RE: What God's justification for eternal torment?
August 24, 2020 at 8:23 pm
(This post was last modified: August 24, 2020 at 10:13 pm by John 6IX Breezy.)
(August 24, 2020 at 12:25 pm)Smaug Wrote: If you'd like to be more exact you can say that when considering motion of the planets of Solar system taking the system's barycenter or the Sun's center of mass as a reference point allows to obtain their equations of motion in the most simple form.
Heliocentric model was a very big step forward from the epicycles and earlier astronomical concepts. Astronomers were making observations for centuries but in the geocentric coordinates they were too confusing to make any general assumptions about the laws of motion. Adoption of Heliocentrism and Kepler's study of Martian orbit paved way for Newton's Theory of Gravitation.
Yup, I agree thats a much better way to frame things.
As long as we remember that the simplest form does not mean the correct form by default. The universe is not at its simplest form. The heliocentric model struggled to catch on at first because it was less accurate than the epicycles of the geocentric model, due to oversimplification. The model assumed that orbits were perfect circles, rather than the slightly more complicated elliptical orbits.
Simplicity is first and foremost a cognitive preference. In fact, there was a recent psychology paper that really makes one aware of the strange preference of scientists to describe things in terms of dichotomies, binaries, and dual-processes. Clearly simplicity is a reflection of how we think and not a reflection of nature itself:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29571664/