Coragyps responds to Geodesic:
quote:
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There is no evidence to falsify geocentrism.
Errrm...Annual parallax? Aberration of starlight? We've only known about these since the 1830's though....
No, that isn't sufficient. You've ignored the important point:
It is true that the motions are simpler to visualize and calculate if the sun is taken as the center of the solar system, but neither heliocentrism nor geocentrism nor M31-centrism is any more or less valid ... or demonstrable.
That's the thing: It is
much easier to calculate things when we create the frame of reference as the sun being the center of the solar system.
For example, we can subtly adjust the spin of the earth by creating an "earthquake" by injecting high pressure water into geological features. In the reference frame of a spinning earth, the visual response of the change of the rotation of the stars around us is much easier to visualize and calculate but there's no reason to assume that such is the case. It strains our personal credulity that futzing with the earth would somehow affect the rotation of the universe around the earth, but that's just personal incredulity and insufficient to be a reason.
The reason we go with the idea that the earth is rotating is that it means we don't have to figure out how a force applied on earth can affect the distant stars. It would mean having to rewrite a whole lot of physics (including the limit on how quickly something can travel since the observed effect on the motion of the stars from these earthquakes is immediate), but that doesn't mean it is wrong to do so.
The Ptolomaic model of the solar system was abandoned, in part, because it was so frickin' complicated. Epicycles within epicycles. To change the model from a geocentric to a heliocentric one fixed an awful lot of problems (though Copernicus's insistence upon circular orbits had to wait for Kepler to do away with them).
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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!