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Figure 3.5. The Coriolis effect. On a merry-go-round, if you throw a ball at a target across the spinning disk, it will miss, since the target is moving away from the spot to where you threw the ball. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)
The same goes for the motion of the currents of air and water around the world. If the world were not spinning, the air would rise from the tropics (where there is an excess of solar heat and the warm ground is heating the air, constantly creating a plume of rising air and low pressure), then move due north and south from the equator to the poles, where it would descend in a permanent zone of high pressure on the poles. But thanks to Coriolis, the air in the Northern Hemisphere curves to the right as it moves, creating the great circulating belts of air in different latitudes known as the Hadley, Ferrel, and Polar cells as well as permanent features like the west-going subtropical trade winds and the east-moving prevailing westerly winds in the middle latitudes.
These same winds drive the surface ocean currents of the world, creating the enormous circuits of water in the tropics and subtropics known as gyres, which move in a giant counterclockwise loop in the Northern Hemisphere and a clockwise loop in the Southern Hemisphere. And the huge cyclonic storms, such as hurricanes and typhoons, always rotate counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere—all due to Coriolis. It even works on smaller scales, such as a giant long-distance cannon. A sniper shooting in the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere would find the shot deflected 7 centimeters (3 inches) to the right if he or she shoots 1,000 meters (about 3,300 feet). Modern geocentrists have no explanation for this global phenomenon.
4. The Chandler wobble: The earth’s rotation is not perfectly smooth. Instead, the earth wobbles on its axis very slightly over long periods of time, a phenomenon known as the Chandler wobble. It makes the stars and galaxies visible in the sky appear to wobble around their normal positions if you observe them over thousands of years. If the earth were stationary, then the modern geocentrist would have to explain why all the stars and galaxies wobble in the same direction and the exact same amount. Furthermore, measurements show that some stars and galaxies are relatively close to us (say, five light-years away), while others are farther (say, ten light-years away). Since the light we see from them started at different times (five years ago versus ten years ago), for them all to wobble the same amount would require enormous coordination and synchronicity, which violates all the laws of physics.
5. Motions of other planets: All the other planets in our solar system are spinning on their axes, something that can easily be observed with a good telescope that can resolve the surface features of Jupiter. If they are all spinning on their axis, why is the earth the only body that is not rotating?
What about proof that the earth is revolving around the sun? Again, the phenomenon is so large in scale that it’s difficult for us to see on earth, but it does provide a number of successful predictions that can be observed and tested.
1. Observations from space: As pointed out before, both modern geocentrists and flat-earthers reject images from space as hoaxes perpetrated by the great conspiracy of NASA, other international space agencies, and the entire worldwide scientific community. Nevertheless, the Hubble and Gaia space telescopes have repeatedly shot images of the earth in different parts of its path around the sun. Even more impressive are recent Mars rover images of a sunrise over the surface of Mars, something that would not happen in the same way if Mars were in an orbit around the earth and the sun were on an inner orbital track.
2. Phases of Venus: As Galileo first observed and published in 1610, Venus has phases (full Venus, half Venus, three-quarters Venus) just like our moon, something that could not happen if both the sun and Venus were orbiting the earth. It makes sense only if Venus is orbiting the sun (fig. 3.6). To get around this problem, modern geocentrists adopt a weird hybrid system proposed by Tycho Brahe as a compromise between geocentrism and heliocentrism in which the sun orbits the earth but the rest of the planets orbit the sun.
Figure 3.6. Diagram showing the phases of Venus, only explicable if the sun is at the center of the orbits of Venus and the earth. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)
3. Retrograde motion: As Copernicus pointed out, the phenomenon of retrograde motion requires extremely complicated and unlikely gyrations, such as Ptolemy’s epicycles (fig. 3.2), to work in a geocentric system but is much more simply explained by heliocentrism. Once again, modern geocentrists fall back on Tycho’s weird hybrid system to explain it.
4. Stellar parallax: For a long time, early astronomers rejected the idea of the earth’s motion around the sun because of the lack of apparent stellar parallax. They reasoned that if the earth traveled in a huge ellipse around the sun (186 million miles or 300,000 kilometers in diameter), the position of the closer stars against the background of the most distant stars should be slightly different when looked at on one side of the orbit and again on the opposite side of the orbit six months later. Since the astronomers could not detect any difference in the stars, they initially rejected the heliocentric model. It turns out that there is a parallax effect, but most of the stars are so much farther away from us than the early astronomers thought that it is hard for us to perceive on earth. Finally, in 1838, astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel successfully demonstrated that there is a parallax effect in the stars. It takes extraordinarily careful measurements to detect it, since most stars are so far away from the earth that the parallax effect is tiny.
5. Starlight aberration: Imagine that you are standing still and the rain is coming straight down on top of you. If you hold your umbrella straight up, it will shield you from drops descending vertically. But if you are moving into the rainstorm, you need to tilt your umbrella “into” the rainstorm to keep protected, even though the rain is still coming straight down. The faster you move, the more you must tilt your umbrella. Likewise, if the earth were not revolving around the sun, starlight would come straight down on us, but if it is moving, then there would be a tilt effect of the starlight coming in at an angle. English astronomer James Bradley first detected the aberration of starlight in 1825, ironically while he was making measurements to demonstrate stellar parallax (but failing at it).
6. The speed of Neptune: Neptune is so far away from us (four light-hours, or the distance it takes light to travel in four hours; about 2.6 billion miles) and on such a long orbital path that it would have to travel faster than the speed of light to circle the earth in just twenty-four hours, as it appears to do. This is physically impossible, but geocentrists will still make misguided appeals to Einstein’s theory of relativity to dodge the problem. It is not a problem, however, if Neptune is slowly revolving around the sun, which is what it is actually doing.
There is no need to belabor the point any further. The evidence for a spinning earth revolving around the sun is overwhelming to any fair-minded person, and only the religious extremism of the modern geocentrists makes them twist scientific data into incredible knots in order to preserve ideas that have been discredited for over four hundred years.
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