Tag: Symmetry

Well, now that we’ve seen how easily anyone who wants to can show the Earth’s a sphere and measure its size — something the classical Greeks knew how to do, using slightly more subtle methods — it’s time to face a bigger challenge that the classical Greeks never figured out. How can we check, and confirm, that the Earth is spinning daily, around an axis that passes through the north and south poles?

We definitely need techniques and knowledge that the Greeks didn’t have; the centuries of Greek astronomy included many great thinkers who were too smart to be easily fooled. The problem, fundamentally, is that it is not obvious in daily life that the Earth is spinning — we don’t feel it, for reasons worthy of a future discussion — and it’s not obvious in astronomy either, because it is hard to tell the difference between the Earth spinning versus the sky spinning. In fact, if it’s the sky that’s spinning, it’s clear why we don’t feel the motion of the Earth’s spin, whereas if the Earth is spinning then you will need to explain why we don’t feel any sense of motion. Common sense tells us that we, and the Earth, are stationary. So even though many people over the centuries did propose the Earth is spinning, it was very hard for them to convince anyone; they had neither the right technology nor a coherent understanding of basic physics.

Broken Symmetry

One way to differentiate a rotating Earth from a non-rotating one is to focus on the notion of symmetry. On a non-rotating featureless ball, even if we define it to have north and south poles, there’s no difference between East and West. There’s a symmetry: if you look at a mirror image of the ball, West and East are flipped, but there’s nothing about the ball that looks any different.