[Industrialblog,
March 28, 2006]
Making my head explode
It turns out that the sun really does go around the earth. Here is the explanation from the Corner.
Brain. Exploding. Have a nice day.
GEOCENTRISM [Jonah Goldberg]
This is the closest to a defense of geocentrism as has come into my mailbox. Of course, it isn't a defense, but here you go:
Jonah -- It is not my intent to defend geocentrism, but I do weary of the common rebuttal that "the earth goes around the sun." Imagine, if you will, if the earth and sun were the only two bodies in the solar system. How would one make the case that the earth went around the sun and not vice versa? And is it not curious that no one argues that the moon goes around the sun, although technically, it does? The problem is not who revolves around whom, but what frame of reference yields the simplest description of motion. Copernicus did not overthrow geocentrism so much as he provided a different reference point that made it possible to describe planetary motions as ellipses rather than epicycles and other w[ei]rd paths.
Brain. Exploding. Have a nice day.
But it's no less correct to say that the earth revolves around my wife's pet iguana than it is to say that it revolves around the sun. It's just that the equations for using her iguana as the center of the universe require a lot of pencils.
When I was a kid I once toyed with the notion that the car I was traveling in (we were coming back from Hershey Park) had remained stationary for the entire trip, and the wheels on our car had simply pushed and pulled and turned the entire planet beneath us until we had repositioned it so that the Hershey Park parking lot was under our car, and now we were simply relocating the planet back so our house was a more convenient distance from our car. Even then I had a sense that the mass of the planet was so huge that it would probably be easier to assume that the wheels had dragged our car along the planet's surface, rather than dragging our planet beneath our car. The presence of other cars on the road at the same time doing the same trick made the mental exercise a little exhausting. I think I was seven or eight.
Every car couldn't be doing this at the same time; you can only have one origin (the point (0,0,0), I mean) on a graph.
I never mentioned? It was July 16, 2005.
In fairness, I've been kind of busy and haven't really brought it up. If you want to see a few pictures: the blog about it. not updated, though.