Saturday, June 27, 2020

it's interesting to see that kind of retraction in and of itself, though.

we're all taught this model in grade school about the planets rotating around the central fire, and we're told it's newtonian, the grand achievement of the copernican revolution, without spending much time contemplating the fact that the newtonian-copernican system is actually a revised ptolemaic system, with the gravitational center of the system corrected. worse, ptolemy himself was actually reversing existing greek systems (coming from aristarchus, with origins in pythagoreanism) that at least actually got the idea of heliocentrism correct. so, we may discuss how the understanding that the earth orbits the sun, rather than vice versa, was a revolutionary achievement in the history of science, but we fail to recognize that, through all of these changes, we've held to the concept of a system orbiting a center of some sort, without really challenging the premise. and, it's something that is taught to us over and over, no doubt as a consequence of the christian appropriation of newtonianism, something the english-speaking world needs to be more forthright and open about. so, we don't challenge our conception of the solar system as being this ordered, mechanical thing, despite the utter ancientness of the assumption - and the fact that it's totally wrong.

a much more substantive scientific revolution took place at the beginning of the last century, which finally broke the old pythagorean model. all of the ideas are developed in the system that was devised by newton, but they weren't properly understood until einstein. we realize today that the solar system is really not a set of well behaved planets orbiting the sun in this polite manner, but rather a system of masses that is suspended in it's own forces, engaging in a constant tug-of-war that no side can ever win. and, if we are to calculate their orbits, we must do so in such a way that takes into account the effects of all of the participants in this gravitational soup, which means constructing difficult n-body problems, rather than ignoring them as too distant or irrelevant. that simplifying newtonian assumption, that goes back to the pythagoreans, can no longer be tolerated.

but, what are the results? don't just tell me you've "lost confidence" in the outcome. do the actual work, and tell me what happens.