This just in; sun revolves around the earth. Who knew?

Slashdot is wonderful for many reasons, but as with anything collaborative, the real worth comes through in the discussions that follow the initial news story. I rarely have time to pore through much of the commenting, but I took a minute today to look through the comments on this article about caves on mars (snakes on a plane?), and found some really insightful stuff… for instance this is a minor diatribe posted in response to somebody getting high and mighty about how dumb people were back in yesteryear:

 

“we thought that Earth was the center of the universe, that the sun revolved around Earth

 

I really wish people would stop telling these lies. The Earth *is* the center of the universe, and the sun *does* revolve around the Earth. If you're talking about other planets or galaxies it's not necessary a handy reference point, but there's no technical reason that you can't define Earth as the origin in any coordinate system. Similarly it's just as accurate to say that the sun revolves around Earth as it is to say that Earth revolves around the sun; the sun and Earth revolve around each other, and anything more specific only expresses a frame a reference, not a technical truth.

 

The only part people ever got wrong was the movement of other planets; there were models that showed other planets in revolution around Earth, and those were inaccurate (and quickly discovered to be so as soon as the technology existed to measure the inaccuracies in the predicted orbits of the planets). But in a time before access to high-quality optics it's not entirely unreasonable to suppose that distant non-star objects you observe behave in the same way as the sun and the moon -- that they also revolve around the Earth.

 

I won't argue the "earth was flat" point (much) for the moment, as there were at least some people at some point in history who believed that. Not many people who actually studied the subject, at least not since some year that ended with "BC", but there were some people in the Early Middle Ages who argued for a flat-earth model, and their belief was wrong, so it's a better point than the first two, even if it's based on a misunderstanding of history.

 

And while religion does may bad (fight about stupid things) and good things (organize society in the absence of stable political powers), they can't be blamed for your misunderstanding of astronomy or history, so maybe you should lay off.”

 

Now that’s some good shit…