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ОглавлениеPtolemy Revisited
Religion versus Science
The scene is a dramatic one, depicted in many plays and novels. Galileo Galilei, now sixty-eight years old, gray haired, losing his sight, and bowed with age, stands before the Inquisition in early 1633 (fig. 3.1). He is on trial for heresy, since he has advocated the notion that the sun is the center of the solar system (heliocentrism), a view first published by Nicholas Copernicus in 1543. This contrasts with geocentrism, the plain, intuitive common-sense idea that the earth, not the sun, is the center of the universe, as Aristotle and people since earliest times long believed (fig. 3.2). In 1609, using one of the first telescopes ever built (invented almost simultaneously in Holland and in Venice) to study the night sky, Galileo concluded that the earth moved around the sun, and he published his celestial observations and ideas in a short book titled Sidereus Nuncius (“Heavenly Messenger”) in 1610.
By 1616, the Inquisition was scrutinizing his works for signs of heresy. They warned Galileo that he could talk about heliocentrism in a theoretical way but not actually claim that the earth really did move around the sun. Trying to steer clear of antagonizing the Church, Galileo argued that heliocentrism could be made consistent with religious dogma. But Church leaders disagreed, citing such passages as Psalms 93:1 and 96:10 and many other verses. In 1 Chronicles 16:30, the Bible says, “The world is firmly established, it cannot be moved.” Psalm 105:5 reads, “The Lord has set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.” Another example is Ecclesiastes 1:5, which says, “And the sun rises and sets and returns to its place.” And in Joshua 10:12, the Hebrew leader Joshua calls on the Lord to make the sun stand still so that they can continue their battle. Thus, Galileo was fighting not only thousands of years of established belief in geocentrism but also the Scriptures, since Europe was still ruled by either the Catholic Church or the Protestants.
Figure 3.1. Painting of Galileo defiantly facing the Inquisition. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)
The last straw for the Church fathers was the 1632 publication of Galileo’s provocative book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Encouraged by the election of his supporter Cardinal Maffeo Barbarini as Pope Urban VIII and the support of some Italian nobles, Galileo framed the argument as a dialogue, a miniature play between three characters. This allowed him to make his argument by letting the characters debate the ideas among themselves, as Plato had done with the philosophical debates of Socrates. Galileo could put his own ideas in the words of one character (Salviati, the scientist in the dialogue) but could plausibly claim that he himself wasn’t advocating heliocentrism; the heretical ideas were spoken by only one character in his “play.”
Salviati presents the Copernican arguments for heliocentrism in a debate with the other main character, Simplicio, who represents the traditional geocentric views of Ptolemy, Aristotle, and the Church. Although the name was drawn from Simplicius of Cilicia, a sixth-century commenter on Aristotle, it was a deliberate double entendre, since Simplicio also meant “simpleton” or “fool” in Italian. The third character in the play is Sagredo, an intelligent but uncommitted layman and merchant who acts as the target audience and jury for the arguments of the other two. He eventually agrees with Salviati’s heliocentric solar system—as would any reader, since Salviati demolishes Simplicio’s arguments.
Figure 3.2. Famous 1888 engraving by Flammarion showing the old geocentric view of the universe. The image depicts a man crawling under the edge of the sky, depicted as if it were a solid hemisphere, to look at the mysterious Empyrean beyond. The caption translates to “A medieval missionary tells that he has found the point where heaven and Earth meet.” (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)
Galileo thought that he had cleverly avoided being accused of directly advocating heliocentrism as a true description of the world, but the Inquisition was not amused. The pope did not like the public ridicule that was clear in the character of Simplicio. Galileo was called to Rome to face several days of trial, where they showed him instruments of torture and made him recant his views on pain of torture and death. As he bowed before them and confessed his rejection of the heretical heliocentric views, Galileo supposedly muttered under his breath, “Eppur si muove” (“And yet it moves!”). Rather than torture the old man, the pope sentenced him to house arrest, where he spent the last ten years of his life unable to leave his domain. There, Galileo wrote his last great work, Discourse and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences, where he laid down the foundations of modern physics, especially regarding the motions of objects (kinematics).
By 1638, Galileo was completely blind (partially due to staring directly at the sun with his crude telescope to see the sunspots) and was suffering from a painful hernia and insomnia, and his devoted daughter had to take care of him. He died on January 8, 1642, at the age of seventy-seven. His Dialogues, along with Copernicus’s work, was banned by the Church, so they could not be printed or read except in places where the Church’s power was limited. Galileo’s books and his ideas were still under official Church ban until 1835, even as the rest of the world had moved on to modern astronomy thanks to the work of Isaac Newton in the early 1700s. Finally, on Halloween 1992, Pope John Paul II officially acknowledged the errors of the Catholic tribunals and announced that a statue of Galileo would be placed in the Vatican. In December 2008, Pope Benedict XVI praised Galileo’s work on the four hundredth anniversary of Galileo’s earliest telescopic observations. However, the plan to put his statue in the Vatican has since been shelved.
The idea of a heliocentric solar system is most famously attributed to the Polish scholar Mikolaja Kopenika (in Polish; we know him by the Latinized version of his name, Nicolaus Copernicus), although a version of the idea was first proposed by the Greek scholar Aristarchos of Samos about 280 BCE. Copernicus was a true genius; fluent in Latin, German, and Polish, and also speaking some Greek, Italian, and Hebrew, he often worked as a translator. He is more famous as an astronomer and mathematician, although he also served as a diplomat and governor. As an economist, he formulated the quantity theory of money, an idea that later came to be known as Gresham’s law.
But Copernicus is most famous for making the astronomical observations that led him to suggest heliocentrism and give strong evidence for it. In the years 1512–1515, he made a long series of intensive observations of stars and planets. Among the puzzles that he dealt with was a curious phenomenon known to the ancient Greek astronomers as retrograde motion. If you studied the position of certain planets, like Mars and Jupiter, against the background of the “fixed stars” night after night, you would observe something odd. Each night, the planets seem to have moved farther in the sky than the previous night, as if they were circling the earth. But once in a while, the planet appeared to pause, then back up a short distance, before resuming its former forward motion. This backward, or “retrograde,” motion (fig. 3.3A) made no sense if planets simply orbited the earth in a simple circle (or, later, an ellipse).
Many solutions to this puzzle were proposed, but the most famous was by the Hellenistic Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus (known as Ptolemy today) who lived in Alexandria around 100–170 CE, during the days of the early Roman Empire. He viewed the universe as a set of nested spheres, all spinning around the earth at the center (fig. 3.2). Each of the planets was on a sphere spinning around the earth, and the “dome of the sky” covered with the “fixed stars” was the outermost shell of the spheres. His Almagest summarized nearly all the known observations of the stars and planets up to that time, so it was the foundation of all later astronomy.
To explain the odd backward motion of certain planets, he postulated that they didn’t move in a single circular path; instead, they were moving around a small circle (epicycle) whose center was the larger circle of their motion around the earth (fig. 3.3B). Sometimes during their motion around the earth, they would be on the reverse-moving part of the epicycle, so they would appear to move backward from the perspective of the earth. This idea was soon the most popular among all the astronomers. By the time the Church dominated all Western thought, they made Ptolemy’s system the officially approved model of the universe, just as Aristotle’s ideas about nature were also considered officially sanctioned by the Church. For over 1,400 years, no one dared challenge the Ptolemaic system.
Copernicus was dissatisfied with Ptolemy’s explanation of retrograde motion but not because he was a rebel who wanted to challenge the Church or the dogma of his day. Instead, he disliked Ptolemy’s system of epicycles because it seemed too complicated and inelegant. He sought a simpler explanation that made sense without all the tinkering and fudging that astronomers had to do to make the epicycles work. Eventually, Copernicus realized that if the sun, rather than earth, was the center of the system, it all made sense. If Mars and Jupiter were on orbits around the sun but outside earth’s orbit, then they would be moving in much bigger circles and much more slowly than us.
Figure 3.3. Retrograde motion. A. The apparent motion of asteroid 514107 2015 BZ509 against the background of fixed stars as it is viewed night after night. B. Ptolemy’s explanation of retrograde motion, where planets move in epicycles centered around a point in orbit around the earth. C. Copernicus’s explanation, where apparent retrograde motion is caused when the faster-moving earth (numbers 1–5) on a short inner track catches up and passes a slower-moving outer planet like Mars or Jupiter (dots on outer track). The projection on the right shows how the outer planet would be seen from earth. It appears to backtrack as the earth passes it on the inside track. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)
Let’s imagine that Mars or Jupiter is ahead of us in its orbit (fig. 3.3C) and the earth comes up fast behind them, around its much shorter inside orbit, until it passes Mars or Jupiter. From the earthbound perspective, Mars will appear to move forward then appear to back up as we overtake it on the inside bend. After we pass it completely, it will appear to move forward again. It’s analogous to two race cars going around a big curve. The car on the inside of the bend has less distance to travel, so it will often pull ahead of a car leading it on the outside bend. From the inside driver’s perspective, the outside car appears to slow down and fall back as it is passed, even though from the spectators’ view, all the cars are moving forward. We travelers on the race car that is earth are on a faster-moving vehicle on the shorter inside bend from outer planets like Mars and Jupiter, so each time we come up from behind and pass them, they briefly appear to be falling back.
This simple but elegant solution first came to Copernicus shortly after his observations in 1515, but reluctant to publish, he spent a lot of time writing it up and tinkering with it. Some of his students wrote and published short summaries of his ideas, so they were known to many scholars and some Church officials. Copernicus himself wasn’t in any hurry until late in his life, when he finally wrote it all down as De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (“On the Revolution of Heavenly Spheres”). Copernicus was justifiably afraid of criticism from the Ptolemaic astronomers of the time and especially from the Church—so much so that he dedicated the work to Pope Paul III in hopes of placating religious authorities. The book finally went to press in 1543, just as Copernicus was dying of a stroke and paralysis at age seventy. Legend has it that he was shown the final printed pages of his book just before he died, knowing that his work would be published.
Once he died, Copernicus was safe from the firestorm of anger, criticism, and censure that his work provoked and from the torture of the Inquisition. After his death, his work was mostly ignored as purely theoretical for decades, and not until people like Giordano Bruno (burned at the stake for his heretical views) and Galileo revived it did the Church consider his work a threat and ban Copernicus’s book. As we just discussed, it was not until the 1990s that the Church finally made official peace with Copernicus and Galileo, even though their work had become the foundation of modern astronomy with the work of Newton in the early 1700s.
“Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right”
Most readers of this book might be thinking, “OK, so much for the history of how the heliocentric solar system was discovered. After all, scientists proved it in the 1700s, and even the Catholic Church finally recanted, only 350 years late.” That’s what I thought too, until I was startled to find mention of a seminar held at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana, on November 6, 2010, titled “Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right.” At first I thought it might be some kind of clever satire, but once you clicked on the web page (since taken down), it was clear that they were dead serious! Who were these people, and how is it that they have a significant following in the twenty-first century?
Robert Steinback of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors racists and antisemites, attended the meeting and described it as follows:
“Seminar” might be generous phrasing: The presentation was a mind-numbing, 15-hour-long sermon-cum-pep rally for radical traditionalist Catholic apologists desperate to debunk any science that suggests the Bible shouldn’t be interpreted literally. Numerous biblical passages describe the earth as at rest, with the sun in transit around it. About 90 mostly Catholic devotees, curious skeptics and feisty college students who converged on South Bend endured a series of one-sided monologues declaring that theorists from Copernicus and Galileo to Einstein and Hawking were wrong about celestial physics. Though much of it was difficult for mathematical mortals to follow, the presenters’ gambit was clear enough: Can anyone really prove the earth isn’t sitting still? That’s tougher than it sounds: Even though astrophysicists tell us that every body in the universe is in motion, it will always appear that the thing you’re on is standing still relative to everything else.
“If we’re saying that the earth is in the center of the universe and it’s not moving, that means Someone, with a capital S, put it there,” said the conference’s principal speaker and emcee, Robert Sungenis, founder of Catholic Apologetics International….
Some of the South Bend presenters have taken their certainty about what they see as literal biblical truth to hateful extremes far more consequential than dismissing Galileo: Sungenis has published a number of venomously anti-Semitic screeds that drew official church condemnation and have rendered him unwelcome in most mainstream Catholic circles.
E. Michael Jones, who also was at the gathering, has used his South Bend-based magazine Culture Wars to viciously denounce the “Jewish world view” and has expressed enthusiasm for many core Nazi ideas about Jews (a sampling of his magazine’s cover stories: “Judaizing: Then and Now,” “The Judaism of Hitler” and “Shylock Comes to Notre Dame”). Martin G. Selbrede, who also spoke, is vice-president of the Chalcedon Foundation, the leading think tank of the Bible-literalist Christian Reconstruction theology; the foundation has never renounced the racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic views of its late founder, R. J. Rushdoony….
The best moments of the gathering came when 15 or so bright college students finally got to confront the purported experts at the end of the long day. The panel struggled with and occasionally mocked their questions and host Sungenis at times seemed to bristle at the students’ audacity.
If such an attitude is typical of all like-minded theorists, it’s easy to scientifically postulate that geocentrism is a lot of solar hot air.1
The summary of the seminar also captures the main features of the modern geocentrist movement. They’re a tiny group of extreme Catholics (sometimes called traditionalist Catholics) who reject most of the changes in their Church in the past few decades, including the pope’s apologies to Galileo and acceptance of modern science. As the article also states, they fall back to an even earlier phase of Church history, when antisemitism and persecution of Jews was one of their main habits (many Jews were tortured and executed by the same Inquisition that tried Galileo).
Their leader is a man named Robert Sungenis, who got a bachelor’s degree in religion from George Washington University and a master’s degree in theology from Westminster Theological Seminary. He calls himself “Dr.” Sungenis because he got a “doctorate” from an unaccredited online diploma mill that calls itself “Calamus International University,” incorporated in the Republic of Vanuatu. He began in a Catholic family, then converted to Protestantism as a young man, and then swung back to the extreme form of Catholicism in his later years. Sungenis attributes his conversion to geocentrism to reading the book Geocentricity by the creationist Gerardus Bouw in 2002. (Ironically, most of the modern creationists who are literalist about every other part of the Bible reject geocentrism.)
By 2006, he had become a major advocate of geocentrism; had self-published (with Robert Bennett) a three-volume book, Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right; and was running a website, www.galileowaswrong.com.2 The site is full of slick video clips, blog posts, and a forum promoting their ideas. One video audaciously claims that geocentrism is “the coming scientific revolution.” Just like creationist websites, it is full of attacks on scientists and scientific ideas, wild claims with only minimal fact-checking from anyone outside their community, and a distinct sense of paranoia that the entire world is against them because they are on to the truth.
Sungenis’s organization has done their share of stunts to please their following and thumb their nose at the rest of the world. In 2006, they offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who could prove that the earth moves around the sun. Like most such contests by pseudoscientists, the conditions of the award are so restrictive that no one can satisfy them, and those who have successfully demonstrated heliocentrism have been rebuffed on one technicality or another.3
Their most outrageous stunt was a 2014 ambush film called The Principle. Using a different tentative film title and concealing their true motivations, Sungenis and executive producer Rick DeLano obtained interviews with numerous distinguished scientists, including Lawrence Krauss, Michio Kaku, Max Tegmark, Julian Barbour, and George F. R. Ellis, and they paid actress Kate Mulgrew (best known for her appearances on Star Trek: Voyager) to narrate it. They asked the right kinds of questions to make these scientists think that it was a genuine, honest documentary, let their guards down, and say things that could be edited to emphasize the uncertainty of science. These included questions about controversial topics like dark matter and multiverses as well as segments edited to sound like the scientists support geocentrism.
The physicists who were ambushed responded in no uncertain terms, according to Colin Lecher in an article in Popular Science:
Along with Krauss, at least two of the mainstream scientists who appear in the film aren’t so happy about it. Max Tegmark, a brilliant MIT cosmologist and science communicator, is spoken of admiringly by DeLano in the radio show. When I asked about his appearance in the film, Tegmark emailed: “They cleverly tricked a whole bunch of us scientists into thinking that they were independent filmmakers doing an ordinary cosmology documentary, without mentioning anything about their hidden agenda or that people like Sungenis were involved.” Ditto for South African mathematician and cosmologist George Ellis, a well-respected professor at the University of Cape Town who wrote The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time with Stephen Hawking. “I was interviewed for it but they did not disclose this agenda, which of course is nonsense,” he wrote me. “I don’t think it’s worth responding to—it just gives them publicity. To ignore is the best policy. But for the record, I totally disavow that silly agenda.”4
This film’s deceptive tactics and the ambush interviews mirror the similar efforts of the “intelligent design” creationists in their 2008 film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Hosted by the obscure character actor and right-wing celebrity Ben Stein, it ambushed a number of distinguished scientists and skeptics (including my friends Michael Shermer, head of the Skeptic Society, and Eugenie Scott, then director of the National Center for Science Education) with questions that sounded odd to them at the time. Their responses were then edited to sound like there was a giant conspiracy to suppress intelligent-design creationism from discussion in the public arena. Expelled opened to universal bad reviews (except in the evangelical circles, where it was required viewing) and made so little money that eventually its production company went bankrupt in 2011. But it created a lot of fuss before it flopped, which was the whole point.
The same might be said of The Principle. It screened in only a few theaters starting on October 24, 2014, and as of 2015, it had grossed a measly $89,543, much less than it cost to make.5 But the film was expected to lose money; it had a different goal. As Colin Lecher explained,
Despite its absurdity, the mere fact that DeLano, Sungenis, and the rest of their crew were able to fund and execute a slickly produced film, and to cajole famous physicists to sit and chat for it, makes the geocentrist fringe startlingly real: people who believe in these ideas not only exist, but have the wherewithal to make a movie. There’s nothing simple about producing a film, much less one with some of the most technically-minded people on the planet. In DeLano’s case, he is (or at least was) apparently steadily employed, eventually on chummy terms with a respected production company, and seems intimately familiar with science, even though his interpretations of it are a minority view, to put it charitably. If the film is absurd (it surely is), its creation was something clear-eyed, thought through.
Why did the creators bother to make the film if they realized that the respected scientists appearing would immediately denounce it? There’s the chance they didn’t expect the denouncements, but that seems unlikely. Another possibility, suggested by DeLano’s initial eagerness to talk to me, was that the establishment backlash had been part of the plan all along. Surely The Principle, after those countless media reports—including this one—is in a better position than it was before, even if potential viewers check it out only for novelty’s sake. Even if it’s fleeting, being the center of the universe has its perks.6
As they say in show business, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Anything that gets you noticed, no matter how critical or negative, gets you attention you might not otherwise have—and that was the whole point. There’s no sign that the film changed a lot of minds (especially since it was barely seen by anyone) or that geocentrism is a growing movement. For example, there have been no more repeats of the 2010 geocentrism conference, while there are now annual flat-earther meetings, and many organizations that tout creationism meet around the calendar.
Why do these people care so strongly about an issue that was settled over 350 years ago? The answer, as they say in so many of their documents and interviews, is religion. To them, anything that takes humans out of the center of the universe makes humans insignificant and no longer the center of God’s creation. Indeed, that was the reason for much of the resistance to heliocentrism in the early days. The Church was not only wedded to literal interpretations of Scripture; it also felt that humans were the apple of God’s eye and could not possibly be living anywhere but in the center of God’s creation. Many other people have noticed this too. For example, in 1917, Sigmund Freud wrote,
In the course of centuries the naïve self-love of men has had to submit to two major blows at the hands of science. The first was when they learnt that our earth was not the center of the universe but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness. This is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus, though something similar had already been asserted by Alexandrian science. The second blow fell when biological research destroyed man’s supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature. This revaluation has been accomplished in our own days by Darwin, Wallace and their predecessors, though not without the most violent contemporary opposition.7
Indeed, we need no more evidence of this than the words of Sungenis himself: “You can’t have the earth at the center of the universe by chance…. The devil is a powerful foe and he will use something like [the model of a sun-centered solar system] to win his battle. If [scientists] have to admit that the earth is in the center of the universe, where does the power shift back to? It shifts back to the church.”8
How Do We Know?
As we have already mentioned in chapter 1, the common sense, intuitive view that humans have held since prehistoric times is that the sun, moon, and planets appear to be moving around us; therefore, the earth is the center of the universe. For us to visualize the system differently and think of ourselves as moving around the sun requires an early education that violates our senses and intuition. Many ideas in science do not agree with common sense; they are nonintuitive and require imagination and a lot of training to understand and accept. Yet that is what the evidence, from Copernicus to today, demonstrates.
As we did in chapter 2, it is worthwhile to briefly describe some of the evidence and observations that support the heliocentric model and falsify geocentrism. Science may not always be easy to understand, but as its methods and results are constantly challenged, tested, and subjected to peer review, they stand the test of time. It is important for any educated human in the twenty-first century to know some of this evidence, so that people understand why science supports heliocentrism. You should not just accept it because you were told to believe it while you were in school.
First, how do we know that the earth is rotating on its axis and that the sunrise and sunset are not caused by the sun going around us but by the earth rotating with respect to the sun?
1. Watch it from space: Obviously, the most straightforward evidence comes from spacecraft, which have repeatedly photographed the movement of the earth in real time. For example, there are videos showing the earth rotating as viewed by the Galileo spacecraft,9 and you can locate many by just searching for “earth rotation Galileo” in your browser. But modern geocentrists are much like flat-earthers and regard all evidence from NASA and all the other international space agencies as part of a big global government conspiracy involving all the world’s astronomers and space scientists, so that won’t convince one of them. This also applies to the extraterrestrial space telescopes like Hubble and Gaia, which are in orbit around the sun, not orbiting the earth, so they can see the earth’s motion from outside our sphere of influence.
2. Foucault’s pendulum: If you have been to some of the modern science museums or public observatories (like Griffith Park Planetarium in Los Angeles or Hayden Planetarium in New York), you might have seen a room where a long pendulum (fig. 3.4) is suspended from a high ceiling; its base is a big circular platform with a series of pegs or other markers around the edges. (There are many good video demonstrations online if you search for “Foucault pendulum.”) If you watch the pendulum for a while, you will see it slowly knock down one peg after another. When you first see it, if you note which peg has been knocked over, go spend some time looking at other exhibits, and return before you leave. You will probably see that the pendulum has knocked down another peg. (More modern versions have lights that are triggered when the pendulum passes over them.)
Figure 3.4. A. Foucault’s pendulum. (Photo by the author.) B. Diagram showing how Foucault pendulum over the North Pole would swing in one plane but on earth would appear to move in a circle. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)
This experiment is known as Foucault’s pendulum, first demonstrated by French physicist Léon Foucault in 1851. If you set the pendulum in motion on a motionless earth, it would continue to swing back and forth in a single plane, as long as enough energy is supplied to keep the pendulum from slowing down and stopping. But the earth is rotating beneath the pendulum, so as soon as the pendulum starts, the earth moves a certain number of degrees beneath it every hour. This makes the pendulum appear to move around in a circle, but what is really happening is that the pendulum is moving in the same plane and the earth is turning beneath it. Modern geocentrists have no good explanation for this except vague references to Mach’s principle, which concerns the difficulty of describing anything in an absolute reference frame.
3. Coriolis effect: Another even larger result of the earth’s rotation is the Coriolis effect, something I have to explain early in every class I teach about oceanography, meteorology, and climate change, since it is fundamental to the way oceanic and atmospheric currents move around the globe. You can demonstrate it on a kid’s playground merry-go-round (fig. 3.5). If you are on one side of the spinning merry-go-round and try to throw a ball to your friend on the opposite side, the ball will appear to curve away from your friend (to the right if it’s spinning counterclockwise; to the left if it’s spinning clockwise). In simplest terms, this is because your friend is a moving target, so as soon as you release the ball thrown straight at him, he moves away from the point you targeted where he used to be, and the ball will miss him. It appears to curve sideways from your rotating perspective, but it’s actually moving in a straight path; you and your friend are doing the actual moving. (There are several excellent videos demonstrating this online, if you just type “Coriolis” into your browser.)
Figure 3.5. The Coriolis effect. On a merry-go-round, if you throw a ball at a target across the spinning disk, it will miss, since the target is moving away from the spot to where you threw the ball. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)
The same goes for the motion of the currents of air and water around the world. If the world were not spinning, the air would rise from the tropics (where there is an excess of solar heat and the warm ground is heating the air, constantly creating a plume of rising air and low pressure), then move due north and south from the equator to the poles, where it would descend in a permanent zone of high pressure on the poles. But thanks to Coriolis, the air in the Northern Hemisphere curves to the right as it moves, creating the great circulating belts of air in different latitudes known as the Hadley, Ferrel, and Polar cells as well as permanent features like the west-going subtropical trade winds and the east-moving prevailing westerly winds in the middle latitudes.
These same winds drive the surface ocean currents of the world, creating the enormous circuits of water in the tropics and subtropics known as gyres, which move in a giant counterclockwise loop in the Northern Hemisphere and a clockwise loop in the Southern Hemisphere. And the huge cyclonic storms, such as hurricanes and typhoons, always rotate counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere—all due to Coriolis. It even works on smaller scales, such as a giant long-distance cannon. A sniper shooting in the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere would find the shot deflected 7 centimeters (3 inches) to the right if he or she shoots 1,000 meters (about 3,300 feet). Modern geocentrists have no explanation for this global phenomenon.
4. The Chandler wobble: The earth’s rotation is not perfectly smooth. Instead, the earth wobbles on its axis very slightly over long periods of time, a phenomenon known as the Chandler wobble. It makes the stars and galaxies visible in the sky appear to wobble around their normal positions if you observe them over thousands of years. If the earth were stationary, then the modern geocentrist would have to explain why all the stars and galaxies wobble in the same direction and the exact same amount. Furthermore, measurements show that some stars and galaxies are relatively close to us (say, five light-years away), while others are farther (say, ten light-years away). Since the light we see from them started at different times (five years ago versus ten years ago), for them all to wobble the same amount would require enormous coordination and synchronicity, which violates all the laws of physics.
5. Motions of other planets: All the other planets in our solar system are spinning on their axes, something that can easily be observed with a good telescope that can resolve the surface features of Jupiter. If they are all spinning on their axis, why is the earth the only body that is not rotating?
What about proof that the earth is revolving around the sun? Again, the phenomenon is so large in scale that it’s difficult for us to see on earth, but it does provide a number of successful predictions that can be observed and tested.
1. Observations from space: As pointed out before, both modern geocentrists and flat-earthers reject images from space as hoaxes perpetrated by the great conspiracy of NASA, other international space agencies, and the entire worldwide scientific community. Nevertheless, the Hubble and Gaia space telescopes have repeatedly shot images of the earth in different parts of its path around the sun. Even more impressive are recent Mars rover images of a sunrise over the surface of Mars, something that would not happen in the same way if Mars were in an orbit around the earth and the sun were on an inner orbital track.
2. Phases of Venus: As Galileo first observed and published in 1610, Venus has phases (full Venus, half Venus, three-quarters Venus) just like our moon, something that could not happen if both the sun and Venus were orbiting the earth. It makes sense only if Venus is orbiting the sun (fig. 3.6). To get around this problem, modern geocentrists adopt a weird hybrid system proposed by Tycho Brahe as a compromise between geocentrism and heliocentrism in which the sun orbits the earth but the rest of the planets orbit the sun.
Figure 3.6. Diagram showing the phases of Venus, only explicable if the sun is at the center of the orbits of Venus and the earth. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)
3. Retrograde motion: As Copernicus pointed out, the phenomenon of retrograde motion requires extremely complicated and unlikely gyrations, such as Ptolemy’s epicycles (fig. 3.2), to work in a geocentric system but is much more simply explained by heliocentrism. Once again, modern geocentrists fall back on Tycho’s weird hybrid system to explain it.
4. Stellar parallax: For a long time, early astronomers rejected the idea of the earth’s motion around the sun because of the lack of apparent stellar parallax. They reasoned that if the earth traveled in a huge ellipse around the sun (186 million miles or 300,000 kilometers in diameter), the position of the closer stars against the background of the most distant stars should be slightly different when looked at on one side of the orbit and again on the opposite side of the orbit six months later. Since the astronomers could not detect any difference in the stars, they initially rejected the heliocentric model. It turns out that there is a parallax effect, but most of the stars are so much farther away from us than the early astronomers thought that it is hard for us to perceive on earth. Finally, in 1838, astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel successfully demonstrated that there is a parallax effect in the stars. It takes extraordinarily careful measurements to detect it, since most stars are so far away from the earth that the parallax effect is tiny.
5. Starlight aberration: Imagine that you are standing still and the rain is coming straight down on top of you. If you hold your umbrella straight up, it will shield you from drops descending vertically. But if you are moving into the rainstorm, you need to tilt your umbrella “into” the rainstorm to keep protected, even though the rain is still coming straight down. The faster you move, the more you must tilt your umbrella. Likewise, if the earth were not revolving around the sun, starlight would come straight down on us, but if it is moving, then there would be a tilt effect of the starlight coming in at an angle. English astronomer James Bradley first detected the aberration of starlight in 1825, ironically while he was making measurements to demonstrate stellar parallax (but failing at it).
6. The speed of Neptune: Neptune is so far away from us (four light-hours, or the distance it takes light to travel in four hours; about 2.6 billion miles) and on such a long orbital path that it would have to travel faster than the speed of light to circle the earth in just twenty-four hours, as it appears to do. This is physically impossible, but geocentrists will still make misguided appeals to Einstein’s theory of relativity to dodge the problem. It is not a problem, however, if Neptune is slowly revolving around the sun, which is what it is actually doing.
There is no need to belabor the point any further. The evidence for a spinning earth revolving around the sun is overwhelming to any fair-minded person, and only the religious extremism of the modern geocentrists makes them twist scientific data into incredible knots in order to preserve ideas that have been discredited for over four hundred years.
