https://xkcd.com/2898

Alt text:

“Some people say light is waves, and some say it’s particles, so I bet light is some in-between thing that’s both wave and particle depending on how you look at it. Am I right?” “YES, BUT YOU SHOULDN’T BE!”

  • gapbetweenus@feddit.de
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    8 months ago

    Pretty sure you can chose earth as fix point and have everything rotate around it on really strange orbits. Everything is kind of relative.

    • Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      8 months ago

      Wouldn’t that break relativity tho if you treat the earth as a fixed point? Stuff really far out would have to be going absurdly faster than light to orbit the earth once every 24h. I feel like that’s one of the ways to tell whether or not you’re rotating, or stuff is orbiting you.

      • Natanael@slrpnk.net
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        8 months ago

        Relativity works when earth is the center because it’s relative, we just calculate everything with earth as the frame of reference. It does make a lot of math harder, but that’s what we already are doing when using earth based telescopes (although we try to shift the math to a more reasonable frame of reference for most stuff, but earth is always the starting point because we’re making all the measurements from here)

      • paholg@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        If the earth is fixed (not just in position, but in rotation), you’re using a non-inertial reference frame, and things get wonky. But you can make the math work.

      • gapbetweenus@feddit.de
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        8 months ago

        Why would objects far out need to orbit earth every 24h?

        Wouldn’t that break relativity tho if you treat the earth as a fixed point?

        To be honest, physics was never my strong point. If I remember correctly you could chose any point as your observational (?) point but maybe someone with some real physics cred can chime in.