The Aug. 21, "Galileo had it right" says: "..heliocentric theory is as factual today as it was in 1633."
Imagine yourself sitting at the center of a merry-go-round in a large dark room, the only light is coming from the horses going around you. You feel no vibration and sense no inertial movement from the equipment or floor, and it's completely silent. How do you know if the horses are going around you or if they are standing still and the room in which you are seated is turning around? Same idea extends to the sun going around the Earth or Earth going around the sun.
Science writer Kitty Ferguson profoundly sums up the situation in her book "Measuring the Universe" in which she writes, "School children learn that we live on a planet that revolves on its axis and orbits the sun. ... Yet our own contemporary science backs away and tells us that when it comes to proving what moves and what doesn't, and whether or not there is an unmoving center, no one can make an air-tight case that any answer is right or wrong."
Big name physicists and astronomers like Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, George F.R. Ellis, Fred Hoyle, Max Tegmark and many others, have expressed a similar view. But now, with the recent data from the mapping of the cosmic microwave background of the known universe by satellites COBE, WMAP and PLANCK, it sure looks like earth is the center of the universe. If earth is center, where does that put the sun? Additionally, other methods of observation indicate the quasars and galaxies are arranged in concentric spheres around earth.
Galileo has struck out.
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Phil Drietz
Delhi
