Does anyone understand what this is trying to argue?
That the Bible was always right and even science doesn’t really contradict it. Yay, Bible!
The steelman version is that (ignoring all other bodies in our solar system), both Sun and Earth actually revolve around their common center of gravity. Saying “Earth revolves around Sun” brings the connotation that the Sun is not influenced by the gravity of Earth, which is not true.
Except that this is unrelated to the theory of relativity (you could get the same conclusion using Newtonian mechanics), and I believe the common center of gravity still happens to be inside the Sun (please correct me if I am wrong).
The common center of gravity is inside the sun. However, the Earth-Sun system also revolves around the center of the galaxy. From that perspective, the main trajectory of the Earth is around the center of the galaxy, but the sun’s gravity is deflecting it this way and that. If you plotted the Earth’s motion, it would look something like a sine wave wrapped around a giant ellipse around the center of the galaxy. Saying the Earth went around the Sun wouldn’t make much sense from this perspective.
The argument being made is that the theory of relativity doesn’t give a preferred coordinate system for the Earth-Sun system, so saying “The sun goes around the Earth” is an accurate statement for an observer located on Earth.
In fact, the theory of relativity would say that the question of whether the Earth goes around the Sun or the Sun goes around the Earth is meaningless unless you specify a reference frame ahead of time. There has to be some observer who is observing the motion from a certain reference frame, and if we know the reference frame then we can decide whether the observer sees the Sun going around the Earth, the Earth going around the Sun, both of them going around Mars, etc.
That the Bible was always right and even science doesn’t really contradict it. Yay, Bible!
That the Bible was always right and even science doesn’t really contradict it. Yay, Bible!
The steelman version is that (ignoring all other bodies in our solar system), both Sun and Earth actually revolve around their common center of gravity. Saying “Earth revolves around Sun” brings the connotation that the Sun is not influenced by the gravity of Earth, which is not true.
Except that this is unrelated to the theory of relativity (you could get the same conclusion using Newtonian mechanics), and I believe the common center of gravity still happens to be inside the Sun (please correct me if I am wrong).
The common center of gravity is inside the sun. However, the Earth-Sun system also revolves around the center of the galaxy. From that perspective, the main trajectory of the Earth is around the center of the galaxy, but the sun’s gravity is deflecting it this way and that. If you plotted the Earth’s motion, it would look something like a sine wave wrapped around a giant ellipse around the center of the galaxy. Saying the Earth went around the Sun wouldn’t make much sense from this perspective.
The argument being made is that the theory of relativity doesn’t give a preferred coordinate system for the Earth-Sun system, so saying “The sun goes around the Earth” is an accurate statement for an observer located on Earth.
In fact, the theory of relativity would say that the question of whether the Earth goes around the Sun or the Sun goes around the Earth is meaningless unless you specify a reference frame ahead of time. There has to be some observer who is observing the motion from a certain reference frame, and if we know the reference frame then we can decide whether the observer sees the Sun going around the Earth, the Earth going around the Sun, both of them going around Mars, etc.
That too.