Refuting the Copernican principle.

• Author: DeLano, Rick
• Position: Science & Technology

WHAT is "The Principle"? Five-hundred years ago, you were crazy if you thought the Earth was going around the sun. Today, you are crazy if you think it is not. What changed? That is a fascinating question, one which involves profound issues of science, faith, and identity. While most people assume that it has long since been experimentally proven that the Earth is orbiting the sun, no such experimental proof ever has been obtained. As historian Lincoln Barnett states in The Universe and Dr. Einstein (which contains a foreword by Albert Einstein): "We can't feel our motion through space, nor has any physical experiment ever proved that the Earth actually is in motion."

Remarkably, physics had to be reconceptualized entirely by Einstein at the beginning of the 20th century, in part because no experiment directly had been able to measure this universally-assumed motion of the Earth around the sun. What Einstein could not foresee, however, was that the reconceptualized physics he offered in his special relativity theory in order to keep the Earth moving and the speed of light constant was superseded 10 years later by his general relativity theory which, by his own covariance equations, allowed the Earth to remain fixed and the speed of light to be variable.

Like Sisyphus rolling the huge rock up the hill only to see it fall down right before he reached the peak, in a strange way the principle of relativity made Einstein's own theories relative. Perhaps he realized this truth in his 1938 book, The Evolution of Physics, in which he said: "The struggle, so violent in the early days of science, between the views of [Claudius] Ptolemy and [Nicolaus] Copernicus would then be quite meaningless. Either coordinate system could be used with equal justification. The two sentences: 'the sun is at rest and the Earth moves,' or 'the sun moves and the Earth is at rest,' would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different coordinate systems."

Physicist Stephen Hawking said much the same in The Grand Design: "So which is real, the Ptolemaic or the Copernican system? Although it is not uncommon for people to say that Copernicus proved Ptolemy wrong, that is not true. As in the case of our normal view versus that of the goldfish, one can use either picture as a model of the universe, for our observations of the heavens can be explained by assuming either the Earth or the sun to be at rest."

So, two of our greatest scientific revolutions--the...