Which, of course, is half the fun.
There is a reality that actually underlies our math, models and interpretations. It’s heavily shrouded and veiled from our eyes, but isn’t it a refreshing thought to know that beyond all these (symme)trees, there’s a real forest somewhere in which we reside?
I’d like to take in as much of this forest as possible from my particular vantage.
AHA! So you’re DR. Chronos!!
I shoulda thunk so… 
Actually, I misphrased that statement, as I am not myself a doctor. I am, however, a physicist, and so meant the “we” there to mean “physicists”.
And njtt, yes, the Tychonic interpretation is used, literally, almost all the time. Consider, for instance, a problem like the following:
A baseball leaves the bat traveling at 50 m/s, at an angle 38 degrees above the horizontal. How far will the ball travel before reaching the fielder’s mitt? Assume that the bat is 1.3 meters above the ground, and the fielder’s mitt is 2 meters above the ground.
A fairly straightforward textbook physics problem, no? And every single physicist or physics student you present it to is going to implicitly assume, when solving it, that the Earth is stationary. Heck, the assumption is implicit in the question itself, which gives the velocity of the ball relative to the Earth.
In what sense can the Copernican model be said to be “more correct” than the Tychonic one? Yes, there is a set of problems (anything involving multiple planets) for which the Copernican model is easier to use, but there is also a much larger set of problems (anything involving only one planet) for which the Tychonic model is easier to use. And both can be used for any problem, and give the same answers. If you had a physics student who solved the baseball problem by assuming the Earth was at rest, would you tell him that he did it wrong, and show him instead how to do it on a moving Earth?
It seems to me that it is about as certain as anything can be that it would have been a lot harder to figure out general relativity if we had not figured out special relativity first (in this context, “we” = “Einstein” :)). Perhaps it would be possible in principle to get to general relativity first (and then, I suppose, derive special relativity as a special, simpler case) - I take it that the math and physics themselves do not rule that out - but surely it is pretty much a psychological impossibility.
Thus I thought your “arguably” unnecessarily weakened a claim that it was in fact appropriate to state strongly. It implies that perhaps a plausible historical scenario could be devised in which GR was discovered first. I think it is most unlikely to be possible (though there may be some highly implausible scenarios), and to imply otherwise is thus misleading.
I am willing to be talked out of this. My understanding of both the relevant physics and the relevant history is superficial, but I did find your apparent tentativeness on this point surprising.
Enjoying this thread as an interested civilian. Given the topic is about the scientific explanations for Reality, and has rubbed up against philosophy and spirituality, I would like to put in a plug for a great book:
Why Does the World Exist - An Existential Detective Story
I loved this book and feel it does a great job chasing down physics/science concepts as well as epistemological / philosophical ones in this area.
Carry on 
Apologies for butting in since I’m not sure what your point is, but I should mention that even snipers take into account the Coriolis effect when making a long shot.
Granted, but the number of real-world problems where the Coriolis force is significant is much smaller than that for which it’s not. Even there, though: The fact that anyone uses the Coriolis effect at all is evidence that they are using the Tychonic interpretation, since the Coriolis Effect does not exist in the Copernican reference frame.
That is what you meant by a Tychonic interpretation? Wow! I thought we were at lest talking about astronomy here (which was Tycho and Copernicus were disagreeing about - neither had much to say about physics). I was prepared to believe you that for some astronomical purposes the calculations are a bit easier to do if you assume a stationary Earth and a moving Sun. The issue between Copernicus and Tycho was whether it is the Earth or the Sun that is really moving; which provides the proper stationary frame of reference? Despite the fact that there is indeed a sense in which all motions are relative and reference frames are arbitrary, there is a sensible answer to this question and a silly one, and the sensible answer is Copernicus’ one.
You do realize, do you, that your example problem, of a baseball moving relative to the Earth depends upon physical concepts developed by Galileo (and then built upon by Newton) for the very purpose of showing that Copernicus was right and Tycho was wrong?
No. The rightness of Copernicus and wrongness of Tycho is not to do with how one best solves problems in dynamics (that neither of them would have been able to solve, and that neither cared about). Copernicus was right because (no doubt amongst other reasons) the Earth and the other planets are much, much more strongly affected by the gravitational field of the Sun than the Sun is affected by the gravitational fields of the planets. The physics of the situation goes far beyond the dynamics, and this new physics, such as the very existence of gravity, and its laws (not to mention concepts such as acceleration, inertia, mass and momentum, and the laws that govern them, the very concepts and laws you actually need to solve your baseball problem) were in fact discovered in the very process of showing that Copernicus was right and Tycho was wrong, and that it does matter.
You might start by telling me what you think is absurd about it. So far as I am aware it is about as straightforwardly true as any historical generalization can be.
The difference between Tycho’s and Copernicus’s interpretations is not only relevant for astronomy. One said that the Earth does not move, while the other says it does, and the difference is therefore relevant for any problem which includes the Earth.
I also loved this book. A hearty recommendation from me as well!
Just on principle that the thought, pace Ayers, of a philosophical system being a success or failure, as in a failure at something–ironic enough considering the OP’s framing of the thread topic.
I don’t think it would be pleasant at this juncture to open a thread, via drift or hijack, on “philosophy as being capable of failure.”
Oh, I think it’s just a language barrier then—I thought I was making a quite strong statement, using arguable in the sense of:
[
](arguable - Wiktionary, the free dictionary)
In any case, I agree that without the insight into the spacetime structure provided by SR, GR would likely not have been discovered in its present form; maybe a case can be made that one could have found an alternative formulation, such as the ADM formalism which indeed introduces a certain spacetime foliation, or a largely equivalent theory such as shape dynamics, but it’s not a case I would be willing to argue.
In any case, another example that sprung to mind is the difficulty of coming up with quantum field theory if you’re a Bohmian: the Bohmian interpretation is equivalent to any other proper interpretation of quantum mechanics, but nobody has yet succeeded in generalizing it for quantum field theory; so if that were the default interpretation, it’s hard to see how people might have come up with QFT in the first place.
QFT
Yeah, that’s called General Relativity, and is completely different from Tycho’s view. Stop simplifying Tycho’s interpretation to one statement so that you can claim that it is accurate. He does not simply say the Earth is stationary. He proposes methods for understanding how all the objects in the heavens move. Methods that reach a dead end because they do not allow us to generalize to other situations.
Frameworks can be wrong even if they fit the facts, if they run into problems with other facts. That’s why Newton’s framework is wrong, even though it works for a large subset of physics problems.
I think that a theory equivalent to the linearized version(s) of Einstein’s GR would follow fairly easily from LET and linearized gravity can recreate all our direct observations of GR (the big loss though of course would be big bang theory).
People have come up Bohmian versions of QFT, Bohmian theory has a big problem with relativity, but quantum field theories needn’t necessarily be relativistic.
Wait, what? Are there two different things called General Relativity? Because I’m only familiar with the one Einstein came up with.
If that is the only issue that you concerned with, you might just as well say say Ptolemaic Theory, or Aristotelain Theory, or Ugg the Caveman’s Theory as Tychonic Theory. To imply that the fact that it makes sense to use frame of reference of the Earth when solving dynamics problems for objects (such as your baseball) within the Earth’s inertial frame amounts to using Tychonic theory is absurd. It is like saying that if I leave money to my children, that is Lamarkian evolution in action. Tycho was not concerned with such matters, and with respect to the matters he was concerned with, the motions of the heavenly bodies, he was wrong.
What is more, Tycho, like Aristotle, undoubtedly considered the Earth to be static in an absolute, not a relative sense. Thus his view was quite different from that of a modern physicist concerned with mechanics problems within the Earth’s inertial frame.
A philosophical program or system can most certainly fail. It happens all the time, in minor ways, as philosophers realize, or are persuaded, that arguments they have made are not, in fact, sound, and conclusions that they have drawn are false or unwarranted. Logical Positivism failed in the task it had set itself, to establish clear, unequivocal and non-circular demarcation criteria between sense and nonsense, or science and “metaphysics”. Those adherents of Logical Positivism who lived long enough all (so far as I am aware) acknowledged that failure.
Although it is true that there are philosophical programs that have survived as reasonable intellectual options, and even active research programs, for a very long time - Aristotelian ethics, for example - the history of philosophy is littered with systems (like Aristotelian physical theory) that are never coming back.
I was not aware you were a moderator.
If you have a quarrel with my point, please state it.