Courtesy mention and ping to allmendream, Fichori, LeGrane, mrjesse, as you are mentioned below.
I would suggest that you do a bit more study of the geocentric position within GR before replying.
I did better than that. I studied the thread.
Your quotes from Boyle, Einstein, Born, and Ellis appear in post 1187, while you were disputing with allmendream, who was responding to Fichori in 1155.
LeGrande and others (Fichori, LeGrande, mrjesse) were talking about the aberration of light, and you and allmendream were duking it out about GR and geocentrism.
I had not read your post 1187 when I wrote, and was not attempting to refute GR. My post actually said:
Depends a little on what we're trying to predict, eh? : Retrograde motion, epicycles, and all that. Some coordinate systems are chosen to simply the calculations *greatly*.
--This part of the post explicitly said, that the coordinate system was chosen for ease of use, not because one was "true" and the other "false".
Then I wrote:
And, if we are talking the orbit of Mercury, classical mechanics won't cut it to more than an approximation. This was an explicit statement that GR could account for things which classical physics could not.
So my beef wasn't with GR.
That being said --
regarding your quotes in post 1187...
I downloaded Einstein and Infeld from gigapedia, and searched for your quote. For some reason, I could not find the quote. I couldn't even find the names 'Ptolemy', or 'Copernicus', which should have survived translation. Do you have a link to another online source which contains this quote?
The reason I am asking, is that the closest parts of the discussion I could find in that text, were to the description of fixed vs. moving or accelerating systems, and the requirement that all laws of motion be invariant. It did not seem to be a discussion of which coordinate system would be the cleanest or easiest to manipulate in any given situation.
I have been unable to find a copy of Hoyle's work online for verification of context.
I have spent an hour trying to download Born's work, as I could not find it online for browsing, and I didn't want to wait for Amazon to deliver it :-)
And I could not find online a copy of the article by Ellis, only references to it: and most of those seemed to say that he was not talking about Ptolemaic or Copernican models, but about the expansion of the Universe. If you could point me to a copy of the complete text, I'd be grateful.
Sorry for the delay, but it was my wife's birthday. Lunch at The Good Earth was *very* nice and what followed was even better :-)
Cheers!
That is correct. They are equivalent. There is no absolute frame of reference. The only thing that is fixed is the speed of light. Time and distance are variables.
I used Google Books and searched for 'Ptolemy'. Google books finds that word on page 211 & 212 just as my quote says but says it's restricted.
Max Born's book is also available on google books and finds the word 'Thirring' on pg 344 just as the quote says. Also restricted.
Hoyle's book is available, don't know if you can still get a reprint of Ellis' SciAm article.
I guess you'll have to wait on Amazon.
Sorry for the delay, but it was my wife's birthday. Lunch at The Good Earth was *very* nice and what followed was even better :-)"
I can't imagine why you would think I would be interested in this info. I am not waiting expectantly for your return nor do I care what you and your wife do.
Please spare me.