Are you smarter than a Geocentrist?
Transmission Control -
Originally published on Medium.
So, you think you are better than the poor unfortunate Geocentrists because you’ve rejected such an obviously false theory in favor of Heliocentrism? Certainly it’s a step in the right direction but it’s just one small step.
It should be obvious to everyone now that while the earth orbits the sun, the Sun orbits the Milky Way galaxy. Specifically, we orbit the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*. Great, we should be Sagittarius A* centrists, right? No.
Our Milky Way galaxy is a member of the Local Cluster which is a lobe of the Virgo Supercluster. The densest, most attractive, region of that supercluster is known as the Great Attractor around which the galaxies in our neighborhood orbit. So, we should be Great Attractor centrists, right? No.
The Great Attractor and everything orbiting it is actually falling towards the Shapley Attractor located in the Shapley Supercluster. Great, so we should be Shapley Centrists? No.
Much beyond that scale, the universe starts looking a bit like an open-cell foam with filaments made of clusters of superclusters connecting in three dimensional web-like patterns around voids.
The lesson, of course, is that everything is moving relative to everything else and nothing is really the center.
Astrophysicists can actually use a different kind of origin all together to help determine the above.
Everything can be plotted relative to the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) which is the furthest distance we can see. While it isn’t really a fixed “thing,” it is so far away and so far back in time that we can treat it as such. We can use it as a yard stick by which to measure our velocity and direction in the observable universe by its faint red shift/blue shift polarization. Of course someone half way between us and the edge of our observable universe will think we are half way between them and the edge of theirs. Their CMB will look different from ours.
We should probably just accept that we should be acentrists. Were you one already? Or, like Copernicus, were you unable to see the full grandeur of the universe in which we live?
Or perhaps like Ptolemy, were you also unable to see the true pattern to the motions of the planets?
If so, hopefully you know better now.