[Serious] What God's justification for eternal torment?

[Smaug]

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/

If we talk mathematics complexity in many cases is not subjective but rather is a measurable thing, as well as level of precision. I have to note that complexity and precision are not the same thing and are not always interconnected. Depending on the choice of coordinates you can obtain different expressions of a given motion or differential equations thereof. While being rigorously identical, these expressions may take on very different appearance. If we talk about human perception our given equations may be as long as several dozens of symbols in one set of coordinates while in other coordinates they may take up several hundred symbols. Also not all expressions representing a given motion are equally optimal for processing by a digital computer. This means that complexity can be formalized. Although it by itself is a rather complicated topic.

There's nothing strange in the preferences you mention. Decomposition is one of the main methods to solve a complex problem. Indeed, that seems to be the way the brain works. Binary logic is the simpliest of them all so finding an explanation that goes by if/then/else scheme is a universally desirable thing. If it stays the test, of course.

Finding the most simple set of coordinates for a given problem is very an important task in physics.

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P. S. from a psychological point of view it can be argued that epicycles were in fact a more 'simple' way to solve the problem because they did not require to think 'out of the box' and check radically new hypotheses (which is generally harder than to increase complexity straight on). So the process of finding a simple solution is not always simple by itself.

I guess that epicycli-sh approximation of the planets' motion in geocentric coordinats can actually be made to a required level of precision in a manner of Fourier series but it's only became possible now when we have developed calculus. Of course it bears no sence other than to play around with math.

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I remember when an Orthodox Christian friend of mine was going on about the baroque elegance of geocentric calculations and how simplicity doesn't mean correct. I was like, 'but gravity!'.

Did he mean the epicycles? I wonder where he found actual calculations for those... those aren't things you just casually google search, I guess. I mean the actual numerical tables or calculations, not the general explanations. This seems to be the stuff you can only find in specialized history books at best.