> With that said, I don't think there's any valid answer besides "you can define your terms and points of reference such that it does or doesn't; there's no particular physical reality to the matter".
Isn’t the article linked here exactly the correct and valid answer of whether the earth orbits the sun? Philosophy likes to make things all seem like perception and mental frame of reference, and sometimes it is with people, but the earth’s trajectory relative to the sun doesn’t change if we think about it different or define terms differently.
Maybe the whole problem is asking an invalid binary right/wrong question, when the actual valid answer is that it’s not binary. This one hinges on your definition of “orbit”, when the real valid answer is that there are more than 2 masses, so using orbit in the first place is misleading. Another valid answer to whether the earth orbits the sun might be 99.87% yes and 0.013% no.
> Philosophy likes to make things all seem like perception and mental frame of reference, and sometimes it is with people, but the earth’s trajectory relative to the sun doesn’t change if we think about it different or define terms differently.
That's exactly the point here - answering the question of which revolves around what boils down to deciding which body is stationary, and that depends entirely on your frame of reference. Viewed from the Earth the sun is moving, and viewed from the sun the Earth is moving, and viewed from somewhere else they both move relative to one another. But none of those viewpoints is any more physically real than the others - they're just choices for where to put the origin of the coordinate system, as it were.
That is, if you wanted to predict how the planets will move in the future, you could start from any of those assumptions and still make correct predictions. That's what I mean by saying there's no physical reality to the matter of which frame of reference you choose.
> Isn’t the article linked here exactly the correct and valid answer of whether the earth orbits the sun?
Is it though? I'm genuinely curious. For example, in our current reference, earth almost always is orbiting the sun, but what would happen if the entire system was not contained in the galaxy but in the middle of space (not attached to any galaxy), how would the planetary orbit change?
Another question would be if our solar system was closer to the center of the galaxy, would the orbits of the planets stay the same or would they be skewed because of gravitational forces from the center of galaxy + other solar systems?
> Another valid answer to whether the earth orbits the sun might be 99.87% yes and 0.013% no.
I'm not sure if you're an astronomer or have a weather of knowledge or PhD in this topic but from the article, the answer is given as "Technically, what is going on is that the Earth, Sun and all the planets are orbiting around the center of mass of the solar system," writes Cathy Jordan, a Cornell University Ask an Astronomer contributor." That would be the only correct answer it seems. If the center of mass happens to be direct center of the sun or skewed one way or other is irrelevant to the fact. However, I could be wrong in my understanding.
Isn’t the article linked here exactly the correct and valid answer of whether the earth orbits the sun? Philosophy likes to make things all seem like perception and mental frame of reference, and sometimes it is with people, but the earth’s trajectory relative to the sun doesn’t change if we think about it different or define terms differently.
Maybe the whole problem is asking an invalid binary right/wrong question, when the actual valid answer is that it’s not binary. This one hinges on your definition of “orbit”, when the real valid answer is that there are more than 2 masses, so using orbit in the first place is misleading. Another valid answer to whether the earth orbits the sun might be 99.87% yes and 0.013% no.