Who wants $1000?

afree87 said:
The only thing the Church has done is apologized for the treatment of Galileo in a 1992 address by John Paul II to the Pontifical Academy of Science."
Click to expand...

I don't get it. The reason I linked there was that it seemed close to an 'official' church position. Can anyone give me a link to official doctrine? I thought the Catholics had their act together on this sort of thing...

Dr. Buzzo,

Your point 2, Perspective of a star... is parallax. Unless you're about to argue that geometry is wrong :boggled: it is proof. The lack of parallax was evidence Aristoteleans used in favour of a geocentric world. That had to wait for good telescopes...
 
Last edited:
Yes parallax. That was the word I was thinking of, but could not remember.

If I remember (and this is only off the top of my head), then the nearest star, Alpha Centauri has a shift of roughly 1 arc second. This would clearly not be visible to the naked eye, but it should be aparent on any astronomical photograph obtained from a reasonably high-grade telescope, such as those which can be found at many college observatories.

Using such equipment is prallax is only effective for neighboring stars.

To acurately determine the parallex shift of more distant stars would require extremely high-power and precision equipment. Of course, ver distant objects, such as other galaxies would be impossible to measure by such a method, even with the best equipment avalaible.

I believe that this effect was first observed in the early/mid 1800's. So it would seem that you don't exactly need the Hubble Telescope to observe it.

-Steve
 
DRBUZZ0 said:
I believe that this effect was first observed in the early/mid 1800's. So it would seem that you don't exactly need the Hubble Telescope to observe it.

-Steve
Click to expand...

By good, I meant post-Galileo. For those who are interested, check out

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax

The math doesn't require much beyond trigonometry. It's straightforward and elegant. Again, Aristotle knew that observation of parallax would be a demonstration of a heliocentric model. Arguing against heliocentrism is arguing against almost 200 year old observations and over 2000 year old logic!

losers...

(btw, geocentrism would demand that parallax observed by the Hipparcos satellite be explained by a weirdly oscillating background sphere some 3200 ly in diameter... it would work, I suppose, if you relinquished most claims to sanity... :hypnotize )

Oh - and mods - I move that this thread get stapled onto the geocentrism thread pointed to by fowlsound (this is what I get for bein' new around here... :rolleyes: )
 
Last edited:
Some SkepticWiki articles:

[swiki]Geocentrism[/swiki] has some good counter-arguments.

[swiki]The Earth stands still[/swiki] has information about Biblical literalism and geocentrism.

The [swiki]Million Dollar Prize[/swiki] article has a subsection on bogus challenges. My fave is this one:

Delamare Resources Publishing are the publishers of Anatoly Fomenko's book History: Fiction or Science? Fomenko believes that human civilization began in the eleventh century, and that Jesus was born in 1053 AD. Delamare Resources, according to their press release, will pay a rather stingy $10,000 to anyone who can prove him wrong by producing "a single piece of firm written evidence or artifact that could be reliably and independently dated earlier than the XI century".
Click to expand...
 
Yeah. The problem is how they define "proof"


I can think of the arguments they can use to question any proof very easily...

"This piece of organic material was dated to be at least 4000 years old"
"How do you know that the half-life of C-14 has not changed? Maybe god has changed the way sub-atomic forces work"

"The earth revolves around the sun because if you look at stars with a telescope, you can observe parallex"
"How do you know god isn't moving the star to create that illusion"

"We can recieve the signals from space probes"
"How do you know those signals are't being spoofed by god to trick us into thinking we are hearing space probes?"

"If the sun orbited around the earth and is further than the moon, then it would take longer to orbit"
"How do you that god has not changed the laws of physics for the sun?"




"Why would god be going to all this work to create a huge illusion?"
"God works in mysterious ways. We can never know why, but he has his reasons. It is all part of his plan. How dare you even question it. How dare you ask. God loves you and you are going to hell!"

-Steve
 
DRBUZZ0 said:
Yeah. The problem is how they define "proof"


I can think of the arguments they can use to question any proof very easily...

"This piece of organic material was dated to be at least 4000 years old"
"How do you know that the half-life of C-14 has not changed? Maybe god has changed the way sub-atomic forces work"
Click to expand...

Oklo natural reactor allows us to show that there has been no significant change in the way subatomic forces work in the last 2 billion years.
 
"How do you know the Oklo reactor has been there for 2 billion years. Maybe god put it there when he made the earth 5000 years ago"
 
DA: This isn't the first thing I've read that tries to make the church look good in the Galileo affair. I really don't care, but it seems weird that some official doctrine seems to be 'heliocentrism is okay,' while others are still stuck on geo. The one thing the positive spin does tell me is that, right or wrong, the Galileo affair was probably much more complex than science against the church! I believe that the issue did hinge largely on the individuals involved. Issues are complex these days, so why would they have been simple then?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom