Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber notes with approval that more than 83% of Americans now think that interracial dating is acceptable. Now, some of you might be thinking, “Hey, that means that there’s still 17% of Americans that think interracial dating is not okay.” Well, yes. But everything is relative. Apparently the folks at the General Social Survey, just for kicks, decided to ask Americans to come clean about their feelings toward heliocentrism. As it turns out, about 18% of Americans are in the “Sun moves around the Earth” camp. A full 8% prudently declined to have an opinion, leaving only 74% to go along with Copernicus. (Of which, nearly three-quarters understood that it took a year for this process to unfold.) So, you take what you can get.
I hope our blog didn’t confuse them.
The NSF has stats on public understanding of simple scientific terms and concepts – includes US and international. See esp. figure 7-7.
So I guess 0%=100%-(74%+18%+8%) of Americans responded that the question about heliocentrism was experimentally meaningless? Perhaps the Enlightenment is marching on in other respects, but in this one, the stats literally could not be worse.
The discussion in the linked blog post argues that coriolis forces, etc argue for the fact that ‘the earth goes around the sun’. Don’t these measurable effects really just show that the appearance of the sun’s daily traversal around the earth is due to the earth rotating about its axis? This would still be true if the earth and sun were fixed (rotating reference frame relative to orbit of earth around sun) and the earth just sat there spinning.
To go further, wouldn’t a model of the earth as a ‘precessing top’ with a spin frequency of a day (motion of sun in sky) and a precession frequency of a year (change of season) be nearly adequate?
If you added in a periodic motion along the line connecting the earth and sun between some Rmin and Rmax (ellipsoidal character of earth’s orbit), this model would be very similar to ‘what is actually happening’.
So, what is it that one would measure to distinguish between this ‘sliding precessing top’ and the orbital model?
re #1: Well, at least we’re doing better than China.
Before we get too high and mighty here – I was unable to get past even the first word of the crooked timber link. Toleration? Are you kidding me? Please tell me there was a joke there I didn’t get.
bm, the sun moves against a background of essentially fixed stars. I realize these aren’t actually fixed, but the motion is imperceptible to the naked eye.
Well, I might have answered false to the big bang question…it wasn’t worded “Did our universe begin at the big bang” but rather “[Did] the universe begin with a huge explosion?”
Well, the unverse was pretty small at the first instant (so, then, a point-like ‘explosion’) and it was really more of a changing metric…maybe the average American is just really ridiculously good at GR?
Any large random sample of the population will include that 17% with the lowest intelligence. Most of us don’t often interact with them. So we tend to forget that they exist, as demonstrated by Sean’s post.
[Incidently, the existence of these literal morons is why, despite being a fervent atheist, I’m not on board with Dawkins and the like in their nifty let’s-destroy-belief-in-Christianity-and-see-what-happens program.]
Sean,
Our basic understanding of cosmic evolution is a coherent (many lines of evidence point to it), relatively simple (6 parameters as opposed to the dozens in some cosmologies), and elegant description of the Universe that has been arrived at through painstakingly careful analyses AFTER the rejection of numerous other theories. It is probably “correct” in the sense that a thousand years from now scientists will still be using a refined version of it to write a biography of our Universe just as today we use a refined version of Eratosthenes determination of the size and shape of the Earth when we study the planet. Is it really surprising or disappointing (I think it is exhilarating) that after thousands of years of effort we finally seem to be settling on a basic picture of cosmic evolution?
So, my guess is that since so many different types of astronomical observations using different instruments, relying on different physics, and conducted by different groups of cosmologists tend to support the LCDM model, the CMB anomalies will probably amount, at most, to a refinement rather than broad refutation of our basic picture. We shall see.
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bm, stellar parallax can’t be explained in your model. Also the redshift and blueshift in the spectra of distant objects (on a 1 year period).
the CMB anomalies will probably amount, at most, to a refinement rather than broad refutation of our basic picture. We shall see.
Yeah, and in the mean time, (maybe give it 20 or 30 more years worth of attempts to “explain it away”), let’s by all means ignore the MOST APPARENT implication of the evidence for a strong anthropic constraint on the forces, which we already have precedence for.
Wait a minute, that’s not, “a broad refutation”… it’s supporting evidence!
We’re only talking equal time for investigation into the possibility that the guy that’s standing over the dead body while holding a smoking gun actually did it!… rather than to *automatically* assume that this must mean that he couldn’a done it.
And don’t everybody quote Krauss at once…
That’s crazy!
To amplify on Ian Paul Freeley’s response to bm, the lack of easily measurable stellar parallax was long considered to be a strong argument against the heliocentric theory. And the search for stellar parallaxes became a major scientific question once Copernicus’ solar system model became popular. But, by the time the first parallax was measured in 1838, the success of Newton’s laws had basically settled the question of the arrangement of the solar system. In fact, strong, direct observational evidence had arrived a century before this when the annual aberration of starlight was discovered. This is the apparent change in the positions of stars due to the fact that the Earth orbits the Sun at 0.01% of the speed of light.
You shouldn’t be so hard on the geocentrists! Isn’t it true, that under the Machian-GR perspective, all motion is relative. It isn’t clear who is ‘really moving’ relative to whom, right? (I know, the simplest way to compare frames, etc., but still…
BTW, so many people also think that the earth’s axis changes its direction to make the seasons, which is not true….(It’s the same direction, but the earth is in a different place…)
(I tried to post this a bit earlier, but got stopped by the message I now see her more and more often: that the site has exceeded its CPU capacity, or etc. What’s going on, and can you fix it? Ty.)
I was impressed that a full 8% of Americans seemed to know that the correct anwer to the Sun-Earth motion question was: “That’s a gauge choice.”
I believe 3% gave the same answer to the interacial dating question. The study apparently didn’t look at correlations between the answers to the two questions.
Joe #6 and Ian #12
Thanks. In my early morning haze, I was for some reason ignoring the rest of the universe 🙂
Neil B.: I’m afraid relativity doesn’t really let you say the earth is stationary, and the sun revolves around it, while keeping the same laws of physics. The trouble is that, since the earth is in a circular orbit and spinning on it’s axis, the reference frame is accelerating. If we take this frame as stationary, we introduce a slew of fictitious forces for which there is no physical explanation other than an accelerating reference frame. This problem is minimized (at least within our solar system) if we take the sun to be stationary.
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Joe Fitz – Two words for you – General Covariance.”
Sorry, Joe Fitzsimons , but Einstein and most of those carrying on General Relativity say that you are wrong. For some time now, they have been saying that even accelerated motion is relative, and the so-called “fictitious forces” are created by the relative motion of all that mass with respect to the earth. I have my own doubts: It has been presented by some, that we can imagine that the force pushing you to the floor of a relatively-accelerating rocket is caused by the gravitational analog of the pulse of accelerational EM component, that would be created by lots of charges accelerating at a distance in the other direction instead. (Like a gravity version of the electric field from starting current up in surrounding wires.) But wait a minute, I thought gravity waves can’t push things meaningfully, since they accelerate all the surroundings the same amount….We have to define such waves with torsions etc. – ?
However, if either charges or masses actually start accelerating at a distance themselves, it takes t = r/c until anything can feel it. Since we feel the force immediately, it can’t be a mere radiation/inductance analog, but some emeshment of surrounding space with matter.
(BTW, Mach’s principle in the literal whole is untestable, and supposed to be “meaningless” to you positivers. For comparison, claims of events having such and such probability aren’t strictly provable or falsifiable either, since there is no distinct outcome that can prove or disprove (any outcome is itself possible!) You just have to make up judgment calls about say “95% confidence level” etc. Nobody really cares unless its a weakness of an idea they don’t like.)
Aren’t we all revolving around a point in space slightly offset from the sun in the direction of Jupiter?
CIP and Neil B.: Thank you, I am well aware of the equivalence principle. While I am by know means an expert in general relativity, I like to think that I am at least somewhat competent. I realise this is a cosmology blog of some renown, but let’s not take the show boating too far.
It should be clear hear that the question is about which frame best approximates an inertial frame. If we take the earth as stationary, we are most definitely not in an inertial frame. I do not see how that is in anyway controversial. Are we simply taking different interpretations of the question? The sun’s rest frame certainly comes closer to approximating an inertial frame, than that of the earth. Sure you can reformulate dynamics from the point of view of an accelerating frame, but the acceleration of the frame is detectable. Inertial and non-inertial frames are not on the same footing. I really do not see how you can claim that a non-inertial frame is in some meaningful sense at rest.
An yes, I do realise that the sun’s rest frame is not inertial, but it is certainly a much better approximation than that of the earth.
Lab Lemming: Yes, although not always exactly in the direction of Jupiter.
Joe Fitz,
I think we can all agree that on a Solar system scale, the Earth going around the Sun leads to simpler physics. The point of my comments, although intended humorously, was that the answers to these questions may depend on your point of view. From the standpoint of pre-Copernican Earth, it was simpler to regard the Sun, Moon, and stars as all circling Earth. From the standpoint of Newton and Kepler, the conventional description is mandatory. From the standpoint of general covariance, either is just one of many possible choices of gauge – though the Keplerian one is still simplest.
Well,
An observer on the earth may see the sun go around him/her but it’s pretty obvious, by observation, that the other plants are orbiting the sun, not earth. I don’t think anyone is questioning that anymore.
Now, I suppose that observer could twist relativity and maintain that the whole shebang, with all those other planets orbiting the sun, is actually orbiting the earth, if they really wanted to. However, designing an orbital structure that way would be a pretty stupid way to go, in my humble opinion.
Now, for all those creationists, what would you rather believe: that your God designed a universe around a solar system where all the planets orbit the sun, except earth, which is the centre of everything, or, oral tradition, from a thousand or more years ago, got it a little bit wrong?
Besides, why do you want to be in the centre anyway? From all accounts, the real centre of the universe is a pretty nasty place, at least for us carbon-based life forms.
David…