Fascinating stuff - thanks for all your excellent and thought provoking work. You wrote of Faucoult's pendulum and stellar parallax, " None of these prove heliocentricity but could be offered as the basis for discussing the idea as a model." Could you be more specific about how these do not prove heliocentricity as to my layman's view they are hard to explain otherwise. If the earth does not move then observations of distant stars should not change position over six months - but they do. Why? Also Faucoult's pendulum rotates opposite ways in opposite hemispheres and describes the length of the day. How can we explain this? Surely the rotation of the earth each day and its rotation around the sun are the most probable explanations. Do I have this all wrong? I agree about the phases of Venus these could have other plausible explanations.
You are a mind reader. Working on the Foucault pendulum as you speak. Will be posted in the near term. It is interesting, but even Foucault was unsure of what it all meant. In general: if the pendulum is constantly swinging in the same plane (while the Earth is rotating beneath it), we can ask, what force is holding the pendulum in that stationary position? In other words, if the plane of the pendulum is stationary, with respect to what is it stationary (back to relativity and its issues)? This is an “unresolved” force in physics. The probable answer is: it is stationary with respect to the rest of the universe, since it is not stationary with respect to the Earth.
So now we are back at the problem that Einstein and the rest of modern physics faced with Relativity theory: is it the Earth that is rotating under fixed stars, or is it the stars revolving around a fixed Earth? Foucault's experiment does not tell us (along with Michelson, Airy, Sagnac, Miller....) eg. The force that is moving the pendulum to change the plane of its swing could be the centripetal Coriolis force, not a moving earth. This possibility is never pursued by 'The Science'. There will be a post on these forces in 2 weeks. Not many have heard about them.
As Einstein said: “The two sentences: ‘the sun is at rest and the Earth moves,’ or ‘the sun moves and the Earth is at rest,’ would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different coordinate systems.”
So in summary the pendulum does not prove heliocentricity - but in the post will add a lot more meat as to why. It also does not prove geocentricity of course but like the stellar parallax and light aberration can be interpreted using different models. But of course 'The Science' won't discuss that.
Another thought. We know that the moon does not spin on its axis. Why could we not set up foucault's pendulum on the moon? It would be quite amazing if the result were the same as it is on the earth - obviously there are confounders but surely some clever boffins could control for them.
Good idea and sensible if it could be done. I personally don't think the Americans went more than 50 miles up in the 60s/70s, and I don't see how any life form would survive the radiation in space or on the moon, without being covered in lead. But it is a good idea. Supposedly the Americans will be playing golf there in the next few years assuming that it is not a Spielberg CGI production. As Kubrick admitted, 'it was my greatest work'.
Also - could you post a comprehensive bibliography on all this in all its subject areas - you have covered an enormous amount of ground here? That would really great. I wish I had read these posts 35 years ago. Anyway at least here in 2024 my intuition back then that science was mostly bunkum and pure faith was, and is, correct and most of what I was "taught" in school - years before that - was just rote learned unexplained speculation dressed up as fact. It was hard to choose philosophy then with all the science propaganda but I am glad I did as it helped, among other things, to made the horror of covid 19 at least comprehensible, if nothing else.
Hi David, good idea, will do a summary post and key bibliography list at the end of this series of posts (which will cover all the main proofs for heliocentricity). It is a complex area and a lot of it is inter-related. Most people don't really know what motivated Einstein for eg. or what he was up to. If they knew, they would be very surprised.
Interesting. I look forward to that post. How about stellar parallax? If we do not accept this idea then the cosmic distance scale is all bunkum as well ( at least for "close" stars)
Aha, yes stellar parallax and light aberration - both discussed after the next post which deals with Newton and the claim that smaller bodies must orbit a larger (not true in all cases).
Fascinating stuff - thanks for all your excellent and thought provoking work. You wrote of Faucoult's pendulum and stellar parallax, " None of these prove heliocentricity but could be offered as the basis for discussing the idea as a model." Could you be more specific about how these do not prove heliocentricity as to my layman's view they are hard to explain otherwise. If the earth does not move then observations of distant stars should not change position over six months - but they do. Why? Also Faucoult's pendulum rotates opposite ways in opposite hemispheres and describes the length of the day. How can we explain this? Surely the rotation of the earth each day and its rotation around the sun are the most probable explanations. Do I have this all wrong? I agree about the phases of Venus these could have other plausible explanations.
You are a mind reader. Working on the Foucault pendulum as you speak. Will be posted in the near term. It is interesting, but even Foucault was unsure of what it all meant. In general: if the pendulum is constantly swinging in the same plane (while the Earth is rotating beneath it), we can ask, what force is holding the pendulum in that stationary position? In other words, if the plane of the pendulum is stationary, with respect to what is it stationary (back to relativity and its issues)? This is an “unresolved” force in physics. The probable answer is: it is stationary with respect to the rest of the universe, since it is not stationary with respect to the Earth.
So now we are back at the problem that Einstein and the rest of modern physics faced with Relativity theory: is it the Earth that is rotating under fixed stars, or is it the stars revolving around a fixed Earth? Foucault's experiment does not tell us (along with Michelson, Airy, Sagnac, Miller....) eg. The force that is moving the pendulum to change the plane of its swing could be the centripetal Coriolis force, not a moving earth. This possibility is never pursued by 'The Science'. There will be a post on these forces in 2 weeks. Not many have heard about them.
As Einstein said: “The two sentences: ‘the sun is at rest and the Earth moves,’ or ‘the sun moves and the Earth is at rest,’ would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different coordinate systems.”
So in summary the pendulum does not prove heliocentricity - but in the post will add a lot more meat as to why. It also does not prove geocentricity of course but like the stellar parallax and light aberration can be interpreted using different models. But of course 'The Science' won't discuss that.
Another thought. We know that the moon does not spin on its axis. Why could we not set up foucault's pendulum on the moon? It would be quite amazing if the result were the same as it is on the earth - obviously there are confounders but surely some clever boffins could control for them.
Good idea and sensible if it could be done. I personally don't think the Americans went more than 50 miles up in the 60s/70s, and I don't see how any life form would survive the radiation in space or on the moon, without being covered in lead. But it is a good idea. Supposedly the Americans will be playing golf there in the next few years assuming that it is not a Spielberg CGI production. As Kubrick admitted, 'it was my greatest work'.
Also - could you post a comprehensive bibliography on all this in all its subject areas - you have covered an enormous amount of ground here? That would really great. I wish I had read these posts 35 years ago. Anyway at least here in 2024 my intuition back then that science was mostly bunkum and pure faith was, and is, correct and most of what I was "taught" in school - years before that - was just rote learned unexplained speculation dressed up as fact. It was hard to choose philosophy then with all the science propaganda but I am glad I did as it helped, among other things, to made the horror of covid 19 at least comprehensible, if nothing else.
Hi David, good idea, will do a summary post and key bibliography list at the end of this series of posts (which will cover all the main proofs for heliocentricity). It is a complex area and a lot of it is inter-related. Most people don't really know what motivated Einstein for eg. or what he was up to. If they knew, they would be very surprised.
Interesting. I look forward to that post. How about stellar parallax? If we do not accept this idea then the cosmic distance scale is all bunkum as well ( at least for "close" stars)
Aha, yes stellar parallax and light aberration - both discussed after the next post which deals with Newton and the claim that smaller bodies must orbit a larger (not true in all cases).