Geocentrists Convene To Discuss How Galileo Was Wrong 1027
rollcall writes "'Galileo Was Wrong' is an inaugural conference to discuss the 'detailed and comprehensive treatment of the scientific evidence supporting Geocentrism, the academic belief that the Earth is immobile in the center of the universe.' The geocentrists argue that 'Scientific evidence available to us within the last 100 years that was not available during Galileo's confrontation shows that the [Catholic] Church's position on the immobility of the Earth is not only scientifically supportable, but it is the most stable model of the universe and the one which best answers all the evidence we see in the cosmos.' I, like many of you, am scratching my head wondering how people still think this way. Unfortunately, there is still a significant minority of Western people who believe that the Earth is the center of the universe: 18% of Americans, 16% of Germans, and 19% of Britons."
I hope there is live blogging from the conference.
Spurious survey results? (Score:1, Interesting)
I wouldn't take those numbers seriously. If someone asked me if I thought the Earth was the centre of the universe in their survey, I'd say 'yes' just because the question itself is ridiculous.
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:1, Interesting)
Evil Planetarium guys will sell you a computer program called Earth Centered Universe and it works on all forms of Windows!
Re:Haha you got me (Score:1, Interesting)
Well ... instead of proving them wrong - people are forbidden by law in Europe, and by peer pressure in USA to question the holocaust ... :)
it's not very "scientific" thing to forbid questioning the matter
And it's very very hard to bend the reality that much to even thinking of compare the Holocoust existence with position of the Earth in universe. And it's totally offtopic.
I am gessing you are a jew
Re:Evidence (Score:4, Interesting)
Ah, but they do cluster, and vote, and then take over boards of education.
Actually, it just takes one of the nutters in your kid's district to bring education to a stand-still. Our local school official policy, luckily, is that you can contest a book, but the teacher can go on using it until the process has completed. And they've got librarians in at every step of the way. Don't mess with librarians.
Re:Spurious survey results? (Score:1, Interesting)
30% of Democrats think "the Jews" are behind the financial crisis.
40% of Republicans think Obama is sympathetic to radical Islam and its goal of Sharia law.
Never underestimate the capacity of large groups of people to believe something that is completely fucking insane when it reinforces their world view.
"Think"? Or "Believe"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Do they ask, "do you think the sun revolves around the earth or vice versa?" -- implying a quick, pragmatic exposition of the subjects understanding of the matter.
Or, do they ask, "do you believe that the sun revolves around the earth?" -- implying that the subject has considered both choices and has come to some conclusion for himself?
I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing if someone has a day-to-day mental model that states that the sun "comes up in the morning" and "goes down at night". I do think it's a problem if ~1/5 of all Americans have spent some amount of time reasoning about both models and have some belief that geocentrism is fact.
Nearly every early elementary school classroom I've been in has some form of the typical solar system diagram (with the sun at the center), I'd be really surprised if ~1/5 of all students coming out of that experience would veto that model and "believe" that the Earth is at the center of the universe. I hope I'm not wrong...
Re:In "believe anything written down" land (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:1, Interesting)
Incorrect. These folks show a distinct lack of ability to reason clearly. Hell, maybe the auto mechanic returns your car with a bunch of crucifixes bolted on to the exterior and tells you it should run fine now that it has been exorcised of its demons.
Re:Spurious survey results? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:5, Interesting)
--- A. C. Doyle, A Study in Scarlet
Re:BS (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you ever gone door to door in a rural environment and met people? Seriously, you select your friends, your friends select you, your family members were raised by the same people, there's a lot of bias going on.
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:4, Interesting)
Fair enough, but then I don't see why atheism (as practiced in OT discussions on countless bulletin boards, if you prefer) shouldn't qualify as a "religion" as well.
Re:Doesn't the Bible say so? (Score:3, Interesting)
Parent is not a troll. The essence of General Relativity is that a non-inertial (accelerating) frame of reference is identical to an inertial frame of reference within a gravitational field—curved paths in Euclidean space become straight paths in gravity-warped space. Using the principles of General Relativity, "a stationary Earth as a frame of reference works just as well in Einsteinian physics as a non-stationary Earth."
Re:Doesn't the Bible say so? (Score:3, Interesting)
Nor have you, apparently.
The equivalence principle is a wee bit different for accelerated motion.
Married with Children (Score:3, Interesting)
I was always reminded of this ridiculous stand by Sherlock when I watched the Married with Children episode where Kelly shows to be doing this exact thing: she was able to hold a number of things in her head perfectly in a FIFO queue but only that number of things and if she learned anything new at all, she would lose the last thing from the queue. So with this ability she was in a contest and would have won if the last useless thing that was thrown at her didn't push out the fact she had in her head that it was her father, who won 4 touchdowns in a single football game at school, the look on Al's face was priceless both, when he heard the question and was sure she'd be able to answer and then, when she lost.
So the question is of-course this: was Sherlock a gorgeous blond girl from Chicago?
Diversification (Score:3, Interesting)
Their stupidity could be important for the survival of the species. It looks a lot like civilization could fail in the next 50 years, thanks in part to the things science brought us (oil, pollution, habitat destruction, etc), and if so, we'll need yahoos like these to say "see?! science failed us!!" to rally the remaining survivors behind a religion that's all about suffering and having tons of kids in order to repopulate the species. Catholicism was pretty handy as a bootstrap religion.
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:3, Interesting)
Trusts are easily broken when there isn't government interference because companies are always trying to get ahead, and if the existing companies won't someone else will. The only constant is change to progress. When companies realize that they can get better labor by not invading their employee's privacy, they will do that.
If things existed like you said, the scientific revolution would have never happened because there would be no change. But change happens. Corporations have found out and increasingly find out that if they treat their employees better they get better productivity.
Your system fails because right is not on the side of he with the most financial leverage. An employer always has the upper hand over an employee because the employee has only one job and employer has many employees. If an employee quits an employer simply replaces him because they structured things to handle the loss of employees but if the employee quits he may well starve.
No he doesn't. The employee does. A single employee can ruin the entire reputation of a company if he finds abuses within the company. The single employee has much more power to change the corporation than the corporation has on the employee.
If abuses were so bad at a company that the employee had to leave and he told the world via the internet what abuses he suffered, it eventually reaches a point where no one will go to that company for work and the company dies.
Plus, increasing competition means that the employee can easily find other jobs because the system encourages productive, job-giving companies rather than government-sponsored monopolies.
The entire reason we form government in the first place is to more evenly distribute power. We have police because collectively the weak are stronger than the brute and with our police we equalize the brute to make everyone equally strong. The same is true of the financially strong, we must equalize their strength vs that of poor so the poor are not subject to wishes of the rich. Your idea of a weak government fails to protect the poor from the rich. Perhaps because you are rich yourself or hope to be or maybe you are poor and stupid and bought the rich mans line.
The "rich" don't magically have some sort of power because they have wealth. First off, A) How did the rich become rich? In a free society it is because they (or an ancestor) did exceptional work. B) How did the poor become poor? In most cases its laziness. No, I'm not rich but I at least have the balls to tell you why I'm not "rich", because I didn't invest my money, I spent it on (then) fancy technology, delivery pizza, TV, Cable, etc. It wasn't because I was being "oppressed" by the rich, I simply blew the money I had. I didn't exactly study hard in high school or college, I graduated with a degree and student loans which I worked off. Had I been less lazy and saved my money, I would be better off financially. I have no problems saying that. I'm not going to blame it on that I was "oppressed" as a store clerk and I wasn't given a $100,000,000 paycheck every week, breaks every 15 minutes and such. I'm not going to say I was "oppressed" at my job as a systems administrator, complain that I don't get $900 for telling people to make sure their cords are plugged in, etc.
If I didn't want my job, I'd say screw it and move on to another job or start my own company, both of which, barring the government fucking those up, would be very easy to do. But instead the government steals from my paycheck, consistently cheapens my degree and high school diploma, debases our currencies, tramples over civil rights, weakens constitutional power, and destroys basic economic rights.
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:4, Interesting)
Atheism isn't a religion, in the same sense theism isn't a religion.
Correct.
But just as it's obviously impossible to find a theist who does not in fact have a religion, I think it's not possible to find anyone who is "only" an atheist.
Once again - correct. How do you get from that, to calling atheism a religion?
That communists aren't "only" atheists are obvious to all - except communists themselves, a rather important exception.
I'd say it's obvious to communists, also.
There were several problems with soviet-style "atheism":
1. You cannot legislate belief. You can persecute people, the way most religions have done to eachother for thousands of years, and you can get those whom you're persecuting to say that they now believe what you believe, but you can't actually make someone believe something by threatening or harming them.
2. Atheism without religion is meaningless. Every child is born an atheist, but there's a massive difference between the atheism of a newborn, and the atheism of, say, Richard Dawkins. Atheism based on ignorance is no better than religion.
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:5, Interesting)
So you would deny yourself the vote as you think it is in another man's best interest to implement this new law you think is in his best interest?
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd have to agree. Atheism doesn't have to be a religion, but when some people start a new thread on 4-Chan asking for quote wallpapers, ten times in a row, and whichever anonymous poster begins each thread always starts it off with a pro-atheist/anti religious quote, and not a quote about anything else, and they say that the only meaningful quotes about anything are about how bad religion is, that's the actions of religious fanatics. If your point of view has numerous religious fanatics who claim to speak for everyone else, it becomes a religion. If you don't distance yourself from the nutters because they claim to be part of your group, then it becomes your religion.
That said, I'm a Zen Gnostic Episcopalian myself. I want to distance myself right now from the WBC, the people who don't want a mosque within 2,000 miles of ground zero, and really, anyone who thinks God wants you to hate for Him. I can logically prove Jesus is superhuman*, and have a separate proof for Apollo's existence**. The rest, I'm not sure about.
*OK, here goes: Jesus' teachings were perverted to support the crusades, the inquisition, and the witch trials. The earliest of these happened about 1,000 years after Jesus was executed. Darwin's teachings were perverted to support the Eugenics movements and Naziism. The earliest of these took only about 40 years after Darwin's publication of his first book to become life destroying monstrosities. It's 39 years from Einstein's first relevant publication to the A-Bomb, and about 43 to the cold war. Ergo, Jesus was roughly 25 times better than some of the very smartest humans we know at avoiding his work being perverted into something loathsome by stupider humans. That's superhuman, although in a somewhat limited sense.
(OK, if you accept that orthodox Christians destroyed the library at Alexandria and killed its head, we can reduce the ratio to roughly 300 years to 40, so Jesus would only be about 8x an incredibly smart human, not 25. Alternately, is it fair to blame anybody for how other people, years after their death, interpret their sayings or writings?).
** The Delphic Oracle guided Greek civilization for at least 500 years. The job was filled by a series of 12 to 15 year old girls, who got blind frackin' stoned day in and day out breathing the fumes they found in a cave. We're talking stoned Emo chicks of the sort who write bad poetry, and obviously, ones who thought nobody understood them, as they kept a host of translators around just to interpret their cryptic utterances. (In fact, this is where cryptic utterances originated). They also played with snakes by some accounts. Everyone believed these immature, spaced-out bints when they claimed to speak for Apollo, and followed their advice. Instead of this promoting one ultimate level massive clusterfrack, it led to an era generally considered surprisingly peaceful and enlightened, and the foundations of what became modern democratic government, formal logic and science. Ergo, Apollo at least was real at that time, because that's an obvious incredible major miracle on a par with everyone on all sides agreeing with the US plan for peace in the Middle East. (Thanks to Alan Moore for this one) .
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:3, Interesting)
Galileo was wrong. This is not in dispute. To whit: Einstein was right.
Every point of the universe is the center of the universe.
Actually, that's not quite what Einstein's theories said. They said that every point in any inertial frame is equivalent to any other (and could thus be considered a "center of the universe".
In Einsteinian terms, the Earth isn't the center of the universe, because it's not an inertial frame. It's moving in an accelerated frame in its orbit around a much heavier object (the sun). Therefore, it's not a candidate for centerhood. At the time of Galileo, the sun could have been considered an inertial frame, and therefore eligible as a center of the universe. We now know that the sun is also orbiting the galaxy, but in Galileo's time, that orbit couldn't have been measured, even if they'd known what the Milky Way is. So, to within the precision of their instruments and observation powers, the sun would have appeared to be stationary relative to the stars, and would have worked as a center of the universe.
Actually, astronomers have recently measured a slight acceleration of the Milky Way (though I've forgotten its direction). So, if your instruments are good enough, our galaxy isn't quite in an inertial frame, either, and thus is ineligible for "center of the universe" status. But not very many of us have instruments that good, so for everyday purposes we can treat the galaxy as the center of everything.
OTOH, we might note that shipping companies (including airlines) routinely treat the Earth as stationary in space, and for their purposes, this is good enough. Once we establish interplanetary trading, however, it won't be good enough, and shipping operations will have to change to a model in which the solar system is stationary while everything in it is moving in some sort of orbit.
(It turns out that this includes the sun. The barycenter of the solar system is slightly outside the sun, at the common center of mass of the sun and Jupiter. Strictly speaking, the sun is in a close orbit around this barycenter, and can't be treated as stationary relative to the rest of the solar system. Jupiter is slightly too big, and accelerates the Sun measurably. However, Galileo probably couldn't have measured this effect.)
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't the Bible say so? (Score:4, Interesting)
Try looking at General Relativity a bit more closely. Results are the same either way.
You are mistaken. Translation is relative, but rotation is not. Rotation us absolute and measurable.
There is for example the Sagnac effect used in some inertial navigation systems. A laser is placed in a ring with light circling in both directions. The laser will lock on a reinforcing frequency where the light takes an integer number of wavelengths around the ring. After making a loop around the ring there is constructive interference as the standing wave overlaps itself. The light going around in both directions will have the same frequency and wavelength. Now lets give the ring some rotation. The light going around in opposite directions need to cover different distances around the ring to return to the laser which that has advanced during the that time. The wavelength of the light in one direction must increase and the wavelength of the light in the other direction must decrease in order to maintain the integer-number-of-wavelengths constructive interference.
If the ring is not rotating then the light going in the two directions locks at the identical frequency. If the ring is rotating then there will be a difference between the two frequencies, and that difference is exactly proportional to the rate of rotation.
This is not merely theoretical, it is the actual foundation of existing navigation systems.
Rotating reference frames are currently a bit of a mess in General Relativity. There isn't a single well defined way to define simultaneous time across a rotating disk, leaving no single well defined measure of length either. If you Google relativity rotating frames the top result is a $360 book on the multitude of often contradictory models attempting to define rotating reference frames in General Relativity. [amazon.com]
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Re:I am not surprised. (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that for all the good religious institutions have collectively done for science, they have done at least as much bad. It would be reasonable to argue that without religion's involvement, mankind would be more intellectually and scientifically advanced today. And I'm not counting the work of individual scientists who happened to be religious as contributions from religion, as they could have done the same work if they were atheists (and maybe could have done more work if religious institutions weren't causing them trouble - Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin immediately come to mind).
And what about religion's general negative effects on science? "Oh no need to investigate that, god did it!" "Why do you question this, is your faith weak?" "Man shouldn't play god!" are all lines we still hear today, and in the western world theists are a lot less fundamentalist than they were in the past.
For at least the last 200 years religion has only been yanking the brakes on the science train, so for today it would be safe to say that with religious authority out of the picture, intellectual advancement would flourish.
Another poster further down argues that it's just idiots who happen to be religious that stifle science. I agree that many stupid people would be anti-scientific with or without religion, but religion's ability to organize and support people with such viewpoints (and even encourage these views in some cases) can't be ignored. In a world without religion, if all the anti-scientific idiots formed The Organization for the Abolition of Scientific Thought (TOAST), they'd be no more powerful than any other similarly-sized think tank of idiots. But in the real world if the pope says investigation into the origin of the universe is an attack on their religion and their deity's authority, this is much more powerful.
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:5, Interesting)
Erm, if there was no religion, there would be no need to hide some selected intellectual works in monasteries.
If there was no religion the Library of Alexandria would still be standing.
The poor understanding of history is on your side. We know a lot about what kind of works were lost during the dark ages from the references to the documents that don't exist anymore. We know that there were works in which scholars argued that stars are like the sun, but very far away. We know that there were other Homeric books around. We know of the lost works of Eratosthenes, Aristarchus, Aristophanes and many more. You can read the handful of their works that survived - and they are works of genius - and wonder how much brilliance was lost.
The dark ages we are talking about are not to be praised by how works were preserved, but condemned for how many books were lost and destroyed. Go read your Name of the Rose again because that is the true picture of the ages.
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:2, Interesting)
I was kind of with you until you started making blanket statements about atheists. Many atheists I know (including myself) did not just wake up one day saying "geez, religion is blocks". Generally, the path to Atheism is a journey which begins with questioning some of the precepts of the given faith in which one is raised. For some, that's enough to completely shatter faith in any religious views. For others, its a process of questioning, and searching, and eventual trend from believer to questioning to agnosticism to outright atheism.
I'm not qualified to speak for all atheists or agnostics any more than you are, but for myself, I can say that the process of "losing my religion" was drawn out and painful. Think about this for a second: if you believe in a God, you probably believe that there's an afterlife of some sort - you probably believe that the universe makes some sort of sense - that something greater than yourself gives a flying fuck what happens to you. In your deepest, darkest, most troubling time, you've got someone/something to pray to. Now, imagine what it's like for those of us who do not believe... we are ultimately alone and insignificant in an uncaring universe. We only have such a very short time to live, love, and figure out what gives our lives meaning before we take a very long dirt-nap.
Tell me now, do you think for one second that I CHOSE that? Don't you think that I'd LOVE to believe - that I'd love to feel that some god in the sky was looking out for me or that I had some shot at life-after-death? That this isn't all that there is? I have stood at the precipice and have stared into the abyss, an deep down inside, it scares the crap out of me, but I keep looking anyway, and I'm a stronger person for it. YES, I've looked at various (but by no means all) belief systems / religions, and in the end, I just can't bring myself to believe in any of them. I'm pretty sure that many other atheists have similar experiences.
To use an analogy: I have stuck my hand on a hot stove and gotten burned. I have found that other hot things cause similar pain, so I do not now need to stick my hand in every single fire or hot thing to know what it is to be burned or to know the signs that I will be burned if I touch it.
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:3, Interesting)
On a side note, you're mixing up two different parts of the Middle Ages. The first part of it, the High Period, was actually more liberal both in religion, sexual behaviour, and generally more tolerant towards different cultures. The Augustinian movements, like other misogynistic and other radical positions weren't taken so seriously. The Decameron, which was written in Italy during that period, could be considered Pornographic by today standards and yet was freely available for public consumption. Our collective imagination of such period has been actually created during the beginning of the Low Period, which roughly starts some year after the end of Italian Renaissance.
After the economical collapse of the previous liberal Principalities in continental Europe, due to the side effects of Black Death and the inability to cope with the growing economical power of Spain coming the recently discovered American continent, the most extremist religious positions filled such power vacuum : On a side we got the Protestantism, that tried to recover and "stiffen" most of the theological and religious position of that period, and the other side we got the Council of Trent, which was most interested in recovering the political and cultural relevance of the Catholic Church. They basically rewrote parts of history and used for this the most violent and radical groups, like the Inquisition, which till the 16th century was quite limited in his powers. Most of our opinion regarding the Dark Ages originated then. (And, as you can see, we don't need to wait for a war with Eurasia to observe the phenomenons about control and language illustrated by G. Orwell in 1984. In a sense, the Low period of the Middle Ages could be considered the first post-apocalyptic society ever).
Galileo operated right after their rise in power. Most of the church couldn't care less about the factual truth behind Galileo positions, they were just interested in maintaining an absolute, even if formal, power.
TL;DR: there isn't actually any contradiction between the way the Church operated, we're speaking about really different time periods, and in a sense a totally different organization.
Oh, and when the economy collapses and the turmoil becomes apparent, the extremists take the power. Which reminds me of something relevant in today politics.