Death to heliocentrism

[Timsup2nothin]

So I met (in the on-line sense) this person who is in an astronomy club. They were tasked with producing "star maps" for their club's monthly telescope outings. Being an apparently anal retentive they took it into their heads to make their own, based on their actual location, rather than just getting them off the internet like a sensible person. Anyway...

They came up with a spherical projection and a couple equations to move it appropriately, then an assortment of equations to move the planets around on it. A pretty intense piece of needless programming effort was my first take, but what fascinated me was that there were people in their club who took offense to their method. Their process is in fact "geocentric." Their entire spherical projection operates around an effectively "fixed" point, which is indeed on earth. Of course, Copernicus "proved" that this is not the actual situation.

Thing is, it works. They are producing viewing aids, and for the purpose of viewing the sky may as well be a spherical projection as anything else. The human eye has no capacity for distinguishing planetary or stellar distances. These complainers want the projections generated using a "correct" heliocentric model, which certainly could be done but adds a substantial order of magnitude to the complexity of the calculations.

I was brought into this under the mistaken idea that I could provide a rational justification, and promptly said "just tell the complainers they are stupid, reality is no more heliocentric than it is geocentric, and if they don't like it they can do it themselves." Anyone have something perhaps not quite so concise, but maybe more socially acceptable?

 

[Birdjaguar]

I like your approach, but would have asked a few questions of the idiots.

1. What is the purpose of the star maps?
2. Who will be using them?
3. Where will they be standing when they use them?

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I kinda think the idiots are aware of those things and are just slavishly devoted to "but Copernicus was right."

 

[Perfection]

Coordinate systems are an artificial construct imposed on the natural world, a wise person chooses the most efficient coordinate system for the task at hand.

 

[El_Machinae]

I like your approach, but would have asked a few questions of the idiots.

1. What is the purpose of the star maps?
2. Who will be using them?
3. Where will they be standing when they use them?

If they don't factor in our Transit around the Sun, the maps will change in accuracy during the course of the year. But it really does matter how much accuracy you need. Either you need that level of accuracy, a higher level, or a lower level. When they were building CERN, they needed to factor in the gravitational pull of the moon into the design. Something that I, personally, don't often worry about.

 

[Kyriakos]

I think there is also a tied issue with the myth that the ancient era had no theory of heliocentrism. While models with gaiocentrism obviously work fine (i mean even anyone who recalls highschool physics, or any math proposition, quickly identifies this as a non issue and what it is about) there is the myth that ancient greek science doesn't feature heliocentrism and everyone waited for Copernicus to come along, much like they all waited for Galileo. This seems to be about catholicism at the time, not scientific views and some progression.
Fwiw, in ancient greek philosophy no one claims the earth has to be the center of the cosmos at all. In fact most treat the natural world as pretty peripheral (pun intended ^^)

 

[Lexicus]

Tfw no preferred frame of reference
Heliocentrism is dead, and we have killed him

 

[Kyriakos]

Tfw

 

[hobbsyoyo]

The guy who wrote the program was either doing it for fun or was trying to show off. He sounds like a guy I went to school with. Is he super ultra catholic by chance?

His friends are dumb for picking on him for it.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

The guy who wrote the program was either doing it for fun or was trying to show off. He sounds like a guy I went to school with. Is he super ultra catholic by chance?

His friends are dumb for picking on him for it.

I don't even know it's a guy...screen name is androgynous.

@El_Machinae they used equations with direction and declination as functions of time for each tracked planet. It completely bypasses actual motion and just tracks the point of apparent visibility on the projected sphere. A system that produces only apparent location, but is accurate from the designated point of origin no matter how the earth "moves" relative to other tracked objects. It would be useless for tracking actual motion, because the equations for distance from the (terrestrial) point of origin get really complex. (or they don't...now that I think about it...that wouldn't be that hard to do, really...not something I'd do for fun though)

 

[Kyriakos]

 

[red_elk]

I did the similar program in the university as an exercise. There were not as many freely available alternatives back then, but even at that time there was no much practical sense in using it.
Actually, I even tried to predict coordinates of the planets, but it turned out it's more complicated than I realized and I just didn't have all required data.

These complainers want the projections generated using a "correct" heliocentric model

Tell them a heliocentric model is primitive, the correct approach would at least include motion of solar system around center of the galaxy

 

[uppi]

They came up with a spherical projection and a couple equations to move it appropriately, then an assortment of equations to move the planets around on it. A pretty intense piece of needless programming effort was my first take, but what fascinated me was that there were people in their club who took offense to their method. Their process is in fact "geocentric." Their entire spherical projection operates around an effectively "fixed" point, which is indeed on earth. Of course, Copernicus "proved" that this is not the actual situation.

Is this about stars or planets? For planets, a geocentric model is quite awkward, because you would need an epicycle and all that. That could probably work out with the accuracy that is needed here, but I would think the equations would be much simpler if you used a heliocentric model.

For stars, the matter is entirely different. If you neglect the motion of the earth relative to the sun, you make an error of at most 0.8 arc seconds (for the nearest star). That is probably far below the resolution of these maps, anyway. For comparison, the light deflection of the sun because of General Relativity is up to 1.8 arc seconds. So for a star map without planets, you would need to include General Relativity effects before you should start thinking about earth's orbit around the sun. The irony is that General Relativity explicitly rejects heliocentrism and any other kind of centrism by assuming that no point in the universe can be special.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Is this about stars or planets? For planets, a geocentric model is quite awkward, because you would need an epicycle and all that. That could probably work out with the accuracy that is needed here, but I would think the equations would be much simpler if you used a heliocentric model.

You need to use the planet's orbit to find relative position to the sun, then Earth's orbit to find relative position of the sun to the Earth, triangulate to find relative position of the planet to the Earth, then apply Earth rotation to come up with apparent position. Certainly a method, but it doesn't strike me obvious that it would be much simpler, if it were simpler at all. I certainly never took it into my head to work it through both ways and compare though. As I said, I'd have just downloaded something off the internet and been done with it. I have enough wheels, I don't put much effort into reinventing them.

For stars, the matter is entirely different. If you neglect the motion of the earth relative to the sun, you make an error of at most 0.8 arc seconds (for the nearest star). That is probably far below the resolution of these maps, anyway. For comparison, the light deflection of the sun because of General Relativity is up to 1.8 arc seconds. So for a star map without planets, you would need to include General Relativity effects before you should start thinking about earth's orbit around the sun. The irony is that General Relativity explicitly rejects heliocentrism and any other kind of centrism by assuming that no point in the universe can be special.

That irony is how it got my attention. The complainers seem to be taking offense to use of a nominally "geocentric" system based on some righteous devotion to Copernicus, as if he was the pinnacle of cosmology rather than a long since passed over rung on the ladder. It's the typical "I am on the second rung spending all my time kicking down rather than climbing up" mentality.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Anyone have something perhaps not quite so concise, but maybe more socially acceptable?

What made Copernicus better is that his model more simply accounted for planetary motion.

By that standard, this program is better in that it more simply generates a star map

Say, wouldn't the universe now be Big-Bang-o-centric? Is there a word for that that scientists actually use? And how precisely can we locate the spot where the Big Bang occurred?

 

[Naskra]

What made Copernicus better is that his model more simply accounted for planetary motion.

Can't agree. By total circle count, Ptolemy wins, 54-57. Or something around that, it's been a while and I'm not going to repeat the exercise.

 

[red_elk]

Say, wouldn't the universe now be Big-Bang-o-centric? Is there a word for that that scientists actually use? And how precisely can we locate the spot where the Big Bang occurred?

Nope, not precisely. Big Bang wasn't like explosion somewhere in space, it was an event where the space was born. There is no specific point in the universe where it occurred.

Edit:
Imagine our universe like the surface of inflating balloon. All points on it are moving away from each other, but you can't say any one of them is the center, where inflation started.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

What made Copernicus better is that his model more simply accounted for planetary motion.

By that standard, this program is better in that it more simply generates a star map

Say, wouldn't the universe now be Big-Bang-o-centric? Is there a word for that that scientists actually use? And how precisely can we locate the spot where the Big Bang occurred?

As has already been stated, there is no "center" once you start using relativistic physics. Wherever you are is as good an observation point as any.

On Copernicus, the thing that makes him "better" to a lot of loyal heliocentrists is that he challenged the church view that the Earth was God's special place at the center of everything, so he is a patron saint in the non-god pantheon. That's another big slice of irony in this situation, as they cling to their dogma based reverence for a challenger of dogma.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Ok, then I'd try this: Hey, Earth is the planet that spit up a Copernicus; what better tribute to him than to pick his home planet as our center?

Imagine our universe like the surface of inflating balloon. All points on it are moving away from each other, but you can't say any one of them is the center, where inflation started.

When I imagine it that way (and that is in fact how I do imagine it), the center of the balloon feels like what I'd call the center.

 

[red_elk]

When I imagine it that way (and that is in fact how I do imagine it), the center of the balloon feels like what I'd call the center.

Not sure I can properly explain it in English.
Balloon's surface is a 2-dimensional analogy of our 3-dimensional curved space. The problem with the center of the balloon is that it's not a point on the surface. So in our case this center, even if it exists in mathematical sense, would be some abstract point outside of our Universe's space.