Earth at the center of the Universe?

Ultimate_Philosophy · January 6, 2016, 1:42am

If the earth is motionless, then it is not spinning, and the stars and planets around it would not be spinning either.

The thirty mile and hour value is an arbitrary value I made up. For example, if a kid was spinning around at night looking at the stars, the photons in his head of the stars would be moving at 30 miles per hour or so. We dont say that because the earth is spinning, and the stars appear to be moving at the speed of light, that they are moving at the speed of light, they are nothing more than localised photons moving at 30 miles per hour.

Ultimate_Philosophy · January 6, 2016, 1:44am

People in this thread, seem to be confusing the actual stars with a projection of the stars. Just because the projection of the stars is moving…

fuse · January 6, 2016, 1:55am

But we’re not talking about stopping the earth’s spin, we’re imagining it was never moving in the first place.
So our model for how everything else is moving would have to be massively different. If the earth is not moving but the relative motion of far away stars appears the same, what is their speed?

Ultimate_Philosophy · January 10, 2016, 2:47am

We must first measure their movement relative to the aether which they reside. Naturally, the aether will be moving at increasing speeds, if the celestial bodies are spinning near it. Thus relative velocity is preserved, relative to the cosmic aether.

Phonetic_Ethics · January 11, 2016, 10:46pm

Earth cannot be the center.

The Galactic Center Is Not Earth
Earth Is Not The Galactic Center

skakos · February 15, 2016, 12:32pm

fuse:

skakos:

Choosing the place with the largest mass is a solution.
But again not even the heliocentric model follows this absolutely: it has two centers (every ellipsis has two centers) in one of which there is… nothing.

More or less. But there is only one center of mass, around which everything in the system orbits: the barycenter.
Our sun has like 99% of the mass in our system - so the barycenter is approximately the sun itself.

skakos:

But there is a better criterion with which we can choose the center: The place where the conscious observer is.

If you were standing on the moon, then the moon would appear to be the center of everything. Same for Mars, the Sun, or an asteroid. This criterion yields lots of centers. In fact, it makes it impossible to choose the center. These are only centers of relative motion, anyways, and most of them are useless as functional models of astronomical systems. If you only care about how observable motion works (kinematics), then Earth is a fine makeshift center for many observations. But if you also care about why motion works and what laws might govern it (kinetics /dynamics), there is no sensible reason to think Earth is actually the center of the movement of the Sun, much less the galaxy or the universe.

So to keep the discussion moving, I’ll reply to the questions you don’t seem interested in answering.

fuse:

If you hypothetically take away our sun, could you still perceive earth as center [of orbit for the remaining planets], with any amount of epicycles?

If you hypothetically take away earth, could you still perceive the sun as the center of orbit for the remaining planets?

Without the Sun, all the planets would fly off in various tangent vectors. Viewed from Earth, the other planets would appear to disperse from view and we would be the center of nothing.*
Yet without Earth, the remaining planets would presumably continue in near indifference in their orbits around the Sun.

*nothing except the two body system of the earth and the moon

I do care about HOW and WHY things move, but what does that have to do with selecting a center?
The HOW can be answered fine by choosing Earth as the center or any other point you wish.
The WHY is more of a philosophical question.
If you asked Zeno, things do not move at all.