Comment by lotsofpulp
16 hours ago
You lost me with your example. What could the word center mean if the thing that all the other things orbit around in the solar system is not referred to as being in the center?
16 hours ago
You lost me with your example. What could the word center mean if the thing that all the other things orbit around in the solar system is not referred to as being in the center?
Barycenter is a good candidate, and apparently it's often outside of the Sun[0].
[0] https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/40782/where-is...
Slightly outside the sun. The comment above was talking about the Earth being center as a judgement call, which is a wildly different idea.
If all you care about is measurements/predictions relative to Earth, then it makes no sense to transform everything into Sol-centric frame, do the math there, and then untransform results back to Earth-centric frame.
Put another way, there's a reason we use latitude/longitude for terrestrial positioning, instead of Cartesian coordinates with Sol being at (0, 0, 0). For one, it keeps the math time-invariant.
Orbits are influenced by gravity and momentum and are always changing as the objects pull on each other and are pulled on. It only appears to be stable because the scale is so immense and our lives are so short in comparison.
Depends on how many epicycles you add!
They orbit the earth in a different shape that is more complex than an ellipse.
For further reading, I like Early Wittgenstein, but warning, he is a meme for a reason, you will only understand 10%...
Imagine we have a table with black and white splotches. We could use a square fishnet with a fine enough resolution to accurately describe it. But why use a square fishnet? Why not use hexagons? They both can accurately describe it with a fine enough resolution.
All of science is built on this first step of choosing (squares or hexagons).
Maybe something easier than Wittgenstein, there is Waltz Theory of International Politics, specifically chapter 1. But that is more practical/applied than metaphysical. I find this a difficult topic to recommend a wikipedia article, as they are too specific to each type of knowledge and don't explain the general topic. Even the general topic gets a bit lost in the weeds. Maybe Karl Popper too.
> They orbit the earth in a different shape that is more complex than an ellipse.
But they don't. We know they don't. Not unless you use a weird definition of orbit that is very different from the one lotsofpulp was using. And if you do that you're not countering their argument, you're misconstruing it.
We know they do. An orbit is a mathematical object, and elliptical orbits only exist in universes that have exactly two objects with mass in them. Add another object, even far away, and as far as we know[0] we no longer even have a closed-form description of resulting motion patterns.
And our universe has tons of matter with gravitational mass everywhere, few other types of interaction beyond gravity, and a vacuum that just doesn't want to stay empty.
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[0] - Not sure if this was mathematically proven, or merely remains not disproven.