The earth is not at the centre of the solar system, the galaxy or the universe. This thread is not supporting any of these unscientific claims. Rather, the aim here is to show how geocentric approaches complement mainstream astronomy and physics. Niels Bohr said physics and biology are complementary.* This is the sense in which geocentric approaches complement big bang cosmology – they are studying different topics which cannot be reduced one to the other, although they must be mutually compatible. The superseding of traditional geocentric cosmologies has caused distortions in modern science, including its difficulty in studying possible relations between physics and biology, and its difficulties in giving attention to topics such as cycles, as argued by rtomes at http://www.bautforum.com/general-sci...verything.html .

* http://www.bautforum.com/questions-a...-einstein.html

This thread expands on the discussion at Is it allowed?. There I noted that all observation using the sky map of astronomy is geocentric, simply by its locating of objects by coordinates and constellations, and the earth may well be the only place in the universe to have produced such a map. This intellectual product presents one limited sense in which we can say a geocentric approach makes sense, in that human thought, as a material product of the earth, has mapped the positions of all visible objects in relation to the earth using right ascension and declination as a purely geocentric coordinate system in astronomy. If other intelligent life exists it may have created similar sky maps from their planets, but ours is the only one we know of. This does not necessarily privilege earth.

A further level at which geocentric approaches are coherent is in the actual relation of the earth to the cosmos. For example, these graphs of observed planetary positions http://www.bautforum.com/attachments...-1999-2008.gif and http://www.bautforum.com/attachments...endar-2008.gif are practical geocentric maps of the solar system, not in a Ptolemaic sense, but as empirical diagrams. My recent discussion Precessional Cosmology sought to explore a similar agenda of how to analyse geocentric cosmic rhythms – geocentric in that rhythms such as precession are centred on the earth, not that they privilege earth.

In discussing the 2008 calendar with Maksutov, he criticized my use of the four traditional elements of earth, fire, air and water. These themes are important in biology, where they have something of a complementary status as fundamental inputs to life, as the 92+ elements are fundamental building blocks of matter. A geocentric view in biology can be usefully informed by the four traditional elements as principal factors in ecology. My calendar presents a traditional mapping of these ‘elements’ onto the tropical zodiac.

Tides are the best example of a regular geocentric rhythm, based on real influences of sun and moon. Tides are geocentric in that whether the earth moves or not is irrelevant to their measurement, while apparent motion of the sun and moon is the main factor. I believe the science of tides can be extended into other fields including biology and meteorology. For example the attached chart of empirical data of moon positions and rain levels in Sydney presents a possible correlation of planetary effects and events on earth, linking cosmic data (moon phases) that is purely a function of the earth moon sun system with actual terrestrial cycles.

Attached Thumbnails

 

I'm all for more coherence!

You appear to be asserting that a geocentric frame of reference is a useful tool for analysis and calculation in many practical scientific tasks, while acknowledging that in using it as such, we are not attributing a fundamentally privileged status to Planet Earth. Nothing ATM about that. If you find it necessary to assert these points, which most of us already accept, why not in General Science?

{Emphasis mine}

Earth has produced nothing of the sort; its residents have produced such maps. And it is a safe bet that any life intelligent enough to study astronomy on other planets in other star systems will have produced their own maps with their own planet and star providing the reference frame. Nothing to see here, just an attempt to start another astrology thread. Move along!

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The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

Not only that, to the extent that they're geocentric, they're also sun-centric. To the extent that they are not both, they are not geocentric.

Are you also going to provide random examples of phenomena that cannot be explained within a geocentric viewpoint?

If not, why should we assume there is anything interesting about the examples you provided?

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"Arrrgh, the laws of physics be a harsh mistress!" -- Bender

The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation and quantum mechanics cannot be explained within a geocentric viewpoint. Life, by and large, can. A geocentric frame of reference applies to the study of all terrestrial cycles and has potential to inform terrestrial observation by placing it in a cosmic context. An underlying question here is how physics and biology are complementary, and how geocentric phenomena in biology illustrate this complementarity. For example geocentric rhythms such as day and night have main effects at the biological level of organism and ecology rather than at levels explained directly by atomic physics. The moon rain cycle chart attached to my last post suggests one area, meteorology, where empirical research into planetary effects could increase its predictive power. This is partly about the relative importance astronomers and other scientists place on different areas of study, with those that are explicitly geocentric generally accorded little importance.

I am trying to extend the mainstream to new areas rather than to criticise positive mainstream ideas. The examples I provide, such as tides, rain and precession, show how cycles of life on earth are structured by cosmic rhythms, often in ways not widely understood. The empirical links between cosmology and biology may one day be mainstream but not yet. Geocentric approaches have a defined legitimate scope, but the empirical framework for studying the effects of cosmic patterns on life on earth also has broader implications for what is ruled in and out as mainstream areas of study. The idea of complementarity is itself somewhat against the mainstream, as Einstein criticised Bohr for departing from the reductive logic of physics.

If and only if you assume that there is only life on Earth. Since I see no reason to make such an assumption, any special nature of Earth rather falls by the wayside.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Life, by and large, doesn't care about your personal viewpoint.

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The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Yes, and what I am asking is how we can produce more coherence between physics and biology by recognizing the role of geocentric systems at their interface.
Human thought is a product of the evolution of the earth, and exists only on this planet within all the universe. Hence there is a logical sense in which maps are a product of planet earth, with scientists as the complex organisms who have evolved to perform this function.
True for star maps, but the paths of the planets along the zodiac sky map are geocentric and not sun-centric. Retrograde movement of planets is geocentric only.
The search for extra terrestrial intelligence has not yet found any. If life and intelligence exist elsewhere it seems rare. Hence there is a logical sense in which any complex planet and organism which produces sky maps can in this respect be considered a focal point in the cosmos, as a place from where the cosmos is measured.
I console myself with a line from Buddha – dew drop slips into shining sea…

So, some observations are geocentric. We've never denied that, I've often used ECEF (earth centered earth fixed) coordinates in working with satellites. But, you said "all observations": "There I noted that all observation using the sky map of astronomy is geocentric, simply by its locating of objects by coordinates and constellations" That's really not true, for most observations.And that reminds me of the Dew Drop Inn, and its cheeseburger in paradise.

By this contorted logic, then we must conclude that rap recordings, telemarketers, and Microsoft Vista are products of the Earth. So profound, and yet so meaningless. So Zen!
To the tune of "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head":

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Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

(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.

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'Just be a good team player in life', Andrew Evans

"Seems" again. You don't know. I don't either, of course, but then, I'm not the one basing preferential frames of reference on ignorance, either.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Robert, a couple of thoughts:
1) Haven't the constellations changed over the time since life first emerged on Earth?
2) Don't the apparent positions of the stars/constellations move (parallax and all that) as the Earth moves around the Sun?

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.

Looking at stars, geocentric and heliocentric outlooks are much the same. As I understand it when we measure the stars from earth we are also effectively measuring from the sun, as stellar distances are too large for parallax. Seeing our planet as a focal measuring point in the universe is therefore much the same as seeing our sun as a focal point. In other words, geocentrism and heliocentrism are the same for observation of the universe, as the sun is so close to the earth by cosmic scales. Of course the sun is in no more a privileged position than the earth when it comes to the big bang etc.

From an evolutionary perspective, science is, in a sense, how the earth thinks. Thought is a physical product of cumulative human adaptation to terrestrial systems, making thought, like all life, a complex product of the earth. In its highest form, thought seeks to truly reflect reality. Reflecting reality through scientific thought involves representing reality, including the earth, by concepts as thought. This representation function is a physical biological product of human ecology, as are reason, will and spirit. Further, since the earth is part of the solar system, and largely a caused product of the sun, science may be seen as how the sun thinks. Ideas are to the sun as leaves are to a tree. Thought is a physical product of the solar system at its most complex point – the earth. The measuring function of thought is a real physical structure in the universe, and, to the extent it is centred on our planet, all thought is in some sense geocentric.

This final paragraph touches on phenomena about which we can perform meaningful contemplation and analysis from a geocentric point of view. I do not see anything ATM about thinking in such a way. Do you really think you are presenting a line of thought that fundamentally is at odds with the way most mainstream scientists think?

No, science is not "How the Earth thinks". The residents of the Earth are the ones doing all the thinking. The quote above, unfortunately, is an example of how a lot of "new-agers" think.
Once again, more new-age silliness. The residents of the Earth do not do the thinking for the Earth, nor for the Sun nor any planets, asteroids or comets.
More new-age claptrap. How about an example of real thought here?
A penny for your "real physical structures of the universe".

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The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

and

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You do observe parallax. It's not huge, but it is sufficient to allow us to measure the distances to our local stallar neighbourhood.

No, that's what I meant when I said above, "Not only that, to the extent that they're geocentric, they're also sun-centric. To the extent that they are not both, they are not geocentric."

Now that I think of it, are you familiar with the annual variation of stellar parallax, first reported in 1729? A very famous cycle

That statement is to reason as fish is to bicycle.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

I feel like I should be saying, "Ommmmm . . ." right about now.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

For some things, we consider both the motion of the Earth around the sun, and the motion of the sun - neither a geocentric or heliocentric viewpoint.

Rather, the sun is no more a privileged reference frame than the Earth. There is no privileged reference frame. Period.

Things like "[thought's] highest form" and "thought seeks to truly reflect reality" are statements related to your personal beliefs, but have little to do with a scientific discussion.

Now that is a circular statement!

I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.

(emphasis added) How do you make the leap from "to the extent" to "all"? What "sense" of geocentrism are you referring to? What is the objective argument (as opposed to value judgement) for picking "thought" as a parameter for centrism?

How about this alternative? "To the extent that red rocks are centered on Mars, all red rock is in some sense arescentric."

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Yes, so the elliptical orbit of the earth around the sun is the starting point for measurement. The small corrections of solar parallax – two parts in 63,241 or 0.003% per light year, are small but real corrections to geocentric observations. The small corrections of parallax support a frame of reference – a geosolar topology - which combines both geocentric and heliocentric factors determining the perceived position of the stars.

When Venus transited the sun in 2004 I learned that Captain James Cook observed the 1769 transit in Tahiti partly to solve this problem of quantifying solar parallax, as it is so small as to be almost undetectable. Previous efforts using Mars had produced a value for the astronomical unit of about 140 million kilometres, about 10 million short, and Cook, before opening his secret instruction to find the south land, diligently sought to measure the transit for this scientific purpose. Quite a tough experimental method to quantify the parallax error of geocentric observation.
And yet the above described geosolar topology is the reference frame we use to observe the universe, and so I suggest is privileged as a systematic effort to map reality – the only such effort yet detected. There may be no privileged reference frame for cosmology, but there is for terrestrial observations.
My ‘circular statement’ drew a distinction between ‘reflecting’ and ‘representing as concept’, terms which you seem to suggest are synonyms. The comparison between a tree and the sun can help to explain the distinction. Leaves are a physical product of the tree, growing and dying by natural process. Similarly, thought is a physical product of the solar system, emerging in its most complex site but physically evolved as a result of the whole system, which is 99.8% sun. The leaves of a tree ‘reflect’ the ecological niche in which they have evolved through cumulative adaptation, but they do not represent this niche as concept. Thought, as a similarly though more complex physical product of evolution, also naturally reflects its environment. Where thought is unique among material systems is that it alone seeks to explain this silent reflection of its environment by representation as concept. The path from the sun to a thought is more complex than the path of a photon, but equally material.

The leap from ‘to the extent’ to ‘all’ was intended to mean that much more thought is geocentric than you would think from just focusing on mainstream astronomy. For example everything to do with days and seasons comes from a geocentric perspective, because these events are pure products of the earth in its relation to the sun. My objective argument for using thought as a parameter is that it is a highly unusual thing in the universe, and we can recognize thought as necessary to produce the focal points from which the universe is measured. If other places have thought they will also be largely place-centric. My understanding of the parameters of thought, following Rare Earth by Ward and Brownlee, indicates that we cannot imagine it existing in the vast galaxies without metal, or near the radiation of globular clusters, so we can consider rich complex sites like earth as the only possible points of thought. If these sites have thought and sky maps, they too are focal points for the universe.
Yes, I am sure the constellations have changed a lot, as the earth has orbited the galaxy about fifteen times since life began here. As noted above, the parallax error is less than one part in a thousand.

Maybe if we did try to do the thinking for the earth we would be much better off.

Thanks for this. You are right that my wording did not originally recognise the parallax. I have responded on this point above in reply to Van Rijn, noting parallax is a very minor factor in measurement from the geosolar frame of reference.

This is true. But they would then have had to use elliptical orbits in this geocentric or hybrid universe, and that violates the original ancient Greek idea of "perfect" circular motion. Even Copernicus didn't dare to violate that principle.

The ancient Greeks did not merely think that earth was center of universe, but combined this with a bunch of philosophical nonsense also, such as the notion that all celestial motions were "perfect": perfect circles and made of "perfect" substances like a ghost. It would have been unthinkable to them to use ellipses for orbits , which is why Ptolomy tried to salvage geocentrism with "equants" "deferents" "epicycles" "eccentrics" and weird stuff like that with perfect circles, just to make the theory accord with measurement. But after Tycho/Kepler, perfect circles just couldn't do it any more. Of course, you are correct that these elliptical orbits were due to Newtonian gravitational thoery and that really was the clincher. But my point was that after Tycho/Kepler, this MAJOR paradigm shift from "perfect" circles to ellipses had to be made, and any honest thinker would say to himself" "how come the Greeks got all this "perfection" nonsense wrong , maybe the geocentric theory itself is nonsense also. So maybe I better rethink this whole thing from scratch and forget everything the Greeks taught"

The ancients were only able to hide their crude models under poor observations: they only got away with geocentrism with ad hoc inventions because of this lack of detail. After Tycho ramped up the accuracy I'll say by factor of 10, there was no hiding the details of the orbits any more. Ptolemy would never have been a good enough magician to hide the truth if Tycho's measurements were known in his day. If Tycho lived at same time in history as Ptolemy, the "Almagest" would have never been written, because Ptolemy wouldn't have had a clue how to handle Tycho's data. Even Kepler himself was reluctantly dragged into ellipses.

I really think after Kepler the ball game was over. And don't forget the harmonic 3rd law. How come this law works relative to sun and not relative to earth? Only possible answer: because the objects are orbiting sun.

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'Just be a good team player in life', Andrew Evans

I generally agree with what you say, but I would like to point out that the Greeks did study conic sections, Appolonius has a work on conics attributed to him (I don't know if any of it still survives, however), and I think that if their observations and data analysis techniques had been good enough to show elliptic motion they would have been delighted to throw out the circles even if they still kept the Earth at the center.

Of course this had to wait for the accurate observations of Brahe and the computing prodigies of Kepler for this to happen. I think the fact that the orbits were shown to be elliptical and conic sections were known and much studied from the time of ancient Greece on helped gain almost immediate acceptance of Kepler's ideas. If the planetary orbits had been some kind of difficult to construct quartic ovals or something, would acceptance have been as quick?

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Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

This is a good point. What I think is:
(a) a few "radical" mathematical thinkers like Appolonius and Aristarchus would have been happy to adopt the correct orbit of ellipse like Kepler did. The correct science/math was key to them, not all the philosophical/theological nonsense that pervaded society.
(b) the bulk of the scholarly elite and general public from Greek days to Kepler's time would have found ellipses repulsive from a philosophical/theological viewpoint. They probably would have burned Appolonius at the stake like they did Giordano Bruno for spouting "heretical" views. As long as Appolonius fiddled around with his conic sections on earth, and didn't dare cross the line into applying them to celestial motion orthodoxy, he was safe.

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'Just be a good team player in life', Andrew Evans

Here are two contrasting responses to my idea on thought and the sun. Hornblower is correct that this idea in itself has nothing ATM, and obviously I have not explained myself clearly enough to Noclevername. Saying that human thought is a product of the sun is a bit like saying flotsam on the beach is a product of the ocean. The earth is really just a complex piece of flotsam of the sun, with thought the earth’s most complex feature. The claim that thought is done by people and not the earth is the logical equivalent of saying that an arrow is shot by a bow and not by an archer. The analogy between thought and the leaves of a tree recognizes that the sun is the source of life. Everything has a causal link back to its source, directly in the case of leaves and a tree, indirectly in the case of thoughts and the sun. The link to geocentrism is that this ‘thinking sun’ we inhabit is the only such ‘measuring centre’ yet discovered. Measurement is a physical product of the universe, so in this sense the geosolar reference frame is privileged as a locus of measurement.

The ATM component comes in when we start to analyse real geocentric observations such as the day and the great year. The point I am trying to make here is that a geocentric frame of reference is actually very useful for the study of biological cycles. Astronomy has been superficial in its interpretation of the implications of the Copernican revolution, invalidly discarding ideas from the Greeks which don’t easily fit within the mechanical agenda of modern cosmology. For example, Plato’s metaphor of ascent is empirically false, but as an image of the process of illumination it is helpful.

Thanks, it is good to recognize how religious passions undermine science. However, I don’t agree with your apparent assumption that we can have an epistemology based on ‘science/math’ = correct vs ‘philosophical/theological nonsense’ = false. Science is not sufficient in itself as a basis for thought, as it needs to engage with non-science to ensure ideas are compatible with empirical findings. An irony in this example is that the theologians claimed to be pursuing truth, but their assumption about circular motion was false, leaving them politically embarrassed by Kepler’s and Bruno’s findings. You might regard some of Kepler’s ideas on the harmony of the spheres as nonsense, (let alone Bruno’s thoughts on Egypt), but this is an illustration of how the scientific community has developed its own orthodoxy of method which like the theologians of old finds it hard to place its assumptions within a broader philosophical reference frame.
The ellipse model is the epitome of elegance and parsimony. It cannot be combined with geocentrism for celestial mechanics. Its comprehensive overthrow of Ptolemy shifted the purpose of astronomy to pure mathematical observation, whereas the former geocentric motivation aimed to explain ‘as above, so below’. This aim remains logically valid – as for example Stephen Jay Gould commented that macrocosms are fractals of microcosms. However, the mathematics of such celestial harmony remains elusive. We still need to stand on the shoulders of the Greeks to develop these themes.
On a point of detail, ignorance of elliptical motion and ideas about perfect circles were not the main cause for Ptolemy’s use of epicycles. Ptolemy’s use of epicycles was a sound observational assumption at the time, which happened to accord with religious dogma about circles. Ellipses are a product of the heliocentric model, and epicycles were retained by Copernicus who shared the assumption of circular motion. The massive intellectual upheaval of de-centring the earth was needed before anyone could even imagine that circular motion was wrong. The fact is that epicycles provide a roughly accurate prediction of the positions of the planets, corrected every few years by observation. The long term cycles are very regular, but when the earth passes between the outer planets and the sun their position looks to go retrograde in a completely regular way. If you haven’t even begun to imagine the earth could move then epicycles are a logical answer. From our position of hindsight they look ridiculous, but the ancients did not know what the planets were.
The paradigm shift of the seventeenth century was from a geocentric/spiritual to a heliocentric/mechanical astronomy. Your ‘honest thinker’ could only note that the perfection model was wrong if he/she already understood the sun was at an elliptical focus. Your comment illustrates the heroic capacity of science to make deductive leaps of logic regarding its philosophical foundations (ie it is slightly ad hominim about the Greeks to say that because they were wrong about one thing, therefore they were wrong about everything)

This illustrates how deeply intuitive is the geocentric model. I think Ptolemy would have welcomed Tycho, as epicycles were inelegant and inaccurate. Your imputation of magical motives to Ptolemy looks unfair as he was simply doing his best to predict planetary positions with the assumptions and data to hand.