Why does the earth rotate the way it does?
Just about every major body in our solar system is rotating in the same direction (and I’ll get to the exceptions…), which is the direction that the cloud of dust and gasses that the sun and planets formed out of was rotating in. There’s no particular reason for the dust cloud to have been rotating in the direction it did. If it rotated the other way, so would we. The exceptions in the solar system prove the rule. Venus is roating backwards, and very slowly, because at some point in the very very very distant past it colided with another large body that knocked it hard enough to reverse its spin. Uranus is tilted on its side relative to the other planets, and so rotates “backwards” due to the way its axis faces. This is also from being rammed by another body in space, except that Uranus got knocked over instead of spun backwards.
