Featured Adam's Telescope

I agree with almost everything that has been expressed so far. Adam didn't need a telescope, because the heavens were designed to be viewed and their meanings discerned with the unaided eye from the face of the earth.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't take a closer look at them. I think we're invited to look as closely as we can, but not to find new and different meanings, as was the case with the Tower of Babel, and has been the case with cosmology for the last four or five hundred years, but to be awed by the power and the glory of the One who put us here.

All in this thread seem agreed that the heavens are about meaning. (I'm going to buy the book that TC recommended.) There is no calendar, technology nor medicine that owes its existence to one model or the other. The high priests of modern physics have come right out and said that both models are equally valid and justifiable by the known laws of physics. No one really knows that it's the earth that goes around the sun. We only believe it.

If there is no structure, there is no meaning. You can discern a meaning in this post because of the arrangement of letters into words, and words into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs. And so also by the structure in the heavens, we are to discern certain meanings.

Would a geocentric model have a different meaning than a heliocentric one?

That's a real question.

Why, though both Einstein and Hawking assert there is no truth to one over the other, do they seem to prefer the notion that the earth is in orbit around the sun, and not the other way around?

 

Actually, the history of cosmology goes like this: geocentricity, heliocentricity, and then relativity, which can equally justify both prior systems. I'm not saying this. The author of the theory says it.

Einstein came up with his theories of relativity in large part due to the failure of physicists to prove the motion of the earth.

This was the first path which led me to the special theory of relativity. Since then I have come to believe that the motion of the Earth cannot be detected by any optical experiment*, though the Earth is revolving around the Sun. Einstein, How I Created the Theory of Relativity.
http://inpac.ucsd.edu/students/courses/winter2012/physics2d/einsteinonrelativity.pdf

*[Meaning that the parallax phenomenon can be explained with an earth in motion or at rest]

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But I did show proof that Einstein and Hawking did say such things. I quoted them and cited the sources above.

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I'll do it again.

Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld wrote in The Evolution of Physics (1938): "Can we formulate physical laws so that they are valid for all CS (=coordinate systems), not only those moving uniformly, but also those moving quite arbitrarily, relative to each other? If this can be done, our difficulties will be over. We shall then be able to apply the laws of nature to any CS. The struggle, so violent in the early days of science, between the views of Ptolemy and Copernicus would then be quite meaningless. Either CS could be used with equal justification. The two sentences, “the sun is at rest and the earth moves", or "the sun moves and the earth is at rest", would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different CS. Could we build a real relativistic physics valid in all CS; a physics in which there would be no place for absolute, but only for relative, motion? This is indeed possible!"[45]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentric_model#Ptolemaic_model

[Here's the primary source. Read it for yourself.] https://books.google.com/books?id=r...cience Ptolemy Copernicus meaningless&f=false


So which is real, the Ptolemaic or Copernican system? Although it is not uncommon for people to say that Copernicus proved Ptolemy wrong, that is not true . . . for our observations of the heavens can be explained by assuming either the earth or the sun to be at rest. Despite its role in philosophical debates over the nature of our universe, the real advantage of the Copernican system is simply that the equations of motion are much simpler [than the Ptolemy's epicycles*] in the frame of reference in which the sun is at rest. Hawking,
pdf document: The Grand Design.pdf
[*Copernicus' system also had to employ epicycles, so it wasn't much simpler, and was no more accurate in predicting the movements in the heavens.]
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Hawking was talking about the nature of reality. There is no such thing in cosmology as a model-independent reality. Though one may explain a geocentric coordinate system, there is nothing by which one can say scientifically that it's really otherwise.

It makes no sense, accordingly, to speak of a difference in truth between Copernicus and Ptolemy: both conceptions are equally permissable descriptions. Hans Reichenbach, From Copernicus to Einstein.
https://books.google.com/books?id=A...k difference truth copernicus ptolemy&f=false
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That is what the modern physicists are saying. Whether you agree with them or not is another issue. But you cannot say they aren't saying that a geocentric model has justification equal to that of a heliocentric model, because they are saying just that.

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Is there a point that is, in reality, fixed? Relativity says no.

 

It is also the conclusions of these scientists [ http://www.icr.org/article/geocentricity-creation/ ], so I won't argue this point any further here. It's not the point of the thread. The point of the thread is Adam's vantage point of the heavens, and whether or not that has any meaning.

 

Ergo, the motion of the earth is assumed, not known. According to Relativity, that is.

 

to me, that would seem to imply that there is more truth to the heliocentric model than the geocentric model, and those who work with the theory of general relativity say there is no more reality to one or the other.

 

You're picturing the big bang like a sphere, like the universe has a center from which it is expanding. Modern cosmology says that isn't so.