…and now it’s the geocentrists, who want to return to the days of Ptolemy:
Mention geocentrism and physicist Lawrence Krauss sighs. He is director of the Center for Education and Research in Cosmology and Astrophysics at Case Western Reserve University and author of several books including “Fear of Physics: A Guide for the Perplexed.”
“What works? Science works. Geocentrism doesn’t. End of story,” Krauss said from Cleveland. “I’ve learned over time that it’s hard to convince people who believe otherwise, independent of evidence.”
To Sungenis, of Greencastle, Pa., evidence is the rub.
For several years the Web site of his Catholic Apologetics International (www.catholicintl.com) offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who could disprove geocentrism and prove heliocentrism (a sun-centered solar system).
There were numerous attempts, Sungenis said, “some serious, some caustic,” but no one did it to his satisfaction. “Most admitted it can’t be proven.”
There’s also no proof that the Earth rotates, he said.
But what about Foucault’s famous pendulum? Its plane of oscillation revolves every 24 hours, showing the rotation of the planet. If the Earth didn’t rotate, it wouldn’t oscillate.
Nope, Sungenis said: There just may be some other force propelling it, such as the pull of stars.
These loons are like the “NASA faked the moon landings” type. They’re impervious to facts, evidence or logic. But everyone can look down on someone:
Sungenis wants to make sure “people don’t classify geocentrists with Flat Earthers. We don’t believe that at all.”
Oh, well, that’s all right then.
[Late afternoon update]
One of Jonah’s emailers had a (sort of, well not really) defense of geocentrism:
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 wierd paths.
Well, no, even that doesn’t help.
The problem with geocentrism isn’t that it merely claims that the sun goes around the earth. It’s true, as Jonah’s emailer writes, that both earth and sun revolve around each other (though the sun barely budges in its tiny orbit around their common center of gravity, which is contained entirely within itself, and superimposed with the motion resulting from its interactions with all of the other planets).
The geocentrists’ problem is that they believe that the sun going around the earth explains the daily cycle of light and dark. But the sun and earth revolve around each other once a year, not once a day. They are essentially denying the very fact of the earth’s rotation in inertial space. Note that their explanation also makes it much more complicated to explain seasons, since they’ve essentially denied the natural motion that causes things to go through an annual cycle (that is, the sun can’t go around the earth both once a day, and once a year).