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Geocentrists Convene To Discuss How Galileo Was Wrong
rollcall writes "'Galileo Was Wrong' is an inaugural conference to discuss the 'detailed and comprehensive treatment of the scientific evidence supporting Geocentrism, the academic belief that the Earth is immobile in the center of the universe.' The geocentrists argue that 'Scientific evidence available to us within the last 100 years that was not available during Galileo's confrontation shows that the [Catholic] Church's position on the immobility of the Earth is not only scientifically supportable, but it is the most stable model of the universe and the one which best answers all the evidence we see in the cosmos.' I, like many of you, am scratching my head wondering how people still think this way. Unfortunately, there is still a significant minority of Western people who believe that the Earth is the center of the universe: 18% of Americans, 16% of Germans, and 19% of Britons."
I hope there is live blogging from the conference.
Committee meets to discuss how light is actually extreme dark.
My mom says I'm the center of the universe.... or is that just the basement?
...even they know the earth goes round the sun.
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
Unfortunately, there is still a significant minority of Western people who believe that the Earth is the center of the universe: 18% of Americans, 16% of Germans, and 19% of Britons."
If your mechanic thinks that "The Little Mermaid" was a Shakespearean drama, that really doesn't affect his ability to fix your car. Same with this.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
there is still a significant minority of Western people who believe that the Earth is the center of the universe: 18% of Americans
In other news, 17% of Americans were found to exhibit a sense of humor when called by pollsters while most of the rest just get upset.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
In the rest frame of the Earth the entire universe revolves around it.
Why do the websites of lunatics always seem to be based on the same template from some horribly awful site made for Mosaic in 1995? Does crazy dictate design? Or does each wackjob just copy the code from the previous wackjob? Or maybe these sites are all made by the same escapee from the insane asylum? Maybe they are still in the asylum, and the computer in there is running Windows 3 on a dialup modem?
I thought Galileo Darwin had conclusively proved that the Earth evolves around the sun?
90% of the world believes in God(s), and there's nothing but imaginary evidence for that, too.
But by all means mock the fringe dimwits who don't actually negatively impact society.
No you don't, because the earth is a non-inertial frame.
At the risk of starting a shitstorm, see the people who believe the Holocaust never happened. If an idea exists, it's likely some entity believes in it and will find/shape evidence to support it.
Except that we can measure the acceleration of the earth (rotation around the sun is obviously not a strait line, and easily measurable). So... yeah, you don't actually get the same results when you do the math for a point decoupled to the solar system and earth. No one outside of physics learns relativity, despite it being 100 year old science. Some may learn "pigeon" relativity, but that's not really helpful.
There's no preferred point of reference, so you could just as well say that the Sun revolves around the Earth as vice versa. It's not like the Sun is a fixed immovable point around which everything revolves either, at least once you get beyond the solar system. Nor is there any other single fixed immovable point. You can pick any fixed immovable point you like and construct a model to match it. (The big problem with a geocentric model is retrograde motion--that is, the planets appear to go backwards from time to time.) The thing is that it's a lot simpler to look at it from the point of view that that the Earth goes around the Sun--both conceptually and mathematically, which is why astronomers do so when they are looking at the solar system. But it is possible to construct a description of the universe in which the opposite is true that is consistent, just damned inconvenient and not very useful.
So, in that limited since, Aristotle was as right as Galileo. Galileo just happens to be more useful.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
The Earth is pretty much at the center of the observable universe...
The summary should read:
Catholic] Church's historical position on the immobility of the Earth was not only scientifically supportable, but it was the most stable model of the universe
The Roman Catholic Church long ago accepted our current scientific understanding of the organization of celestial bodies.
Oh, and evolution through natural selection as well.
And one of its greatest thinkers believed that reason and faith were both equally valid ways to truth and not in conflict at all.
These nuts are in no way affiliated with official Roman Catholic Church positions. So let's just halt the Church bashing before we begin, ok?
What does the claim that 17% of the population believe in a geocentric earth mean? Even assuming that there's no one in that population that is simply saying that for kicks, it seems probable that a large part are simply answering that way because they don't know anything either way and are just guessing. At some level that's not as bad as having people who actively believe in geocentrism. But at another level, that means that one should expect that around 34% are really ignorant and have of them just got lucky when asked. That's not good. However, I suspect that some of these answers really are just people messing with the polsters or not bothering to thing.
But one thing to note is that many of the geocentrists are religious. Not only is geocentrism common among Christians but there's a substantial fraction of ultra-Orthodox (charedi) Jews who are affirmatively geocentrist. This is especially common among the chabad chassidim who are often geocentrists because their guru, the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, made pro-geocentrist comments and because they want to preserve the word of Maimonides as inerrant (of course some of these are the same sort of people who refuse kidney transplants because the Talmud says that one kidney is the seat of your good instincts and the other is the seat of your bad instincts. So we're not talking about highly enlightened individuals). There are however, some very disturbing studies by Alexander Nussbaum showing that even among modern Orthodox Jews, anti-science views are disturbingly common. See for example http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/featured_articles/v12n03_orthodox_judaism_and_evolution.html .
However, one thing to note is that although the conference in question in the top post is Catholic, affirmative geocentrism is not nearly as uncommon among evangelical Protestants as one would hope. Indeed, it is common enough that Answers in Genesis, one of the world's largest young earth creatonist ministries, feels a need to have essays that talk about why Christians don't need to be geocentrists. http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v15/i2/geocentrism.asp . Incidentally, There's some evidence that anti-Copernican sentiment actually started in Protestants and only spread to Catholics a few years later. Thomas Kuhn discusses this in his excellent book "The Copernican Revolution" although my understanding is that more modern historians disagree with him on this point and many don't think that there is a strong case for anti-Copernicanism as an originally Protestant ideology.
Finally, note that there are still some flat-earthers out there although they are very rare. They aren't as uncommon in the Islamic world. See for example this segment on Iraqi TV http://haha.nu/interesting/iraqi-tv-debate-is-the-earth-flat/ . In the West there is still some flat-Earthism but it is often more conspiratorial than religious in nature. See http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/ although some of the people there are trolls, some are quite sincere.
If you gave me a survey with questions like that, I'd claim to be a Republican and tell them I thought Obama was a kenyan muslim who worshiped Stalin and wanted to make America a sharia-communist country. Especially if they conducted it over the phone and irritated me. What people believe and what they claim on surveys are entirely different things.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"Loosely," of course, meaning "blatantly ignoring context and treating obvious similes and metaphors as literal statements of fact." I suppose the author would also assume that any poet or author through the centuries who has ever used the phrase "ends of the earth" also believes in their heart that the earth is not spherical?
That would be insightful, except for the fact that there are a large number of people who "blatantly ignore context and treat obvious similes and metaphors as literal statements of fact" in other parts of the bible as well.
[quote]I thought Obama was a kenyan muslim...[/quote]
No, he's a "Keynesian muslim."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Next up on Slashdot 18% of Americans, 16% of Germans, and 19% of Britons hate being asked stupid questions in surveys.
Most of modern science is the result of hundreds of years of research by people who were religious to some extent.
Yes, because people had less of an understanding back in the day of how stuff actually works. Being religious was also compulsory in those days. Bach, one of my favorite composers, glorified god in his music while he was fooling around with maidens in wine cellars and beating up his musicians in street fights.
Anyway, back to your point. Religion is stifling "modern science" rather than advancing it forward. We all know what happened to Persia after Islam, and about Europe in the dark ages, etc. I think it's safe to say that the world as a whole would be much more advanced if magical thinking was abolished somewhere in its history.
The essence of General Relativity is that a non-inertial (accelerating) frame of reference is identical to an inertial frame of reference within a gravitational field--curved paths in Euclidean space become straight paths in gravity-warped space.
No. What gravitational field would explain the rotation of an object on the Equator? You can treat the paths of freely falling objects as geodesics in curved space time (within limits), but you cannot treat objects traveling along nongeodesics as freely falling.
If one treated a point on the Equator as an inertial reference frame, then many stars would be travelling at superluminal speeds with respect to that reference frame.
That is simply not true.
Of course, religion did play a big part throughout history, and it even helped human kind advance a very long time ago. But saying that religion helped man get organized, leave by a certain set of rules, and develop the wheel millions of years ago is one thing, and saying that it still does that today is just plain stupid. Religion has been nothing but our biggest problem for at least 3000 years.
Remember, even in the golden days of Greece, religion was already trying to murder science.
And, really, why am I supposed to treat religion different from other mental diseases?
You wouldn't dare take seriously a scientists that was also an astrologist, or one that claimed aliens visited him daily ... then why do we accept those that believe in that creepy guy in the sky? It's certainly just as crazy as all those guys that keep their head wrapped in tinfoil to prevent the government from controlling their minds, and we love to lock those away at mental institutions. Instead, we grant tax exceptions to those that believe in the crazy guy in the sky. But beware, the rule of thumb is: if your guy in the sky is green and lives in a starship, you get locked away. If your guy in the sky has a badass beard and a jewish son, you get a tax exception. Just remember that, it might come in handy if you ever choose to become schizophrenic.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
But saying that religion helped man get organized, leave by a certain set of rules, and develop the wheel millions of years ago is one thing, and saying that it still does that today is just plain stupid.
Actually, they're both equally stupid, which is why I didn't say either of those things. RTFP.
You wouldn't dare take seriously a scientists that was also an astrologist, or one that claimed aliens visited him daily
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton's_occult_studies
And, really, why am I supposed to treat religion different from other mental diseases?
Because it is not.
My mother is very religious. She attends mass every Sunday, she's a roman catholic so she believes in God, Jesus, Virgin Mary, the apostles and the saints. Yet she doesn't believe the Sun goes around the Earth, or that the Earth is the center of the Universe, or that we actually came from Adam and Eve. She's a smart, balanced, and certainly not mental diseased person. I think what you should consider a mental disease is fanaticism. Over anything. Specially religion. That's what really distortion reality for some.
If we're picking our axioms, then why can't we choose to believe in a universe which operates on a universal set of rules unless its workings are altered on a case-by-case basis by some being existing outside of those rules? That would sort out the inconsistency - you can get general rules like gravity, electromagnetism etc. but also leave room for "acts of god" which may not be subject to such rules.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
You mean the dark ages where fear of heresy stifled secular innovation, or the dark ages where the core of hellenic, roman and islamic learning was preserver in monasteries while the kernels of the renaissance and the core of modern thinking and the scientific method was born between the rabbinical, islamic and christian scholars of the convivencia,?
By your tone, I'm not so sure 'we all know what happened to Europe in the dark ages' - one thing I know is that the foundations of *non-magical thinking* were preserved by the clerical population, not the secular one. Any reasoned study of the Inquisition (the catholic institution, not the spanish one under secular authorities) would be a good exposition of how the simplistic is the idea that removing religious authority out of the picture would suddenly make intellectual advancement flourish.
I say this not as a 'believer' but as someone who divorced himself from a religious tradition for very similar naive intellectual pride - only to rediscover later that much of the scientific and philosophical heritage that I so prized was due to the intellectual traditions that were preserved, cultivated and brought unto the world by brilliant scholars from religious traditions and dispositions.
You can disagree with them all you want (for what's it's worth, I do), but if you feel "it's safe to say the world as a whole would be more advanced" if they had not been there, I'd have to say you have a poor understanding of history.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Very good. Thank you.
More people should take a longer and more precise view of history, such as yours.People should realize that religion and science are two sides of the same nature, our inquisitive mind, which evolved along with millions of neocortical columns relatively quickly such that we became able to ask such questions as "What the fuck is that?" and "Why am I here?" The same impulse that drives science drives religion . That doesn't make science and religion equivalent as modes of explanation, but it does connect them.
Religion may seem like a silly vestige of prehistorical and ancient mythologizing. It may seem like a leftover piece of our brains that we should have learned to think around by now. But science is no less hardwired into our brains than religion. It's all about explaining experience. Some of us do it more with our left hemisphere than our right hemisphere, and situations where it's not lateralized so neatly blur the line between complete and incomplete explanations even more.
Religion is not stifling science. Idiots are. It just so happens that some (maybe even many) of them happen to also be religious.
Actually, no. I don't think even the idiots are because science is still advancing faster than they can attack it. I mean, more than 80% of people know better. Assertions to the contrary aside, I am not of the belief that we need to worry about the remaining ones.
No, no it isn't. The nondeterminism in quantum mechanics is understood and circumscribed, and we absolutely can be exactly sure.
I am trolling
Erm, if there was no religion, there would be no need to hide some selected intellectual works in monasteries.
If there was no religion the Library of Alexandria would still be standing.
The poor understanding of history is on your side. We know a lot about what kind of works were lost during the dark ages from the references to the documents that don't exist anymore. We know that there were works in which scholars argued that stars are like the sun, but very far away. We know that there were other Homeric books around. We know of the lost works of Eratosthenes, Aristarchus, Aristophanes and many more. You can read the handful of their works that survived - and they are works of genius - and wonder how much brilliance was lost.
The dark ages we are talking about are not to be praised by how works were preserved, but condemned for how many books were lost and destroyed. Go read your Name of the Rose again because that is the true picture of the ages.
If there was no religion the Library of Alexandria would still be standing.
That's first assuming the story of Julius Caesar accidentally burning it down is untrue. It is also an incredibly large assumption that it would continue to exist for 2000 years and that no one would attempt to conquer Alexandria.
But even more, it's quite possible that without religion, it would not have been built in the first place. That library was also a temple to an Egyptian god, though the contents of the library were not specifically religious texts. The Ptolomies (the library was built at the beginning of that dynasty) helped increase their power through the acceptance of the Egyptians' religion, and by at least appearing to respect and even observe it. Maybe if the Egyptians were not religious they would not have been conquered by Alexander. If religion did not exist, perhaps Alexander would not have created Alexandria. Heck, he might not have ever had any power to begin with. Maybe he would not even have been born.
For the record, I do agree with much of your post, but condemning someone for a poor understanding of history and then attempting to suggest that you can divine the consequences of removing an immense aspect of human history, especially one so influential as all religion, ever ... Well, that is not insightful in the least (as a few moderators seem to think) but it is incredibly ignorant and unbelievably arrogant.