Let’s say I am God. I create an Earth and Sun, and make the Sun revolve around the Earth. I then create eight planets, and make them all orbit the Sun.
Being God, I also create people on Earth. Eventually the people discover the scientific method, and erroneously conclude the Earth revolves around the Sun. Ha - I really fooled them!!
I guess the question I am asking is… if the Sun really orbited the Earth, would we know? Or would we incorrectly believe the Earth goes around the Sun?
Does God apply this magic only on the planets and Sun?
Or does this magic apply to ALL objects and how they relate to each other?
Just in this one case.
IANAP, so there is probably a simple explanation on why this can’t happen.
Ignoring the rotation of the earth on its axis for a moment.
If you’re omnipotent, I guess it would be possible to fix the Earth in place and cause the solar system, the galaxy and the rest of the universe move in such a way that it appears the way modern science has discerned it to be. You would be violating Newton’s laws of motion, but hey, you’re God, right?
I think there are probably some subtle inertial things that can be used to demonstrate that the sun is closer to the centre of rotation of the solar system than the earth, but if you’re omnipotent, you could just fudge all of the delicate instruments that people use to measure it, or confound their memories of the experiments, or just smite them before they publish.
Rotation of the earth on its axis is a different thing (although it’s actually perceived by puny humans as the sun travelling around the sky once a day - so I guess it might be in scope of your question).
If the earth was not rotating on its axis, and everything else was rotating around us, that would involve distant objects needing to move at a velocity greater than the speed of light, which we don’t think is possible, but again, you’re God, right? So anything is possible, including that which is impossible.
It’s sort of an automatic ‘yes’ answer, but quite a banal one.
Re-reading the OP, you may be asking if God had made the planets and set them in motion, then left them to the laws of physics, could the sun be orbiting the Earth?
I think that’s pretty definitely a ‘no’, as long as we are right about what the bodies in the solar system are made of, and how massive they are.
You’re describing the Tychonic model of the solar system. If the planets are moving by magic, rather than by physical forces, then there’s no way to tell which is correct. The motion of all bodies in the Tychonic system is equivalent to that in the Copernican/Keplerian system by a simple mathematical transformation of coordinates. However the Keplerian system has the advantage that relatively simple laws of motion and gravity explain WHY the planets move as they do; no such explanation is possible for the Tychonic system.
The Aberration of Light doomed the heliocentric model. Along with Parallaxit showed that the Earth was moving in a big yearly orbit around something in the general vicinity of the Sun (haha).
For those that don’t want to look up the articles, “Aberration causes objects to appear to be displaced towards the direction of motion of the observer compared to when the observer is stationary. The change in angle is typically very small — of the order of v/c where c is the speed of light and v the velocity of the observer. In the case of “stellar” or “annual” aberration, the apparent position of a star to an observer on Earth varies periodically over the course of a year as the Earth’s velocity changes as it revolves around the Sun, by a maximum angle of approximately 20 arcseconds in right ascension or declination.”
And Parallax is the difference in apparent position of distant stars when measured from the two opposite sides of the Earth’s orbit.
To the OP if you invoke an omnipotent god then you can magic up anything you want.
For the science though the reality is that the earth and sun orbit each other. More precisely they both orbit a common center of gravity. Since the sun is so big and the earth, comparatively, so small that common center is inside the sun (but not the center of the sun).
IIRC Jupiter is big enough that the common center is actually just outside of the sun so it is more apparent that they orbit each other.
So yeah, in a manner of speaking the sun does orbit the earth but the earth orbits the sun more.
Arrrg, I meant doomed the Geocentric model.
From the standpoint of pure orbital mechanics, the sun does orbit the earth. At the same time, the earth orbits the sun. However, since the sun’s mass is about 333,000 times that of the earth, it’s the earth’s orbit that is spatially large and the sun hardly moves at all with respect to the earth.
Or is the assertion that the sun’s mass is in doubt? It’s certainly big enough to generate spontaneous fusion!
Also, every space probe ever launched to other planets was crucially dependent on the earth’s orbital velocity around the sun for a big component of its initial velocity and subsequent trajectory.
We would be able to tell by the observation of other planets.
Consider Earth and Mars. If they are both orbiting around the Sun then Mars will always be farther from the Sun than Earth is. But if Mars and the Sun were orbiting the Earth, it would be possible for Mars to be between Earth and the Sun and we would observe Mars passing in front of the Sun.
How do you figure? Near as I can tell, Mars would be farther away from the Sun than the Earth is regardless of whether the Earth goes around the Sun or vice versa.
Mars doesn’t pass in front of the sun in either the Tychonic or Ptolemaic models of the solar system.
The wiki article I linked to says “the motions of the planets [in the Tychonic system] are mathematically equivalent to the motions in Copernicus’ heliocentric system under a simple coordinate transformation, so that, as long as no force law is postulated to explain why the planets move as described, there is no objective reason to prefer either the Tychonic or the Copernican system.” It cites Thomas Kuhn’s The Copernican Revolution which says “[T]he Tychonic system is transformed to the Copernican system simply by holding the sun fixed instead of the earth. The relative motions of the planets are the same in both systems.”
Motion is relative.
You can construct a fully valid, internally consistent view of things that has the sun, the earth, saturn or pluto as the center of the solar system.
The one with the sun at the center ends up looking much simpler and doing a cleaner job of prediction. But that doesn’t mean the others are actually wrong.
After all, the whole solar system is moving around the galaxy, but we don’t use that model when planning satellite voyages to the outer planets.
For most practical purposes, we use the simplest frame of reference. We still speak (and think) of sunrise and sunset, because no one wants to have to do the math regarding our cities and streets rushing eastward at up to a thousand miles an hour. It’s far easier to take Chicago (for instance) as a “fixed location.”
He was assuming that the question had the planets orbiting the sun (as they do), but then that whole SYSTEM is orbiting the Earth. NOT, the Planets and the Sun orbit the Earth (Ptolemaic model).
This. In fact, I could myself at the origin of the coordinate system. From the point of view of simplicity, though, it is better to put the sun at the center. But there is no preferred origin.
I heard an answer to the question of why the shadow in an eclipse moves from west to east that was all wet. The answer was that is was on account of the moon’s motion. In fact, the best way to think about the question is to imagine a geocentric solar system in which the moon is stationary (which it almost is compared to the sun since it takes nearly 30 days to do what the sun does in one day. Now imagine you are stationary (or nearly so) and a light is moving from east to west down your street. Which was will your shadow move? From west to east obviously. But this explanation really needs a geocentric point of view to be clear.
Motion is relative but the heliocentric model and the geocentric model are only mathematically equivalent. Once you consider the physics and what forces drive the orbital motions, then the geocentric model collapses. Sure you can consider relativity but it does not explain why the planets would move in the strange orbits required by a geocentric model. You can construct a fully valid, internally consistent view of things, but if it is the geocentric model or similar, the empirical evidence suggests it is wrong with a certainty containing way more 9s than 99.999999999999 %.
How do you explain retrograde motion of the planets as seen from earth in a geocentric model that is consistent with the laws of motion?
In a heliocentric model the answer to retrograde motion jumps right off the page at you and makes perfect sense.