With all the disagreement about how to proceed on global climate change, you begin to forget that not that long ago energy companies were paying scientists to go out in public and speak against the science of climate change. We have gone from an era where scientists themselves were issue advocates into an era where more people seem to be pursuing more options to control greenhouse gases. To me, that signifies that values are beginning to align (witness McCain’s speech about taking on the challenge of climate change) and perhaps a way forward can be charted through the political landscape.An issue like global climate change seems tiny, however, compared to whether or not the Earth goes around the sun, or vice versa. During one of my weekend chats with my dad, he told me he’d received in the mail a pamphlet offering a free book claiming to shed light on the “myth” of a sun-centered universe while providing evidence that the universe is truly geocentric – that is, Earth-centered. Something like that makes a 1-degree Celcius mean global temperature rise seem like a walk in a warm room. Now, as a scientist I could sit here and poke fun. That’s easy, and a lot of scientists do this. I choose to look at this pamphlet as an opportunity, on an issue as non-controversial as position of the Earth in the universe, to see in action the typical strategies mounted against a scientific principle.
Let’s step back for a moment and review the history of this issue. In the western world, the notion that the Earth was at the center of the universe is an old one. It’s a pretty natural choice, I suppose, when you have little to go on and need to guess how to navigate the cosmos from your narrow vantage point on Earth. The idea even appears in the Bible, for hundreds of years considered the un-erring truth of the universe on every level, even in the most minor details of the text. For instance, in the book of Joshua we are told that “Then Joshua spoke to the Lord in the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel: Sun, stand still over Gibeon; and Moon, in the Valley of Aijalon. So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the people had revenge upon their enemies” (Joshua 10:12-14). Passages like this were frequently cited as evidence that the sun, which can be stopped, must therefore move around the Earth, which must be fixed.
It was Ptolemy, in the first and second centuries A.D., who developed an Earth-centered astronomy which he claimed could be used to predict the motions of planets. In fact, his system was used extensively to make many astronomical predictions. This view of the Earth is often referred to being Ptolemaic, as well as geocentric. There were others who published scientific models of the universe that put the Earth at the center, though in the west Ptolemy is the well-known popularizer of this idea. It was Copernicus who took a different view of the cosmos. Specifically, the Ptolemaic model with the Earth at the center and the stars and planets moving around it on fixed spheres failed to make accurate predictions for all heavenly bodies. Many astronomers had to correct for these aberrations. Copernicus realized, among other things, that the hypothesis that the Earth was not fixed solved these aberrations simply. Allowing the Earth to be in motion around the sun made the predictions of stellar and planetary motion much easier, and vastly more accurate.
It was years later that Copernicus’ idea started to be argued against in religious establishment. The standard argument was that it violated the literal letter of the Bible. Decades after the publication of the work the Church took action against it, during the struggle of Galileo with the Church. While Copernicus had used the motion of heavenly bodies to argue for a sun-centered cosmos, Galileo discovered many pieces of evidence that suggested that the Earth was truly not unique in its place in the cosmos. He spied moons around Jupiter, and speculated that if Jupiter had moons that orbited them then certainly the Earth and its moon could not be unique in the universe. He saw blemishes on the surface of the sun, sunspots, which flew in the face of Church arguments about the perfection of the sun. He even tried to use the Mediterranean tides to show that the Earth was moving; this, it turns out, was in reality a scientific dead-end — Galileo did not, and could not, know about Newton’s work on gravity and the moon, because Galileo died the year Newton was born.
In his famous and prideful fight with the Catholic Church over his scientific observations and, more to the point, his conclusions from those observations, Galileo became the archetype for the scientist struggling against the beliefs of people unwilling to adapt their view of the cosmos to truths in the cosmos. It was only at the end of the last century that the Church apologized for the Galileo affair and noted “misunderstandings” in the handling of the case. Since Galileo, however, the science community has firmly held to the heliocentric view. Not of the universe, but simply of the solar system. The universe as a whole is much more complex. We orbit the sun, and the force of gravity keeps us there while also causing us to be tugged and jiggled by all the other planets in our solar system. Our sun is just one of billions of stars in our galaxy, orbiting a supermassive black hole lying silent at its center. Our galaxy is part of a group of galaxies called The Local Group, part of a much larger structure called the Virgo Supercluster. Our supercluster is just one of many in the universe, a breadcrumb trail of cosmic structure that stretches from here to the edge of the universe.
And if the universe has an edge, then certainly it must have a center? That’s a tough one. The theory of the big bang, which has stood up to many tests of its predictions in the last 50 years, tells us that the fabric of the cosmos, the spacetime in which we are all embedded, stretches out more and more as the universe expands. However, there is no center to the expansion, because if you sit at any point on the fabric and look outward, all other points appear to be moving away from you. Every point is the center of the expansion, and so no point is really the absolute center.
All of this is to come back to the point that the Earth is not fixed, but moves in relation to its neighbors and, in fact, in response to their gravitational caress. This notion is not merely a mathematical convenience, but is necessary to explain the apparent “aberrant” motion of heavenly bodies in a view where the Earth is fixed. The observation that the moons of Jupiter orbit Jupiter, and not the Earth, rob us of our privileged place. In fact, by the geocentric view of nature, every newly discovered moon has chipped away a little at the prestige of our position in the universe; every time we see a planet going around another star, our ego dies a little. To view the heliocentrism of the Earth in our solar system as offensive to our privileged place in on this planet seems to miss most of the true majesty of the universe.
So what did this pamphlet say? Well, when dad told me about this I was at first hoping that it would offer up some pretty sound evidence for the view that the earth is the center of the universe. I like a challenge! Here’s what I got:
- Scientists have conspired for 400 years to hide the truth of the geocentric universe
- It offers two models of heliocentrism: Lense and Thirring and Barbour and Bertotti. More about them in a minute.
- The mobility of the earth is the only place where the Bible and science come into conflict; this would suggest that if science just accepted the geocentric view, religion and science would stop quibbling.
- Scientists ignore evidence of geocentricity gathered in the 1870s and 1880s
- Many phenomena, such as satellites, are better explained by geocentricity
It’s hard to mount arguments against some of these, simply because it’s clear that a number of key principles of observation and language have been missed or intentionally misused. For instance, regarding satellites it’s perfectly clear that the Earth is at the center of the moon’s motion. That’s a local phenomenon and defines what it means to be in orbit. So that last item is a tautology, linguistically speaking. Geocentricity is the best explanation of satellite motion because a satellite, by definition, orbits something and is thus centered on it. However, one cannot calculate the orbit of the moon without also taking into account the pull of the sun. Your prediction for its motion, which can be quite critical to the strength of the tides, would be off without realizing that the sun pulls on the moon just like we do; we have only the benefit of distance from the sun and proximity to the moon.
The pamphlet makes the old argument about the Bible and geocentricity, so there’s no point in going there. That argument is based on literalism, and literalism without regard to natural observation is “abortion politics”; the two sides are not in value alignment, and just wind up arguing past one another to achieve their exclusive ends. As for conspiracies of scientists, I don’t know too many scientists who can keep there mouths shut when they know something that other scientists either don’t, or believe to be wrong. Scientists would be crawling over each other to publish first if they thought they’d discovered the Earth is standing still in an absolute reference frame. That observation alone would wipe away relativity, something that would be exciting to the physics community since it would signal the need for a new underlying principle of nature.
Where are we left? Well, setting aside all the questionable philosophical arguments in the pamphlet, which have nothing to do with data or observation, we are left with two pairs of names: Lense and Thirring, and Barbour and Bertotti. Who are these people?
When I was talking to my dad, I said I thought I remembered the Lense-Thirring effect as also being called “frame dragging”. I was right [1]. Frame dragging is a prediction of general relativity that says that rotating bodies drag spacetime around with them as they rotate. This distortion is INCREDIBLY small – about 1 part in a few trillion. You have to measure it with a massive object or sensitive instruments. Gravity Probe B, launched within the last few years and reporting first results on their attempt to measure this effect at APS 2007 [2]. Their data analysis is still ongoing (it’s obviously a very difficult experiment). However, stepping back for a moment I couldn’t figure out what any of this had to do with a geocentric universe. Technically, any body with mass will frame-drag. We measure the Earth’s frame-dragging because it’s convenient, not unique.
I did more digging around. Searching Google for “Lense and Thirring geocentric” turns up links to the pamphlet authors’ websites (of course), and a few papers on the arXiv which refer to “the geocentric frame” and treatments in general relativity. I think I understand the pamphlet’s problem. In their original paper, Lense and Thirring would have computed the effects of general relativity in “the geocentric frame” — that is, the reference frame in which the earth is stationary. That simplifies calculations of relativistic effects, but the trick in relativity is that you can always compute what another frame is seeing by choosing an easy frame for the math, then moving the results into the other frame using the fact that the speed of light is constant in all frames of reference. I think that this concept – that of reference frames which are all equally valid since none can be said to be absolutely at rest – was confused as scientific argument for a geocentric universe. In fact, this trick argues quite the opposite: choose any frame you want to make a calculation, since no frame is special.
Truth of the matter is that some math is just easier when you’re standing still. Doesn’t mean the world revolves around you.
What of Barbour and Bertotti? These were names unfamiliar to me. It turns out that these two scientists did work in relativity in the 1980s trying to explain why a person in a rotating frame experiences forces like the centrifugal and centripetal force, but if you instead fix the person and rotate the world around them they do not experience these forces. Barbour is also said to hold the “controversial” view that time is not something we should treat as necessary in physical theories, that our only evidence for time is our memory of it. That was about the most coherent description of either of these two that I could find, leading me to conclude that their work was interesting, perhaps unfinished or untested, but not clearly arguing the scientific case for a geocentric universe.
So we’ve arrived at my point (hope you learned a few things along the way). The pamphlet embodies a classic strategy to convince the mind of an uncertain person why they should believe a certain thing. It makes the argument that there is no sound science telling us the Earth is moving, and what’s worse that scientists have been lying to everybody and keeping that lie alive in a vast conspiracy. Even if you don’t buy that, they then appeal to reason by dropping names of scientists whose work allegedly supports their view (four of them, practicing physicists). And if that doesn’t sell you, they spend a whole panel of the pamphlet arguing that it’s what the Bible says anyway, and if it’s not true then humans have no self-worth. Doubt . . . logic . . . fear. It’s a popular strategy, it seems, to try to get the public behind a counter-scientific notion.
In the scheme of things, this pamphlet and its argument is pretty minor. If America decides to abandon the heliocentric view of the solar system (after all, it wasn’t that long ago that 50% of Americans in a survey reported “false” when asked, “True or false: the earth goes around the sun, and this takes one year. [3]”), the consequences for navigation, tides and coastal industries will be more than the public can bear. We didn’t spend 400 years setting aside geocentrism because we felt like it, but because it served society and fit the data.
It’s the strategy of the pamphlet that is interesting, because it is used everywhere. In arguments for teaching alternatives to the theory of evolution, we find the strategy of stating the incompleteness of the science, the alternative views of a minority of scientists, and appeals to God and family values. These are used to create a wedge in the classroom and the nation. This wedge strategy was proceeding in test cases in Kansas and Pennsylvania until the court case in Dover, PA in 2006. A similar strategy was employed for decades when it came to climate change, and before that by the tobacco industry (the originator of this strategy in a broad political context). This pamphlet is a microcosm for much larger issues.
It all comes back to education. A person versed in the tools of learning can approach this pamplet with a critical mind. He can ask for more information (without necessarily ordering the free book) and seek other sources of content to understand the issue. Ultimately, people can arrive at different conclusions, and that’s fine – that’s one outcome of an open and inquisitive society. But I don’t appreciate being told I am a liar and a conspirator, I don’t appreciate my own field being misappropriated to argue a false premise, and most of all I don’t appreciate the view that without geocentrism, humans have no intrinsic worth.
From the moment of your birth, in those first struggles to get air and beat back the harsh light of day in the longing for the dark comfort of the womb, your value becomes apparent. How unlikely it was that you should have been created, Beginning with the long struggle of two people to find love in this world, continuing in the long and improbable journey of the sperm and the egg, and nearly ending in the fact that a miscarriage is half as likely as actually making it to the first month of pregnancy. How unlikely you are, when you enter this world, and in that improbability your worth is immeasurable.
Do you really need to Earth to be standing still, too?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_dragging
[2] http://steve.cooleysekula.net/blog/?p=448 and http://einstein.stanford.edu/
[3] http://steve.cooleysekula.net/blog/?p=696
