On Wednesday, September 10, 2014 2:34:13 PM UTC-6, oriel36 wrote:

Do you not believe the stars come out 1461 times as it crosses four orbital
circuits because that is the only observation and value that counts ?.

The stars come out when the Sun sets, so if that's what you mean, that is true.
Some people are reminding you that if we take the Julian calendar approximation
as fact, though, Sirius rises (whether we can see the rising or not, because of
the Sun) 1465 in those four years.

The entire Western civilization,if it can now be called a civilization at
all, cannot follow the dictates of people who truly force themselves to
believe there are more rotations that sunrises/sunsets across a year and
orbit of the Earth.

- What do you think of Western civilization, Mr. Gandhi?
- I think it would be a good idea.

You don't actually think that the distant stars rotate around the Sun once a
year, which would lead to the cosmology of Tycho Brahe.

To us, the cosmology of Tycho Brahe would, however, be the logical consequence
of having the Earth rotate once every 24 hours. Rotate *means* turn once in
absolute space, not turn once relative to the primary one is orbiting.

Even if now due to Albert Einstein we don't really believe in absolute space
any more.

Because the laws of the Earth's rotation are simpler to express relative to the
fixed stars than to the Sun, which the Earth orbits in an elliptical fashion,
and not in the plane of its equator, leading to the complexities of the
Equation of Time. A 24 hour rotation would have the Equation of Time as *part
of that rotation itself*, so such a rotation would be a compound motion, not a
simple motion.

And the Copernican system specifically came about to resolve retrogrades, to
turn the orbits of the planets other than Earth into simple motions instead of
compound ones. As was done with orbits, so must be done with rotations, that
the movements of the planets and their moons might be amenable to comprehension
and calculation.

John Savard