Does The Earth Move, and Can You Prove It?

Question

My physics teacher gave an extra credit assignment worth 20 points. i want those points so i attempted at it with a 2 page paper and that took me 5 hrs of straight research and he rejected my paper with the saying that the stars/sun move or the earth moves around the sun/stars, and we all knows this is false but i have to prove it in a way that can't be disproved. So if you know and expirement/theory or what ever please let me know cause its bugging the hell out of me.

Answer 1

Simple answer. If you hang a mass on the end of a string there will be a slight angle from the vertical, this is due to the earth moving. You can also tell the earth rotates by the water spinning as it goes down the toilet or the way a hurricane spins.

You could also look at the Coriolis effect if you want.

Answer 2

A Foucault pendulum proves that the Earth is rotating and not the sky:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucault_pendulum

Stellar parallax is consistent with the Earth moving around the sun and not the sun moving around the Earth:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax

Retrograde planetary motion is a result of both the Earth and the planets moving around the sun in elliptic orbits.

Kepler's law and Newton's theory of gravitation describe planetary orbits with great precision and lead to a unified concept of how the solar system works.

Either one accepts these things as real or one brews up a cocktail of geocentrism where every failure of the system has to be explained by yet another layer of speculation and assumption without any hope for self-consistency.

Please understand that the difference between self-consistent, analytic theories and dogmatic philosophies like geocentrism is not a logical one because logic in conjunction with an arbitrary number of assumptions can be used to support basically anything.

The important thing to keep in mind is that the analytic scientist wants to find the SMALLEST, most reduced representation of how the world behaves. He lets himself guide by what the world tells him. He keeps looking for models that can not only explain all known observations but ones that can also predict new observations without the introduction of new assumptions.

In comparison the dogmatic method takes an explanation for granted and unchangeable. It then uses any number of additional assumptions that might be required to defend that dogma against any fact that is imposed on it by reality.

The above mentioned experiments and theories are part of the scientific analytic answer to that problem. But as powerful as they are, they can not move the mind of the person mired in dogma.

So if your teacher keeps asking for a LOGICAL proof, tell him that there is none. But also tell him that the empirical proof is in the pudding and while the bloody heliocentrists with their heretic sun-at-the-center-of-the-solar-system fallacy keep launching rockets to the planets and take snapshots of Titan's surface, the good and god-abiding geocentrists are still trying to figure out behind close doors how the strings have to be attached to the angels wings that move the nearby stars so they show exactly the parallax one would expect from a moving Earth.

:-)

Answer 3

That's a tough one & it's been a while since I had to tackle that. I read a paper once showing that if the universe is infinite that the earth most certainly could be called the center as any point in an infinite area can be called the center. However, if I remember this right, there's a wobble in the earths orbit around the sun that can only be explained by it being the earth orbiting the sun & not the other way around as the other planets don't wobble the same.
But what do I know, we thought Pluto was a planet in my days!!! LOL

Answer 4

revolution
The difference between summer and winter stars. The stars you see at night in the winter are obscured by daylight in the summer and the difference between them is not explained by the idea of the sun or stars moving around the earth. This shows that Earth orbit the sun as it rotates

rotation
As the answer above indicates there is the problem with plumb bobs.
The definitive experiment for earth moving was Foucault's pendelum where a pendelum seems to change the direction it swings in, but it is actually not changing, the earth is rotating underneath it. The clincher for the pendelum is that the rate of change changes depending on latitude.

If he allows NASA then they have a reason for trying to get as close as they can to the equator and for launching their rockets towards the east. The rotation of the earth adds to the speed of the rocket and allows it to reach escape/orbital velocity. If they lauched to the west they the rotational speed of the earth would be subtracted from the rocket's velocity.

Answer 5

The way it was proven that the earth goes around the sun was the motion of the planets in the sky. Sometimes they appear to move backwards in the sky and that kind of movement was only possible if the earth and all the other planets revolved around the sun. Read this website about Galileo, he's the one that proved it.

http://www.imahero.com/herohistory/galileo_herohistory.htm

Answer 6

That's a difficult task to prove the Earth is rotating (then you will see the sky, the Sun, the Moon move opposite).
My idea is you should go up to the top level of a skyscraper, then drop a small ball. It will drop not to the vertical point (drop line) in the ground.
But I don't know if you have learnt that kind of theory to prove that.

Answer 7

The Foucault pendulum offers physical evidence of the Earth rotating on its axis.

The parallax of stars offers optical evidence that Earth orbits the Sun.

Answer 8

epicycles would make it appear as though the earth was stationary and everything else revolved aroud it. however, gravity gives the earths motions away. objects like the stars and planets would have to be alot less massive to account for their motions around the earth in this scenario. and if these objects were made of nothing but hydrogen (lightest element) there would be no way to account for their circumferences due to gravity and their hydrogen composition. knowing the earths gravity, you can work out the other objects gravities and hence their mass and by understanding gravity, yuo would have to KNOW that the earth was indeed moving due to the influence uf much more massive objects near by. hope this helps....love the pendulum experiment...easiest way to prove this!!!!

Answer 9

She's right the world is flatter than Americas future . and if you studied anything about the universe you wouldn't be saying anything so dumb.
I wish it had been flat,
That way maybe America would never have been discovered.
you should study finance or even math your country wont even change to the metric system, man it is just too dumb, ask your brilliant teacher about that. use spell check please.

Answer 10

The earth moves on its axis very slowly.. But it does move! Now proving it, I am not sure about that part?