Thread: Geocentrism
View Single Post
  #16 (permalink)  
Old 31-January-2008, 09:25 PM
Hornblower's Avatar
Hornblower Hornblower is online now
Established Member
 
Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: Falls Church, VA (near Washington, DC)
Posts: 1,769
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by HypothesisTesting View Post
(1) the appearance of the celestial sphere as viewed by earth-bound observers can be viewed as a useful tool in learning celestial motions but this doesn't necessarily imply a geocentric model of universe. After Tycho Brahe made his accurate measurements of Mars, etc., what geocentric model could accurately explain those?
Tycho himself had to do some weird hybrid theory and of course Kepler used his data to nail down the heliocentric theory in detail.

(2) other than the pure utility in (1) above, it is nonsensical today to have a geocentric view of the universe. There are so many disproofs of this that to believe so today is cartoonish.
Once Kepler nailed down the elliptical orbits and the equal-area rule, the position errors went away. That alone did not rule out a geocentric model. An exercise in vector algebra could have transformed the whole thing into one with a stationary Earth, the Sun orbiting it in a Kepler ellipse, and the other planets orbiting the Sun in Kepler ellipses. That would have been an adaptation of Tycho's model, and the resultant apparent motions of the planets would have been the same.

It was the emergence of a universal dynamic theory that did in the geocentric line of thought. Newton's simple theory worked fine with the heliocentric model, but it would have required something really wacko to make the geocentric model work gravitationally.

Back to the OP. Robert Tulip still has not made it clear, at least to my feeble brain, what he means by "geocentrism". He has given hints of wishing to evaluate the possibility of finding relationships between celestial cycles and various phenomena here on Planet Earth. His lines of thought may well be against the mainstream, but I don't think they necessarily are unique to our planet, at least in principle. We cannot rule out the possibility that other places in the cosmos could harbor similar environments subject to similar dynamics.