Ah yes, the 'arrogance' claim. Nice to see that one trotted out again. Mostly used to provide support for failed theories by claiming that, since absolutely every single possibility hasn't been tried, that the theory is still viable. Kind of like claiming that, since the infinite set of even numbers have not all been factored by 2, we can say that some even number exists that is not factorable by 2. Nice one.
"It only appears to be a straw man because religion (superstition in general really) has been slapped down so many times in the past that nobody want to own up to the tar baby of geocentricism and the other garbage that was previously held as truth."
Were you sufficiently informed, you would not make the implication that geocentrism has been 'disproved'. You merely accept what popular science tells you without question. You are guilty of the very superstition that you claim to detest.
Sir Fred Hoyle wrote:
The relation of the two pictures [geocentricity and heliocentricity] is reduced to a mere coordinate transformation and it is the main tenet of the Einstein theory that any two ways of looking at the world which are related to each other by a coordinate transformation are entirely equivalent from a physical point of view ... . Today we cannot say that the Copernican theory is right and the Ptolemaic theory wrong in any meaningful physical sense.
Sir Fred Hoyle, Nicolaus Copernicus, 1973.
Similarly, Max Born wrote:
"...Thus we may return to Ptolemy's point of view of a 'motionless earth'...One has to show that the transformed metric can be regarded as produced according to Einstein's field equations, by distant rotating masses. This has been done by Thirring. He calculated a field due to a rotating, hollow, thick-walled sphere and proved that inside the cavity it behaved as though there were centrifugal and other inertial forces usually attributed to absolute space.
Thus from Einstein's point of view, Ptolemy and Corpenicus are equally right."
"Einstein's Theory of Relativity",Dover Publications,1962, pgs 344 & 345
Einstein himself said:
"The struggle, so violent in the early days of science, between the views of Ptolemy and Copernicus would then be quite meaningless. Either CS [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 CS."
Einstein and Infeld, The Evolution of Physics, p.212 (p.248 in original 1938 ed.)
Hoo Boy!! Your going to argue that the earth is the center of the universe? I can't wait to hear this one.
Einstein and Infeld, The Evolution of Physics, p.212 (p.248 in original 1938 ed.)
Could you please provide additional documentation on this quote? I am unable to find a reliable source through google.