Comment by PlatoIsADisease 3 days ago
As someone who reads epistemology for fun. Its so much worse than you know.
Everything is basically a theory only judged on predictive capabilities. Even the idea that Earth is not at the center of the solar system is a judgement call of what we define as the solar system and center.
The math is simpler sure, but its arbitrary how we define our systems.
You lost me with your example. What could the word center mean if the thing that all the other things orbit around in the solar system is not referred to as being in the center?
Barycenter is a good candidate, and apparently it's often outside of the Sun[0].
[0] https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/40782/where-is...
Slightly outside the sun. The comment above was talking about the Earth being center as a judgement call, which is a wildly different idea.
If all you care about is measurements/predictions relative to Earth, then it makes no sense to transform everything into Sol-centric frame, do the math there, and then untransform results back to Earth-centric frame.
Put another way, there's a reason we use latitude/longitude for terrestrial positioning, instead of Cartesian coordinates with Sol being at (0, 0, 0). For one, it keeps the math time-invariant.
You can do math from any position. If you're on a train you'll do a lot of calculations relative to your train. That doesn't mean things are actually orbiting your train. You would never declare to all of humanity that your train is the 'center' of everything.
They orbit the earth in a different shape that is more complex than an ellipse.
For further reading, I like Early Wittgenstein, but warning, he is a meme for a reason, you will only understand 10%...
Imagine we have a table with black and white splotches. We could use a square fishnet with a fine enough resolution to accurately describe it. But why use a square fishnet? Why not use hexagons? They both can accurately describe it with a fine enough resolution.
All of science is built on this first step of choosing (squares or hexagons).
Maybe something easier than Wittgenstein, there is Waltz Theory of International Politics, specifically chapter 1. But that is more practical/applied than metaphysical. I find this a difficult topic to recommend a wikipedia article, as they are too specific to each type of knowledge and don't explain the general topic. Even the general topic gets a bit lost in the weeds. Maybe Karl Popper too.
> They orbit the earth in a different shape that is more complex than an ellipse.
But they don't. We know they don't. Not unless you use a weird definition of orbit that is very different from the one lotsofpulp was using. And if you do that you're not countering their argument, you're misconstruing it.
We know they do. An orbit is a mathematical object, and elliptical orbits only exist in universes that have exactly two objects with mass in them. Add another object, even far away, and as far as we know[0] we no longer even have a closed-form description of resulting motion patterns.
And our universe has tons of matter with gravitational mass everywhere, few other types of interaction beyond gravity, and a vacuum that just doesn't want to stay empty.
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[0] - Not sure if this was mathematically proven, or merely remains not disproven.
When I said "don't" I was talking about the complex shape that applies to orbiting the Earth, old school epicycles.
Actual orbits being slightly off ellipses isn't what I meant.
> Not unless you use a weird definition of orbit that is very different from the one lotsofpulp was using. And if you do that you're not countering their argument, you're misconstruing it.
All of science is like this. Change your frame of reference/theory. Why did we pick one system vs another? Its arbitrary.
The thing lotsofpulp was talking about is not arbitrary.
Just cause knowledge can be reduced to predictive capabilities and judgement calls does not mean systems are defined arbitrarily. Everything is defined as to its relative function in/to society and our material endeavors and the social forces that limit or expand on areas of these systems.
First we have to live. That has implications; it's the base for all knowledge.
Knowledge is developing all the time and can be uncertain, sure, but the foundations aren't arbitrary.
You are doing an idealism.
A case study of myself as an overeager math student:
I used to focus so much on finding "elegant" proofs of things, especially geometric proofs. I'd construct elaborate diagrams to find an intuitive explanation, sometimes disregarding gaps in logic.
Then I gave up, and now I appreciate the brutal pragmatism of using Euler's formula for anything trigonometry-related. It's not a very elegant method, if accounting for the large quantity of rote intermediate work produced, but it's far more effective and straightforward for dealing with messy trig problems.
> Even the idea that Earth is not at the center of the solar system is a judgement call of what we define as the solar system and center.
If you don't have a definition of the solar system, the question about its center is meaningless. If you have then you can answer it according to that definition.