As Poe has been invoked, nothing more to see here.
Carry on.

Actually, they’re willing to get in bed with the Devil, so to speak. For the most point, these are ultra Catholics – so nutty that I’m sure even the current Pope alternates between facepalming and groaning that he has to deal with these devout nutbags.

The “deal with the Devil” part is that one of the promoting quotes is from a guy who is mixed up with with the “Chalcedon Foundation”, which has been identified as a hate group for it’s anti-gay positions. The group was founded by JR Rushdoony, the “father” of Dominionism – a fancy word for throwing out the US Constitution and turning the country into a theocracy. This stuff is nuts (perhaps not as totally cookoo as earth-centrism), but it’s particularly nuts for Catholics to “get in bed” with radical Protestants. I sadly suspect that if the Rushdoony-types get into power, there will be some updated version of “boxcars and showers” prepared for America’s Catholics. (From the perspective of many radical Protestants, Catholics are in league with the Devil, and we all know how allies of the Devil are to be dealt with.)

But on the whole, these people are fervently applying an absurd and sad amount of brain power to mentally grind the real world in to subservience to a pre-Medieval, fundamentally arbitrary cosmology. For many of them, this goes beyond Creationism and Earth-centrism, to the project of making science subservient to theology. Part of why the Soviet Union fell was that they would, at times, say something to the effect of “Who cares if crops fail and diseases aren’t dealt with, it’s most important that science be reigned into a corral defined by the current political ideology.” These people may or may not believe that the earth really is the center of the universe, but many of them truly believe that science must be crippled so that it will only produce results in line with their personal theology – disease and starvation be damned. Ideological purity is paramount.

For the more than 99% of the population of earth who will never travel into outer space or deal with the complicated calculations and astronomical knowledge required to get a rocket into space or a satellite orbiting the planet, it doesn’t matter one bit.

Whether we learn that the earth circles the sun or the sun circles the earth or my ego is actually the center of the universe, it doesn’t matter. Geocentristic theories don’t increase or decrease my mortgage payment or make my ex-girlfriend want me back.

Perfect for the bulletin board at the astronomy or geography department of your friendly neighborhood college or university!

For more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Kepler

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tycho_Brahe

Circular orbits? Bah!
Get real!

Anyhow, I thought that this thread about planetary orbits had gone on long enough without somebody mentioning Kepler.

No. I’M the center of the Universe. (It might be easy to miscalculate and assume that the Earth is the center of the Universe, seeing as how I live there. But no — I’m at the center of the whole shebang.)

There will probably be 3 people there. So I’m guessing this is “nothing to see here; move along.”

Unless you want to see what other crazy stuff he’s up to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sungenis

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/859037–library-to-make-books-come-alive

But AFAIK, they aren’t charging you $$ for it.

I think an excellent sign of how this of reaction works is that the question “what is real?” is no more important than “what do renowned physicists Urban and John Paul have to say?”

I just laugh at their stupid questions. I say “The computer came from Dell, and the electricity comes from PG&E- what else ya got?”

Then they roll their eyes and walk away. Losers!

The choice of an appropriate “frame of reference” in relativistic physics is not purely arbitrary: when doing gravitational physics, it needs to be the strongest source of gravity in the locality: “locality” being determined at an appropriate scale, and when studying gravity, that is an astronomical scale.
And that means our sun…not the earth.

To do otherwise would necessarily complicate the maths, based only upon….self-importance. Which is to say, that to do so adds un-necessary complication….and even taking the earth as your “center of reference”, the sun would yet still NOT orbit the earth.

Or are they actually denying the existence of gravity itself?

Anyhow, a little piece of me just died when I read this post. Good job, Mark.