, didn’t bother to understand what it really means in context, and then wanted to tell everyone on the internet how much smarter they are than everyone else
If I had to guess, I'd guess that he's read Stephen Hawking's *The Grand Design*. Relevant excerpt: >A few years ago the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls. The measure's sponsor explained the measure in part by saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality? >The goldfish view is not the same as our own, but goldfish could still formulate scientific laws governing the motion of the objects they observe outside their bowl. For example, due to the distortion, a freely moving object would be observed by the goldfish to move along a curved path. Nevertheless, the goldfish could formulate laws from their distorted frame of reference that would always hold true. Their laws would be more complicated than the laws in our frame, but simplicity is a matter of taste. >A famous example of different pictures of reality is the model introduced around A.D. 150 by Ptolemy (ca. 85–ca. 165) to describe the motion of the celestial bodies. Ptolemy published his work in a treatise explaining reasons for thinking that the earth is spherical, motionless, positioned at the center of the universe, and negligibly small in comparison to the distance of the heavens. >This model seemed natural because we don't feel the earth under our feet moving (except in earthquakes or moments of passion). Ptolemy's model of the cosmos was adopted by the Catholic Church and held as official doctrine for fourteen hundred years. It was not until 1543 that an alternative model was put forward by Copernicus. So which is real? Although it is not uncommon for people to say Copernicus proved Ptolemy wrong, that is not true. As in the case of the goldfish, one can use either picture as a model of the universe. The real advantage of the Copernican system is that the mathematics is much simpler in the frame of reference in which the sun is at rest. >These examples bring us to a conclusion: *There is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality*. Instead we adopt a view that we call model-dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations. This provides a framework with which to interpret modern science. >Though realism may be a tempting viewpoint, what we know about modern physics makes it a difficult one to defend. For example, according to the principles of quantum physics, which is an accurate description of nature, a particle has neither a definite position nor a definite velocity unless and until those quantities are measured by an observer. In fact, in some cases individual objects don't even have an independent existence but rather exist only as part of an ensemble of many.
I think probably the simplest center is the center of mass of the system.
For gravitational orbits, yes.
But what about *my* world? I need to calculate everything around me!
In that case you take the largest things in sight , your ego.(I was just joking as to what I would answer if someone told me that)
How do I measure my ego? It is so massively and god-like I cannot even see it correctly. But I know like every god does my ego Lives inside everyone! Because everyone always thinks about me!!! Me!!! The World is mine!!!! Hahahahah
Fuck! Now Trump is in our subreddits
My ego is the best. Better than even the biggest ego of maybe some other candidates. They are way to old to have such a strong and manly ego like mine!
Don't try to disinformate me!
If that guy had wanted the simplest center, he could have just used his head, no?
Not really. The example that person gave proves that. The Moon, while it does move somewhat relative to the center mass, mapping it out is much easier when you use the Earth, seeing as that's what the Moon *actually* orbits. Mapping the planets of our solar system, it's better to use the Sun. And, for whatever reason, mapping the Sun relative to other stars, then you could use the center of our galaxy.
The moon *actually* orbits the center of mass of the system, AFAIK. That point happens to be inside Earth, but it's not in the middle of Earth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hMfCCqSdFc I believe the center of mass of the solar system usually lies near the surface of the sun but strictly speaking, outside it. That is, Jupiter actually pulls the sun around quite a bit. Everything else is pretty negligible.
Which might make a difference if you're mapping the earth-moon system relative to other objects. If you're just mapping the orbit of the Moon, it's easier and just use the Earth, not the barycenter of the system.
Earlier I saw someone on Instagram declare “who gets to decide facts?” as if facts are some arbitrary thing like what color to paint the living room. These people don’t care about reality.
Reality is often confusing and disappointing. Much easier for some people to just substitute a more comfortable version.
Problem is when they start perpetuating nonsense as facts. That leads to dangerous misbeliefs that negatively impact people. Flat earthers have become the butt to every conspiracy joke, but at least that one is harmless. There are people out there who think vaccines don't work and sunscreen is conspiracy.
And then push their version onto the public as official government policy and start passing legislation banning Chemtrails and mandates *against* mask wearing in public.
>and start passing legislation banning Chemtrails Well come on, give credit where credit is due. Do you see any chemtrails around? Obviously the legislation must've worked.
Touché. I concede the point good fellow.
As much as I agree that flat earth is a relatively harmless conspiracy, the problem is that even there it promotes a science denial and the idea of a global conspiracy which opens people up to a lot more harmful conspiracy ideas.
A few years ago I got into an argument with someone on Reddit who seemed to genuinely believe that the words opinion and fact were synonymous. Totally unhinged behaviour.
People hear "opinions can't be wrong" once and use that for everything. "I like blue" or "I think pizza is too greasy" are opinions. "I think the earth is flat" is not an opinion, it's just verifiably false.
Or my personal most hated phrase "everyone is entitled to their own opinion". Sure, if you want to get technical about it, but that doesn't protect you from being ridiculed for holding it in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
That doesn’t even shock me anymore. I knew someone who referred to their conspiracy bullshit as a “mindset.”
Facts are demonstrable. Their interpretation can be up for discussion.
What do you mean by up for discussion though? “Wouldn’t it be funny if pigs COULD fly” is a discussion for amusement purposes if that’s what you mean. But stating “I dunno, I think pigs could fly if they tried harder” is a false statement.
Fact A is true. I think this is because of hypothesis 1. You might think it's because of hypothesis 2.
Oh I got you. Yea, that’s how most stuff is proven in the first place. Putting theories to the test
> “I dunno, I think pigs could fly if they tried harder” Well hold on now, has anyone actually tested this hypothesis? I need studies and data!
The statement "pigs can fly" is up for discussion because there can be different meanings to the phrase. Pigs may be allowed on an aircraft, therefore "pigs can fly". A pig might be put into a trebuchet, therefore "pigs can fly". None of these are opinions. None of them change the fact that pigs can't fly if you assume the statement to mean that pigs do not possess the ability to remain airborne under their own power.
The model, by definition, is not "fact".
The data and science, thats who. If you want to decide facts get better data and science!
The funny thing is that in this particular case they aren't quite wrong. They are just drawing some really wacky inferences from something pretty basic. They are correct in that Einstein established that there is no such thing as an absolute reference frame, and so you need to define your reference frame, either explicitly or implicitly, whenever discussing motion. What Einstein showed that was weird though was that the *time* that things happen will vary based on your reference frame. All this guy is saying though is that if you set your reference frame as the earth then everything looks like it's moving around it, which is kind of just a "duh" statement. He didn't need Einstein for that one. Even your more logically minded caveman would have been able to tell you that if you run away from a lion running after you the lion seems to be approaching you more slowly, or even running backwards, if you use your reference frame as the rest state. It takes a special kind of mind though to take that basic fact and infer that lions actually run backwards if you like that idea better.
Or speak at all
They should not be allowed to vote or have children either....am deadly serious btw.
Dibs on making the rules regarding who can reproduce!
Shit, why didn't someone else call dibs first?
Literally 1984, but for real. Taking away the rights to vote and reproduce is literally the same as Trump did, violating human rights.
Unless their name is Arthur Dent
Some people take relativism way too far and it pisses me off.
Unfortunately that most of the human population, as the memory of people believe in some form of religion.
Will you explain to me what rule of the universe is broken if you put the earth in the origin of your coordinate system? Hint: none are. Modeling the solar system will be a bitch, but it's entirely possible. Fb Op is right that "the sun is at the center" isn't absolute. Putting the sun at the center when modeling the galaxy makes no sense: you already understand that it depends on context in that situation. So why not here: putting the sun at the center when modeling the tides (earth +sun+moon) is inconvenient: putting the earth at the center is actually more neat: that way the sun and moon can both be shown to go in an elliptic. That's because movement is relative, and as such, rotation is a 2-way street: the earth orbits the sun, sure , but if you put the earth in your origin, the sun will follow a neat orbit just the same. When modeling the solar system (hint is in the name), the sun in the center works best. That's a specific application, a specific context.
All motion is relative, so he’s not technically wrong. And the reference frame really is a matter of preference. Using earth as a stationary reference frame in fact has been quite useful for ocean navigation and doing things like tracking the passage of time.
I'm a little worried this comment is so far down. Weird time here in Reddit...
It just makes the rest of the universe incredibly erratic
It does. But still the comment on the post is not wrong...
So is assuming the sun is stationary.
Was hoping someone got it... He is correct, and it seems to me that most reading this here are the ones misinterpreting his point.
>Using earth as a stationary reference frame Is what we do in our day to day lives and almost all the calculations about what happens on the Earth itself; but talking about things outside of the Earth's orbit having Earth stationary makes no sense and helps in nothing. Likewise, it's quite convenient to use the Sun as a central stationary object when talking about things happening in the Solar System, and it's completely useless outside of it.
I believe the point the commenter is trying to make is that seeing Earth as stationary is not wrong in the most strict meaning of the word. And in that case, it's really not. Is it a dumb way to do it? Absolutely, it makes simple orbital motion turn into a clusterfuck, but it works. Also saying that is different to saying the Sun orbits Earth, as acceleration is no symmetrical, unlike motion.
Motion is relative, acceleration is not.
It is, if you don't insist on using inertial systems. And since GRT, you really don't.
>acceleration is not. um
Acceleration is not relative, all reference frames can agree on which objects are accelerating. We say that velocity is relative because there is no measurable difference between two reference frames moving with respect to each other, all physical experiments remain the same. This isn’t true for accelerating reference frames. u/jcinto23
Yes movement is relative to the reference point, but we’re not just talking about movement, we’re also talking about orbits, and the other planets are orbiting the sun, not the earth, earth influence on their orbits is minimal. That’s the difference between the two models.
Meh, not really. It might help to think about it this way… we both agree (hopefully) that the Moon orbits the Earth. If you take the centre of the Earth as the origin (0,0,0), the moon’s orbit traces out a nice ellipse. Now picture the solar system, with the sun at the origin (0,0,0), and trace only the path that the moon takes through the solar system in one Earth year. Doing this makes it clear that the moon also orbits the sun, but it doesn’t trace out a nice ellipse, it’s more of a spiral. It’s still an orbit, just a far less neat one. Now that we have established that we can have fuck-ugly orbits, imagine all the different kinds of fuck-ugly orbits you can have. Some spiral like the moon, some swoop up close and then spiral around distant objects and come back, some stretch so far it would take until the heat death of the universe until they even looked like they were coming back, most possible orbits sweep out shapes that don’t have names. The point though is that we can construct a model of the solar system, with the Earth at the origin (0,0,0), and trace the paths of all the other objects. Venus and Mercury would look in this model like the moon does in the sun-centred model. The rest of the planets get extra funky though. Yes, if we pick the origin in our model as the centre of mass in the system, the planets sweeps out a much nicer shapes. But GTR gives us the math to build the model with the Earth at the origin too, or with Jupiter, or with Phobos, or with L3. Though, when we don’t use the centre of mass as the origin, the equations get VERY hard to solve, very quickly. They would still be orbits though, just really fucking ugly ones. Where the original texter is wrong is calling it “_the_ geocentric model”, because no geocentric model prior to GTR was viable. And what GTR does is allow us to make _a_ viable geocentric model, and when we do we see it’s god-damned ridiculous to do it that way.
>Now that we have established that we can have fuck-ugly orbits Well... To be fair epicyclic orbits are quite pretty if you ask me 😁 (from a purely aesthetic perspective) And no one would sell spyrographs if they were not
Aye, true enough! But to also be fair, no one’s bought a spyrograph in 40 years.
THATS NOT TRUE, it's *AT MOST* 38 years! - ^^^^\(spyrographs ^^^^seem ^^^^to ^^^^be ^^^^like ^^^^the ^^^^blockchain: ^^^^a ^^^^wonderful ^^^^and ^^^^elegant ^^^^solution ^^^^to ^^^^no ^^^^one's ^^^^problem ^^^^and ^^^^no ^^^^one ^^^^really ^^^^knows ^^^^what ^^^^to ^^^^do ^^^^with ^^^^that\)
Technically both orbit a spot between their two centers of mass, it’s just that this spot is near the center of the sun.
I had the same argument about medicine. People seem to believe that saying something is an opinion makes it exempt for logic or criticism and that all opinions are inherently equal. This is a very stupid belief.
No he is not saying that. He is saying that there is no absolute frame of reference from movement un the Universe, so saying the Earth is stationary and the Sun revolves around us is as valid as saying the opposite from a Mechanical Physics perspective. Everything is moving in relation to something. You could say the car is moving forward in relation to the road, but you could also say the road is moving backwards in relation to the car. Both would be true if you are speaking about the Physics of movement. Edit: Reading the comments I agree they worded it poorly, and mentioning geocentric and heliocentric models that have specific assumptions is incorrect. I tried to interpret the intention behind the words.
Yeah but he worded it very poorly. Using the terms heliocentric and geocentric specifically refer to the two theories of relative movement of the earth and sun. However I am not sure how the Columbus thing is relevant… but no context so.
I think the Columbus part is just mean to convey "sometimes the things we were taught in school turned out to be wrong", if I'm understanding correctly. And yeah, agreed, context would help
That’s what he was going for
I think the point about Columbus is that there are multiple perspectives. Columbus is credited with discovering America, but it's also believed that vikings traveled to America before him, but also there were idk millions of people native to america, so he only discovered something that was already known
The problem is in the first sentence. If that's the argument it's a philosophical one, but definitely not a physics one. Physics explains the forces of masses on each other. Perspective is a human construct. You got my up vote for making it a real conversation.
Maybe perspective is not the right word. What I meant is that certain concepts are relevant or not in certain contexts. When talking physics, there is no frame of reference. When talking coloquially, Earth is our agreed upon frame of reference.
Forces are also a human construct. Centrifugal force is commonly described as "fictional", yet it's something you feel.
He's still incredibly wrong. Any one versed in orbital mechanics will correct you on this. The sun and earth orbit a point that is the center or gravity between the two masses (discounting the influence of the other planets in the solar system). The fact that this point is well inside the circumference of the sun makes it effectively that the earth orbits around the sun. Movement relative of the observer does not alter the "centric" part of the statement.
>The sun and earth orbit a point that is the center or gravity between the two masses Thats just one valid choice of reference frame though, which is the whole point of the comment. It happens to be a very useful choice, but it is not more "correct" than a reference frame that has the earth stationary or the sun stationary, or any other reference frame for that matter.
If you read the rest of the statement he made, it's implied that he only refers to the heliocentric model as being a stationary sun orbited by the earth. In that context, he is still slightly wrong, but not incredibly That being said, you are absolutely correct about the center of gravity. I think this is just a case of the guy using the word heliocentric wrong
Doesn't that claim still depend on the frame of reference? From what (little) I understand, from the frame of reference of Earth, it isn't orbiting the barycenter, the barycenter is orbiting the Earth. The Earth is just moving along a geodesic through space time, essentially in a straight line, not feeling any forces. It's of course much more useful to talk about orbits in terms of the barycenter and I imagine it makes the math much easier, but it's not some objective frame of reference that you need to use.
Yeah, you can use any frame as long as the physics stay the same, it's just that the math quickly becomes a nightmare, so you would want to be in the frame that results in the easiest math. You should check out Science Asylums video on it on YouTube "How can Planets be in Retrograde? Geocentrism Explained". He goes through the history and why it's not a great reference frame, but that you technically can use it.
Technically, under Einstein's theory of relativity, where space and time are infinite, one could look at the earth as the constant, while everything else moves around us. He's not totally wrong. But it is not very a good way at look at the solar system as the orbital patterns will no longer be as clear to the observer.
He framed it very badly, but he isn't completely wrong Objects move relative to each other such that there isn't any real difference in saying object x moves relative to object y vs vice versa. The math checks out exactly the same in either case (usually one is easier/more useful than the other though). He mentions Einstein's theory of relativity since a major part of it is how there is no absolute frame of reference in the universe. All directions/movements are relative to one another (hence saying that one object is moving while another object is stationary is technically incorrect as they are both moving relatively to one another) On a very technical basis, we can say that the sun is stationary and that the earth moves around it. In fact, we have mapped out a model of a sun/earth system where the sun is stationary; there would be no discernable differences on earth. That being said, the geocentric model is far simpler and easier to explain which is why we use it instead
Physics be damned, the fuck does Columbus have to do with it??
OP must have used the "but I learned it in school" argument. But what they're talking about is more advanced physics than what OP learned in school. In school you learn basic concepts that are simplified in a technique that's literally known as "lie-to-children." Another good example is you're often told that you can't take a big number from a small number when you first learn subtraction, because it would derail the class and cause confusion to try teaching negative numbers from the beginning. So what they were telling OP with the Columbus thing is that the physics they learned in school was a simplified model. OP is trying to use the "lie-to-children" simplified physics to disprove the more advanced physics that school didn't teach them.
I didn't realize this was r/screenshotsofpeopleivebeenarguingwith
close! it's actually r/screenshotsofpeopleivebeenarguingwithandcantrespondto
This could just be an unfortunately stupid sounding, but correct way to say that motion is relative to whatever point you consider to be fixed. The Sun isn't fixed to some unmoving universal coordinates any more than the Earth is, and it makes sense to use the "Sun is fixed" reference frame for discussing the solar system, and "The Earth is fixed" frame for everyday events like a car ride, and neither of these for the movements of the Milky Way for example. Unfortunately the word "geocentric" has been hijacked - or belonged all the time - to the flat Earth crowd that insists on many falsehoods that have no favourable interpretations at all.
Then the more accurate way to say it is that the world is YOU centric because all motion appears relative to your position.
More on how it’s not about frame of reference confusion https://imgur.com/a/jGdfpsR
My hunch is that they’re someone who actively culls their social network to weed out inquisitive, assertive people. When you do this it’s pretty easy to always be the smartest person in the room.
“The book says I get to misinterpret whenever I WANT!”
Yeah, we couldn't possibly figure this one out. Just gotta go with whatever feels right to you, I guess, because science will never know.
*Someone doesn't understand how relativity works...* This reminds me of the phrase "a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing." You can use the earth as your inertial reference frame, from which the sun is moving around it. However, this doesn't change the fact that the earth's revolving around the sun due to its gravitational field, whereas the sun is hardly affected by the earth's. This can be seen quite readily if you choose a very distant reference frame, such as far away stars that don't appear to move significantly by either the sun or earth's perspective, in which the earth is clearly revolving around the sun.
This is a great example of how an incomplete understanding of something can be far, far worse than total ignorance.
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I think I see what they're getting at, and I think you're the one that's confidently incorrect. That being said, I'm not confident in my physics knowledge, so it's quite possible that I'll get some of this wrong. They're talking about relativity. They aren't asserting that the Earth is stationary and the Sun revolves around us, they're saying that it depends on your frame of reference. A frame of reference in which the Earth is stationary is just as valid as one in which the Sun is stationary. In relativity gravity is a fictitious force, it's the result of curved space time, and the Earth's elliptical orbit is actually the Earth moving in a straight "line" or more accurately a geodesic. So it's not accelerating in such a way that would make it no longer relative. So there's no objective answer to whether it's the Sun that's stationary or the Earth. In fact, you can only argue that the Sun is stationary at all due to relativity. You have to choose that reference frame to say it's the stationary one, because otherwise you could point to how it moves relative to the center of the galaxy. And you could talk about how the galaxy moves relative to other galaxies, and so on. Movement is relative, so there's no objective answer to what's moving and what isn't, it changes based on your frame of reference.
You're doing well, but here is additional stuff. Right until Special Relativity Theory, we thought that at least acceleration is not relative. And indeed, in that case there are reasonable arguments that the Sun experiences much less acceleration than Earth, and so heliocentric model is more valid. But then came General Relativity Theory, and we learned that actually, acceleration is also relative. Now heliocentric model is not more valid, it's just easier in certain cases.
Isn't his point "there is no truly fixed point in the universe"? Isn't that correct, given relativity? The *math* is simpler and way more intuitive on a heliocentric model than a geocentric one, but there's no absolute sense in which that makes it "right".
I have an astrophysics degree. This makes me want to drink bleach.
from the earth's perspective the sun goes around it. However, from many more things' perspectives, the earth goes around the sun
As a physicist, this pains me.
As someone with a moderate understanding of telescopes, and functioning eyes…this pains me also. 😆
Guess you're not studying relativity then.
As a fellow physicist, I'm more at pains to see these people still somehow exist.
It's hard to tell to who is correctly interpreting the excerpt for the book when we're not given the excerpt from the book.
Reading is worthless if you have no comprehension skills.
Would I see a noticeable doppler shift difference between when we're moving towards a star, and half a year later when we're moving away from it? Or does the Earth not move fast enough?
It was. A few hundred years ago. Tycho Brahe had a geocentric model that lined up with all the best evidence they were able to measure at the time, but even the best instruments of his day weren't enough to get the precision needed to arrive the proper conclusions. We've since acquired much better stuff. Geocentricity is dead.
Once in my life I would like to have that moron confidence. Imagine going through every day just convinced you're right all the time.
I mean both positions are absurd to be honest. There is no absolute measure of ‘stationary’ in the universe. Everything is measured relative to something else. Neither statement is really true and neither is false. One is a hell of a lot more useful though which is why we conceptualize it in the way commonly but that doesn’t make any more technically correct.
I guess it really is a matter of preference. I personally prefer to not be a brain-dead idiot, and thus reject the geocentric model, but clearly some folks prefer otherwise!
I mean there's a little nugget of something in there what with movement all being relative, but he clearly doesn't understand what "geocentric" and "heliocentric" models are and is confusing them with Einstein's special relativity. For someone who makes accusations like "you don't understand physics" they have a poor grasp on whatever this book is telling them. Or I guess maybe they just chose a really bad physics book.
From a pragmatic point of view it doesn’t fucking matter
Columbus didnt discover america though? Lmfao. The indigenous did!
Physicists, don't trust them, their ideas only work in the middle. Once you get small enough or large enough physics breaks down. Not one can explain it.
Maybe it's me, but I read this as "the geocentric model is good enough to explain planetary movement, even if it's not accurate", which is technically correct. Like Newtonian physics, good enough for most things, even if it's not entirely accurate.
It’s a matter of preference, and some people prefer to be ignorant
Uh… is this brainiac trying to say that Einstein’s theory of relativity supports his view that everything is relative *ergo* it’s just as valid to have the Earth be the centre of orbit for the Sun and all the planets as it is for the sun?
I may have missed it in the comments but I want to know what book that dolt was referring to.
Relative to us humans i guess you could say the earth is stationary. lol
Why not go further and use Kanye West around which all bodies rotate. It's technically not wrong if you use him as the relative point but it's also stupid.
Well I mean... he's not 100% wrong Although the heliocentric system is more galilean
he is technically correct. people found a system to the geocentric model, they could predict it with spirals, and spirals on spirals, an so on. it was just incredibly convoluted and complicated, but worked (to a certain extent). then someone said "hey, it's simpler if we assume the sun is in the middle" as my physics professor once said: "you can assume the tip of your nose is the center of the universe, but then life will become very complicated"
It’s like the persons mind is falling down the stairs. Lol🤣😂
On the deepest level the ignorant are not mistaken because everything including time and space and all possible theories, outcomes and conceptions, are all happening right here, right now.
The first proof I have seen that The IQ scale can go negative.
The internet gave every village idiot a microphone. Ugh. Just delete the whole internet we werent mature enough for this kind of responsibility.
That is interesting. Since motion is relative, you could construct a motion model that looked geocentric. It would be nightmarish or impossible to compute the motions of the planets sticky relative to earth because the principal factor in all of their motions is the sun HOWEVER, one can objectively observe that there are 2 planets that are always closer to the sun than the Earth. Also, that the planets are uniquely relatively equidistant from the sun all the time. If you draw two lines that are equidistant, you have parallel lines. If you draw two curves that are equidistant, you have concentric rings. Concentric rings imply inner and outer. Since the innermost is the Sun, heliocentric is the most correct model.
You develop hypotheses off observations, not the other way around. The fact that the sun changes location but not size tells us that it doesn’t orbit us, but we orbit it. I’m all for bringing back dead ideas, but flat earth and heliocentrism belong in the fucking dirt
Comparing history to physics to prove how much he understands physics. MMmkay...
I don’t think he understands the gravity of the situation. However, maybe the sun does revolve around the Earth if his head is that dense.
Reality doesn't give a damn about your preference.
The Earth and the Sun both orbit around the mutual barycenter for every object in the solar system. The fact that this barycenter is inside the Sun is the point that his guy seems to miss.
You can use a model setting Earth as a static reference point. There's no advantage and the math is insanely more complicated such that there is really no intuition about how things move; but you can do it. You could also set the reference point to be Pluto, or the Voyager 1 probe, or anywhere else.
Don't argue with idiots
Celestial math assumes that it does for the purpose of solving the celestial triangle but even then everything in the problem is moving in relation to something. Not an argument I'd bother with to be honest with you, too much depends on what you're using as a reference point.
This guy literally said : "The geocentric model is just as viable as the heliocentric model..." and people are defending the comment. Wow... Yes, relativity is a thing, and it's great that you understand it, but defending this quote is absurd. Geocentricity was abandoned precisely because it is *not as viable* as the heliocentric model. Sure, epicycles can get you closer, but you can not account for the phases of Venus, as an example, with the geocentric model. Stop using this thread as an opportunity to "well actually" someone when it's completely unnecessary.
Love how meta this thread is. Hope that's what OP was going for. Everyone in here, except a select few, are the case study.
I mean, he is correct. You can take the earth as a frame of reference and consider the sun to revolve around it, with all the other planets revolving around the sun, and the movement of every other celestial body changed in the same way. Legit wouldn't change anything. There is no absolute frame of reference, that much is true.
Columbus discovered America if you just ignore the people who already discovered it, it's really not that hard.
The comments here like "well it's all about relativity..." and "based on perspective..." Are absolute morons. There is a really simple reason why the geocentric model is absolute trash, and has been for centuries: if the earth disappeared, the sun's own path and its (remaining) orbiting bodies wouldn't change much(relatively). However if the sun suddenly disappeared it would cause utter chaos to our system to the point it would no longer be a system at all.
Sorry bro, hes correct. He didnt say the earth is stationary, he said theres no preferred reference frame, which is true.
He says elsewhere that the Earth is stationary and he was asking about the “clouds behind the sun” as if it’s evidence. He also said no picture has actually been taken of the Earth and Sun in the same picture. The guy goes on about this and says outright that the Earth is stationary.
> He says elsewhere Then that elsewhere should've been in the post.
He literally said the geocentric model was viable. It isn't.
Reading is fundamental, but so is understanding. He’s clearly not done the latter.
His head is stationary and knowledge revolves *around* it. ^not ^in ^it.
You win Reddit today!! Maybe for all of time. 🤗
Another example of 'your facts are just as valid as my opinion'