Is heliocentrism wrong?
Well yes, Copernicus and Galileo were both badly wrong, so wrong that if Kepler had given into the desire to fudge the Mars data collected by Tycho, western astronomy would have been fucked for a good couple of centuries. The Copernican model was still grounded in the belief in idealized shapes and spheres. But, the absence of a single inertial frame of reference doesn’t necessarily mean we can say that everything moves around an arbitrary point. You still have to deal with acceleration ~ Force/mass in both Newtonian and Relativistic frameworks (using a tilde because it’s not linear under Relativity). Applying this to the Earth and the Sun: the Sun’s mass is 2e30kg, and the Earth’s mass is 6e24kg. The acceleration of the Sun relative to the Earth is minimal. The acceleration of the Earth relative to the Sun is large.
> The reason why geocentrism makes bad predictions is because it is wrong. No. It’s a bad theory because it produces bad predictions, not the other way around. The heliocentric model is better, because it produces better predictions. Whether that means the model is closer to “objective reality” (whatever that is), is an academic point and IMO wankery. It doesn’t matter whether it’s objectively true or not, the point is that it’s predictive. The only reason models incorporating the Theory of Relativity are better, is that they produce even better predictions still. Arguably, that might make them even closer to ‘truth,’ but again, that’s getting outside the realm of science and into metaphysics/philosophy/religion/masturbation. Geocentrism sucked because it failed to produce predictions that corresponded to observations. Heliocentrism was an objectively superior predictive model in that its predictions worked without a lot of arm-twisting, and for that Galileo should be lauded. The fact
