Contending with structural astrologers

Brian Tung wrote -

However, strictly speaking, your niece is correct: You *can* arrange
things so that the Earth is at the center of the universe. You can even
arrange things so that you, personally, are at the center of the
universe, even when you are spinning around. In order to so arrange it,
though, you must set the Einsteinian tensor fields to something wholly
ungainly. The universe is much simpler when you or the Earth are not at
its center.


Maybe people can now understand why the majority of people on the game
show (52 %) believe that the Sun orbits the Earth -

http://www.maniacworld.com/pitiful-a...game-show.html

What it takes to smash the reasoning of Brian here and his colleagues
I do not know,it cannot be good for humanity let alone astronomy.

Brian finds the niece correct in some way and that should be
frightening for reasonable people insofar as when Copernicus reasones
how the Earth has an axial rotation and an orbital motion it should
have ended any trace of geocentricity.No doubt Brian revels in the
ability to say something perverse without objection but that may the
only thing he has going for him,the ability to turn logic on its head .

On Jul 12, 12:17 pm, oriel36 wrote:

Brian finds the niece correct in some way and that should be
frightening for reasonable people

But he admits that Occam's razor makes the niece less correct than
wrong, so he is not wholly unreasonable. I'll have to admit I didn't
think that even General Relativity was that relative myself; while at
a point, gravity and acceleration are equivalent, some structures of
space-time must be produced by acceleration, and some by gravitation.

Thus, the Principle of Equivalence doesn't make it impossible to
distinguish between gravity and acceleration. Of course, even in
Newtonian physics, one could imagine a universe in which the Earth
does not need to revolve around the Sun, because some mysterious force
keeps the Earth from falling into the Sun - and the distant stars from
flying away - but that in no way makes Tycho Brahe "correct in some
way". Einstein did not open up this door to chaos for astronomy.

John Savard