Timeline for Simple experimental evidence that Earth revolves around Sun
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
12 events
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| Mar 27, 2019 at 22:18 | comment | added | Ken G | You are making an essentially sociological point. But we are talking about coordinates-- and there is no problem applying the postulates of general relativity to coordinates in which all the stars are moving in either little circles to make the Earth stationary in its orbit, or even in very large circles to make the Earth not spin either. That's all just the mathematical language. Einstein made the physics work in all these languages, that was the crux of his great achievement. Philosophically, he used that this must be possible as a guiding principle of his theory. | |
| Mar 27, 2019 at 16:40 | comment | added | ProfRob | @KenG Why should all the stars be executing little circles? Orbiting their own planets I guess? But why all with a period of 1 year? This motion tells us that it is more correct to say that the Earth goes around the Sun and argues strongly against a geocentric point of view. | |
| Mar 27, 2019 at 12:37 | comment | added | Ken G | The stars would also be going in circles, consistent with the coordinate system. It's simply a different coordinate system, and the key lesson of relativity is don't reify your coordinates, coordinates are just the language you have chosen. | |
| Jul 12, 2018 at 6:44 | comment | added | ProfRob | How would the Sun orbiting the Earth explain trigonometric parallax? | |
| Jul 12, 2018 at 5:05 | comment | added | kkm mistrusts SE | @BenCrowell, perhaps you meant the special relativity, not the GR. In the GR framework, everything is "free-falling" along their geodesics, pretty much by postulate from which the theory is developed. | |
| Jul 10, 2018 at 13:14 | comment | added | Ken G | Also, the basic postulates of general relativity apply in exactly the same way in all reference frames, inertial or otherwise. Newton's postulates do not. | |
| Jul 10, 2018 at 11:17 | history | edited | David Hammen | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 121 characters in body
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| Jul 10, 2018 at 6:54 | comment | added | Ruslan | @BenCrowell while equations of motion in inertial frames are generally nicer, this doesn't make non-inertial frames invalid – just introduces fictitious forces. | |
| Jul 10, 2018 at 0:07 | comment | added | user15381 | all frames of reference are equally valid Not true. Both Newtonian mechanics and general relativity distinguish between inertial and noninertial frames of reference. (In GR, an inertial frame is a free-falling frame.) | |
| Jul 9, 2018 at 22:27 | comment | added | Tristan | Nah, you just needed more numerical precision! :-) | |
| Jul 9, 2018 at 20:44 | comment | added | David Hammen | As an aside, one of my favorite tests of the orbital dynamics framework I developed for NASA's Johnson Space Center was to place an object in orbit about the Earth's moon, but to model the time evolution of that object from the perspective a Neptune-centered inertial point of view. It worked, at least for a short period of time. While all frames of reference are equally valid in theory, some choices are rather dimwitted compared to others due to numerical accuracy concerns. My choice of Neptune-centered inertial was intentionally dimwitted. | |
| Jul 9, 2018 at 20:35 | history | answered | David Hammen | CC BY-SA 4.0 |