[Avodah] Geocentrism

[Eliyahu Grossman]

--Micha said:
: And since we are posting links here, here is one that might be
enlightening:
:
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2010/09/13/geocentrism-was-galileo-w
rong/

>>Who doesn't discuss relativity, and argues against the position that
geocentrism is the sole accurate description, not that one can describe the
exact same universe using two different languages.
>>WRT RMMS's claim, it's a strawman.
>>What recommends heliocentrism (plus the sun's, galaxy's, etc... motions)
is the elegence of the model and its ability to more easily get more correct
answers. Not right vs wrong.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha
------------------------

"more correct" is not really a valid term here. 

The reason I selected the link that I did was because one does not don't
need to misuse relativism at all in order to see the flaw in geocentrism.
Simple math does it, but many discount that, so let's use facts.

There is this simple thing called a telescope, and that was the focus of
that link I sent.  It turns the "straw man", that is "the theory of
relativity", on its head with facts. But we also have telescopes in space,
and ships in space leaving our solar system that have returned interesting
data. 
 
So here is the simple explanation, and it is not a cut-and-paste.
-------------------------------

Geocentrists incorrectly hold a Solar system that looks like this:

Earth
Moon
Mercury
Venus
Sun
Mars
Jupiter
Saturn
Etc...

If you were not aware of it, one of our telescopes, NASA's Casinni Satellite
was sent towards the sun. Its purpose was to slingshot back past the Earth
as it head towards Saturn, using the gravitation of other objects to do
this, with the sun always behind.

It has been heading away from the sun on a slight curve for several years.
The sun keeps retreating. The sun has never gotten closer as it's
instruments measures visual and other forms of light. (NASA would be really
interested to know that the sun bobs and weaves).

Last year, while it was near Jupiter, it took a shot of Venus passing before
the sun, a sun that Cassini had left behind. That doesn't play out well for
the Geocentric view where Venus is always between the earth and the sun (see
list above). Look up the speeds of Venus to see the problem.

A few days ago Cassini's cameras looked back at us from Saturn and took a
photo of our pale blue dot (Earth).

Now, according to the Geocentrist view, the sun takes 365 days to go around
the earth, and Saturn, that slow gas ball, takes 10,832 days to go around
the Earth. Or, from a Geocentric view, during the 2 years from Jupiter to
Saturn, the sun was 96-million miles closer and then 96-million miles
further from Jupiter and Saturn, doing this 29 times! Hence my "bob and
weave" mention.

Saturn was chosen because of its specific distance from the sun WHICH DOES
NOT CHANGE in order to measure solar affects upon the rings. In a geocentric
view, this is impossible. NASA would have noticed.

--------------------------------

And here is the simple math that most Geocentrists ignore:

The sun is HUGE in comparison to the Earth, about 109x as big. This means
that from the Geocentrist view, Mars is not really about 34 million miles
from the earth as the NASA scientists plan. Since Mars needs to be further
from the sun than the Earth is (Mars is cooler), but since the sun is in
between the Earth and Mars, Mars is, in reality ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY
MILLION MILES AWAY based on the Geocentric view, which means that the rover
would not have taken about a year to get there, but MORE THAN FOUR YEARS. 

But it didn't. And the Cassini would still be nowhere near Saturn, but it
is.

Yes, before there were telescopes and spaceships, one might have had a valid
discussion concerning relativism in a solar cosmology. But that was hundreds
of years ago

But there will always be holdouts: http://theflatearthsociety.org

Eliyahu Grossman