Yes but the Earth isn't at rest and does travel round the sun and this is why axial tilt is important.
When Heliocentrists failed to disprove the geocentric nature that we live in, they resorted to inventing assumptions, many of which are so absurd that the inventors themselves admit that they are unfalsifiable (by implication unscientific) thought-experiments. Some of these assumptions include:
- the alleged tilt of the earth's axis,
- the so called Copernican principle,
- positive stellar parallax,
- uniformitiy of the speed of light,
- lengh contraction
- time dilation
- denial of inertia (only accepting an imaginary and isolated "chosen" inertial frame of reference)
- the earth supposedly moving at a various speeds (in order to account for the observed eclipses)
Five-hundred years ago, you were crazy if you thought the Earth was going around the sun. Today, you are crazy if you think it is not. What changed? That is a fascinating question, one which involves profound issues of science, faith, and identity. While most people assume that it has long since been experimentally proven that the Earth is orbiting the sun, no such experimental proof ever has been obtained. As historian
Lincoln Barnett states in The Universe and Dr. Einstein (which contains a foreword by Albert Einstein):
"We can't feel our motion through space, nor has any physical experiment ever proved that the Earth actually is in motion."Remarkably, physics had to be reconceptualized entirely by Einstein at the beginning of the 20th century, in part because no experiment directly had been able to measure this universally-assumed motion of the Earth around the sun. What Einstein could not foresee, however, was that the reconceptualized physics he offered in his special relativity theory in order to keep the Earth moving and the speed of light constant was superseded 10 years later by his general relativity theory which, by his own covariance equations, allowed the Earth to remain fixed and the speed of light to be variable.
Like Sisyphus rolling the huge rock up the hill only to see it fall down right before he reached the peak, in a strange way the principle of relativity made
Einstein's own theories relative. Perhaps he realized this truth in his 1938 book, The Evolution of Physics, in which he said:
"The struggle, so violent in the early days of science, between the views of [Claudius] Ptolemy and [Nicolaus] Copernicus would then be quite meaningless. Either coordinate system could be used with equal justification. The two sentences: 'the sun is at rest and the Earth moves,' or 'the sun moves and the Earth is at rest,' would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different coordinate systems."Physicist
Stephen Hawking said much the same in The Grand Design:
"So which is real, the Ptolemaic or the Copernican system? Although it is not uncommon for people to say that Copernicus proved Ptolemy wrong, that is not true. As in the case of our normal view versus that of the goldfish, one can use either picture as a model of the universe, for our observations of the heavens can be explained by assuming either the Earth or the sun to be at rest."So, two of our greatest scientific revolutions--the Copernican revolution and relativity--intimately are associated with this question of Earth's place in the larger scheme of things.
The Copernican Principle simply states that the Earth is not in any special or central location in the cosmos. It is sometimes generalized as the "cosmological principle," which holds that there are no special locations in the cosmos. On this fundamental assumption, which modern cosmology defines as the "isotropy and homogeneity of the universe," everything will look very much the same everywhere we look, and it will look very much the same no matter where we might be looking from.
If, for instance, we examine a bottle of homogenized milk, we see that there are no lumps of fat circulating in the milk nor resting on top. The milk would look the same no matter what part of it we examined. The Copernican and cosmological principles say much the same about the universe. Its matter and space are homogenized, as it were. To say it another way, these principles state that we are not able to distinguish one place from another in the universe. There is no up nor down, no left nor right, and no place where either we nor ET can claim to be in a special or central location.
This principle is named after Copernicus, since, in the 16th century, he revived the ancient Greek Pythagorean model that took Earth out of the center and put it among the other celestial bodies. As we then grew in our knowledge of the vastness of the universe from such icons as Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton, Ernst Mach, and Edwin Hubble, it was then we found out precisely what Copernicus' removal of Earth from the center meant, as
Carl Sagan stated so eerily in Cosmos:
"We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost between two spiral arms in the outskirts of a galaxy which is a member of a sparse cluster of galaxies, tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people."Copernican Principle is not a scientific fact, but rather a metaphysical assumption supported by profoundly convincing ideas and theories.For thousands of years, there was a prevailing geocentric view of the cosmos, in which the Earth was believed to be the centre of the universe. By looking up at the sky and seeing the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars moving about Earth along circular paths day after day, it seemed evident to ancient people that the Earth was stationary and the rest of the universe moved around it. Such a perspective was also in accordance with the God-centred worldview which maintained that a god or gods created us, and that there is a purpose to this creation.
The ancients were more than intelligent enough to understand that the same observational phenomena would be equally attributable to a rotation of the earth on its axis. So, why then was this perspective not adopted in ancient times?
“The simple truth is that the ancient world found it more plausible to believe that we were clearly the focus and centre of what we saw going around us” The Danish astronomer
Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), a brilliant experimental scientist whose measurements of the positions of the stars and planets surpassed any that were made prior to the invention of the telescope, proposed a model that attempted to serve as a compromise between the geocentric explanation and the Copernican theory. In this model, all planets except the Earth revolve around the Sun. In other words, the planets revolve around the Sun, and the Sun revolves around the Earth.
“The remarkable thing is that the Tycho system absolutely duplicates the observations we see in the sky just as the heliocentric system does. There is no visual distinction at all between the Tycho system and the Copernican system.”
“For two centuries the greatest scientists in the world tried to come up with an experiment that would measure that motion of the earth around the sun, that everyone almost knew was obviously occurring. But paradoxically, for two centuries every one of these experiments that tried to measure this universally assumed motion of the Earth around the Sun kept returning a value of zero for the motion of the earth, and this became a really big issue in science.” Over the last decade, a number of anomalous cosmological observations have emerged which do not make sense according to the Copernican Principle, the latest being the Planck satellite results of March 2013. While the science behind the findings is complex, to put it simply, the Copernican Principle requires that any variation in the radiation from the Cosmic Microwave Background (thermal radiation assumed to be left over from the ‘Big Bang’) be more or less randomly distributed throughout the universe.
However, the results of three separate missions, starting with the WMAP satellite in 2001, has shown anomalies in the background radiation which are aligned directly with the plane of our solar system and the equator of the Earth. This never-before-seen alignment of the Earth results in an axis through the universe, which scientists have dubbed the
‘Axis of Evil’, owing to the shocking implications for current models of the cosmos.
Laurence Krauss, American theoretical physicist and cosmologist, commented in 2005:
"When you look at [the cosmic microwave background] map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That’s crazy. We’re looking out at the whole universe. There’s no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun — the plane of the earth around the sun — the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe."Cosmologists, astrophysicists, and others initially brushed off the strange finding as an artifact, and dozens of papers and reports followed trying to address the anomaly. But when the Planck results returned in March 2013, the alignment showed up in yet even higher resolution and detail, and has now been replicated across three separate missions, suggesting there is something more than an ‘artifact’ that is going on here.
“The thing that has really launched the media hysteria about our film, is that we are pulling the covers off the dirty little secret that not only is there structure, that structure is related in astonishing ways to one and precisely one location in the universe, and it happens to be us!"
So much about the alleged tilt of the Earth!