Galileo was wrong?? Pope was right??

[Dr Adequate]

If the Earth is stationary, then Alpha Centuri revolves around it once a day. As it is about four light years away, it must therefore be moving at rather more than eight thousand times the speed of light. I wonder what Einstein would say.

 

[ma1ic3]

My fundie says, "the Pope forced Galileo to withdraw his teachings that the world was not the center of the universe. But science has shown that the universe is infinite and growing - so that makes every point the center of the universe. The pope was right, the earth IS the center of the universe"

No, that makes no point of the universe the center. The universe has no center, just as the surface of the Earth or a balloon has no center.

Sometimes, when the surface of a balloon is used as an analogy for the universe, it is said that the center of the balloon is the Big Bang and the surface of the balloon is the current state of the universe.

Also... it's obvious that the pope did not believe that every point of the universe is the center. The pope believed that the Earth was the center, not a center.

Galileo probably thought that there was a center as well, just as Im sure everyone did. But he was right that the Earth was not at the center of the universe and that everything else was revolving around this one, and only one, center of the universe.

edit:

From MadScience:
It's not true that everything has a center. Take the Earth's surface, for example. If you could walk anywhere on the Earth's surface, where could you walk to say, "Here I am at the center of the Earth's surface"? There's no one point on the Earth's surface that one could claim to be at the center of it. (Alternately, one might think that every point on the Earth's surface has equal claim to being the center of the Earth's surface!) (The Earth itself has a center, of course.)

The Universe has a more complicated geometry than a simple two-dimensional spherical surface. Nonetheless, the same general idea is true. It's not possible to locate a single point that could be called the center. As an example, one possible geometry for the Universe is that it is infinite in spatial extent. If so, that means no matter where one is in the Universe, the Universe extends an infinite (spatial) amount in every direction from that point. (Again, perhaps you'd like to say that every point is the center.)

This notion of the Universe having a center is probably the result of the popular, though misleading picture of the Big Bang as being an explosion. It wasn't. The Big Bang is an expansion of spacetime. It is best thought of in terms of increasing distances---the distance between galaxies is increasing. In the past, the distances between all galaxies was smaller, in the future it will be larger. The conclusion from thinking about the Big Bang in this way is that it occurred everywhere. The Big Bang occurred here, it occurred in the Andromeda Galaxy, in the Virgo cluster of galaxies, everywhere.

 

[c4ts]

If the Earth is stationary, then Alpha Centuri revolves around it once a day. As it is about four light years away, it must therefore be moving at rather more than eight thousand times the speed of light. I wonder what Einstein would say.

Einstein would say God did it, because all things are possible through God. Here, I have a quote:

"I love God," - Einstein

See?

 

[69dodge]

If the Earth is stationary, then Alpha Centuri revolves around it once a day. As it is about four light years away, it must therefore be moving at rather more than eight thousand times the speed of light. I wonder what Einstein would say.

He would say, things are even more relative in general relativity than they are in special relativity.

 

[CaveDave]

I have heard it said, by people who I think understand relativity better than I do, that in a relativistic sense, all free-falling reference frames are equally valid, so it's just as true to say the Sun goes around the Earth as vice-versa.

Another way to look at it is from a frame stationary relative to the center of mass of the earth-sun system. Then both earth and sun orbit a common center, but not the center of either. (OK, it is inside the sun, but not the center ) Then to make things really interresting, add in all the other bodies in the solar system.

Dave

 

[Jyera]

If the Earth is stationary, then Alpha Centuri revolves around it once a day. As it is about four light years away, it must therefore be moving at rather more than eight thousand times the speed of light. I wonder what Einstein would say.

I think this is a neat scenario to remember.

 

[Earthborn]

1992. It only took 359 years.

That was when an apology was issued to Galileo and it was declared that a great injustice was done to him. The Catholic Church officially admitted that the Earth orbits the sun much earlier...

.. in 1979...

Pope Iohannes Paulus II, the pope who will forever be remembered as the pope who made the Catholic Church ready for the 19th century.

 

[joesixpack]

Wasn't Galileo wrong about the earth CIRCLING the sun? It was Keppler who was able to explain (through elliptical orbits) how the planets orbits seemed to speed up and slow down.

 

[SkepticalScience]

Ah. . . . ma1ic3


"The pope believed that the Earth was THE center, not A center."


That's a great point.