Ptolemy Lives!

seeing is separate from internalizing. intuitively a moving earth doesn’t make sense. moderns have been educated away from this view, but if you don’t have the scripts nailed into your cognitive template because you’re dull to begin with and zone out when being instructed it is not surprising that you simply pick the more ‘natural’ model.

You think you’re SOOOO smart. Some of us get along just fine without knowing all your mumbo jumbo about “diaphrams of the solar system” and “heliumtropics” and “Keebler” and “epileptic orbits”, thank you very much!

(and you got your math wrong! It’s not “a fifth” of Americans they’re talking about - it’s 20%! )

one questions though - who’s Ptolemy?

and about that being the strangest thing you’ve seen in a long time, knowing some of your thoughts on this man, I thought this might be a close 2nd.

Well, if we are going to be technical, this isn’t really knowledge, but opinion or belief for most people. After all, how many could reproduce the proofs that would be necessary for the judgment that x goes around y? I’d like to know what the 0.1% refused to answer the question. As an indicator of the failure of schools to indoctrinate (as opposed to teaching students how to reason), I don’t see the results as being that negative. However, it is still the case that it will be difficult to persuade those who are obstinate in their opinions that what they have is belief and not knowledge.

oops–should be “I’d like to know why the 0.1% refused to answer the question.”

but it seems to me that in the age of space exploration it is difficult to believe that people do not understand or internalise certain truths about physical reality.

what about space exploration would falsify geocentrism? yeah, yeah, i know that if you look at images it is pretty obvious what the system is, but most people don’t look at these as contingent interlocking sets facts. they get sense impression which they filter through what they’re taught. i know many people (college educated) who would have no idea how to explain to you why the moon goes through phases because they’ve never considered it, even though the facts of the universe as they are make it pretty obvious why if you think about it for a few minutes geometrically.

Thinking of the earth as a sphere is probably somewhat counterintuitive as well (though it isn’t that counterintuitive once you’ve seen an eclipse or looked from the top of a mountain), but I have a hard time believing that there are very many, save self-consciously eccentric troublemakers, who would honestly and seriously claim that the earth is not spherical

well, it wasn’t obvious to many of the ancients even though they went atop mountains or saw the sail crest the horizon from the shore. yes, by the time greeks showed up it was pretty obvious for a variety of reasons, but in any case i think you’d get a minority of “flat earthers” out there too, though fewer.

the point is that high intelligent people can have a hard time comprehending how little the extreme left half of the bell curve really thinks about these things.

This kind of survey result of course strengthens one’s confidence in the ability of the democratic process to lead us to good public policy decisions about science–global warming, stem-cell research, drug regulation, Mars adventures.

Fer shurr.

You won’t get the proof of heliocentrism from going into space. One can make the equations work for a geocentric model fairly easily. If you are working equations for an earth satelite, I can gaurentee that you will use a geocentric model unless you’re an eccentric who likes to make his equations difficult. Basic geometry (okay, semi-advanced geometry) tells you that a relative coordinate plane can be made equal to another relative coordinate plane, even a moving relative coordinate plane.

For more than you would ever care to know about the topic, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_geocentrism

I should note that modern astronomy has a consensus that the sun in the heliocentric model actually has a small orbit of its own. http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=461

A physicist on Yglesias’s thread pointed out that there is a perfectly respectable reference frame in which the Earth is stationary and the Sun revolves around it. Granted, it’s not an inertial reference frame, so you have to incorporate various pseudo-forces, but I’m pleased to see that the 20% of Americans familiar with General Relativity aren’t fazed by that.

I was always taught to remember that the sun and earth revolve around each other, with the sun moving only slightly due to its mass while the earth moves (comparatively) greatly. Maybe that’s why the .1 refused to answer; they must have had the same science teacher as me!

Oh, I just noticed that M.Z. Forrest made the same point. Great minds…

The mathematics of epicycles may be fairly trivial compared string theory (don’t ask me; I majored in anthropology).

It seems to me, though, that having faith in the latest manoeuvres of theoretical physics is as great a leap as believing in the life-giving Trinity. The former is, let’s say, not intuitively obvious to the average barfly.

Rosie O’Donnell and Mike Huckabee, take this one away.

Sherlock Holmes on the Copernican Theory:

But the Solar System!” I protested.

“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently: “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

From “A Study in Scarlet”, 1887.