Collaborative fact-checking of : Einstein: The Closet Geocentrist

who exactly is the fool? Is it the one who sees the Sun going down and concludes it is really the Sun that is moving, or is it the one who sees the Sun going down and thinks it is actually the world spinning round?

[according to Einstein:] 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

When Einstein first entered the scientific arena in 1905 with his famous paper espousing special relativity, it was written for the express purpose of countering about a half dozen experiments [...] that [...] showed it was the earth that was fixed

[according to Lincoln Barnett] the experiment was tried again by Morley and by others with the same conclusion: the apparent velocity of the earth through the ether was zero

[according to Lincoln Barnett] we can't feel our motion through space nor has any physical experiment ever proved that the earth actually is in motion

[according to Arthur Otis] in the effort to explain the Michelson-Morley experiment, the thought was advanced that [...] our earth occupied the omnipotent position in the universe with all the other heavenly bodies paying homage by revolving around it.

[according to historian B. Jaffe] the data were almost unbelievable. There was only one other possible conclusion to draw that the earth was at rest. This, of course, was preposterous.

[according to Adolf Baker] thus failure of Michelson and Morley to observe different speeds of light at different times of the year suggested that the earth must be at rest. [...]We have known since Galileo that the earth is not the center of the universe

[according to Michelson] This conclusion directly contradicts the explanation of the phenomenon of aberration which has been hitherto generally accepted, and which presupposes that the earth moves

[according to Julian Barbour] thus even now, three and a half centuries after Galileo's condemnation by the Inquisition, it is still remarkably difficult to say categorically whether the earth moves and if so in what precise sense

considering the devastating intellectual [...] and scientific upheaval a motionless earth in the center of the universe would have on our modern society, hardly anyone wants to allow the experimental evidence to be interpreted to give it any credence

Einstein invented the theory of special relativity to provide [...] at least one plausible answer to [...] does the earth go around the sun or does the sun go around the earth?

If the earth revolves that meant it was just like any other planet that went around the sun, with the sun going around other stars and those stars going around other stars in an endless cascade of circles.

it meant that the earth was somewhere out there in the remote recesses of space "tucked away", as Carl Sagan told us, "in some forgotten corner of the universe with no rhyme or reason of his existence"

Einstein was confronted with the fact that the 1887 Michelson Morley experiment and all other experiments both before and after failed to prove the earth was moving

as such Einstein did precisely what a scientist is not supposed to do : he began with an unproven conclusion that is that the earth is revolving around the sun and then set to work backwards to make the evidence fit the conclusion.

The only way Einstein could give some semblance of scientific credibility to the conundrum created by Michelson experiments was to reinvent physics from the bottom up.

[Einstein] He said that we should not look at Michelson experiment with our unaided eyes but we should done it with a pair of his new relativistic glasses.

Fitzgerald proposed that since Michelson's experimental apparatus was tied to the earth [...] the substance of space, otherwise known at that time as ether, pressed against Michelson's apparatus and thus compressed the atoms so as to shorten its length

[the Fitzgerald hypothesis] however suffered from a clear case of the logical fallacy of petitio principii, otherwise known as "using as proof the very thing one is trying to prove"

In his patent office story in 1905, Einstein became privy to Lorentz and Fitzgerald bold new hypothesis and he realized with them that the only way to adjust the result of Michelson's experiment...

if space was composed of a a particular substance it could then serve as an absolute reference frame, and an absolute reference frame did not bode well with his new theory that was going to consider everything relative.

Since Einstein needed a shrinkage of Michelson device to provide mankind with a moving earth

Einstein thought of something none had prior to him dreamed of. This solution however required an another assumption, another postulate. Namely that the speed of light was constant.

[about special relativity theory] ...since a moving object reflects light into his eyes and since that light has a limited time and speed to reach his eyes this handicap of light will result in a slightly distorted image in the eye

Einstein could point to many other experiments that science consider proof of a moving earth such as stellar parallax, [...] and especially Newton's physics which showed that the smaller body, the earth, had to revolve around a larger body, the sun.

[Einstein] He could have the contraction of Michelson's apparatus but he needed no direct physical cause per se. It was all matter of human perception.

After all, Michelson's experiment taken at face value showed no movement of the earth through space weather that space was composed of ether or not.

Maxwell for example maintained in its electromagnetic equations of 1865 that the speed of light was constant at the value C. This was only with respect with a stationary ether within which he believed the light was traveling.

the whole understanding depends on whether space is composed on ether and what if that ether moves

Michelson himself notes this fact in his write up in the American Journal of Science for November 1887.

for every single interferometer experiment performed from 1887 to 1930, over 40 years of results demonstrated by over dozen experimenters, every one found that at least some drift but nether nearly enough for an earth orbiting the sun at 2O miles/s.

Herbert Dingle who was one time an ardent follower of Einstein [...] suddenly rejected everything Einstein thought [...] . It was for one simple reason : if as Einstein observes everything was in relative motion and only the speed of light was absolute...

Max Abraham one of Einstein's trusted colleague insisted that if material dimension such as length could be contracted an abstract dimension such as time could be dilated than light itself should also be affected in the same proportion.

Why is light immune from the time contraction an time dilation that is applied to every other moving substance in the universe? Einstein had no answer for this question

Nothing has the power to change real time, rather influences from the environment on the clock counting mechanism such as gravity, pressure, [...} will all of that affect the position of a clock, weather it is a Rollex or a radioactive cesium clock.

in 1915, which is called the general theory of the relativity that the special theory he had invented in 1905 [...] was now forced to be superseded and the earth would once again be allowed to assume the superior position in the universe and remain there

as such, not only did Einstein general theory allowed the sun to revolve around the earth, it allowed the full universe to revolve around the earth

[forces created by a spinning universe]one of the force the forces would be what we have normally as the Coriolis and this Coriolis force will lock on to the Foucault pendulum and turn it while earth beneath remain motionless

in 1915 he discovered that the very earth he had previously insisted was moving along with everything else could be now the only object that was at rest in the universe,

As modern physicist Dennis Scamia puts it : whether the earth rotates once a day from West to East [...] or the heavens revolve once a day from East to West [...] the observable phenomena will be exactly the same, this shows a defect in Newtonian dynamics

apart from general reality and its pension to create unproven oddities such as black holes, wormholes, time warps and bent space

the principle of dynamic motion could be deduced by a simple combination of Newtonian and Machian mechanics

astronomer Fred Hoyle candidly admitted that : we can take whether the earth or the sun or any other point for that matter as the center of the solar system, this is certainly sold for the purely kinematical problem of describing the planet motions.