Read more carefully. Consult my post at 3:40 AM, 8/27, above. I am not going to say any more about it though.

As to Asimov, I read a lot of books by him (he wrote an enormous number, as you know).

When I was thirteen.

I have always thought that Nabokov’s description of some writer or other (it may have been Hemingway) suits Asimov rather well: the world’s greatest writer of books for boys.

Obviously I’m expressing a mere taste in literature, but his science fiction seems to me to be juvenile, consisting almost entirely of talking heads who supply long-winded exposition. I have never read any of his mysteries, nor do I intend to.

As to the nonfiction of him that I’ve read, there he has always reminded ME of the 1920s Tom Swift series in his interests and intentions. You know: “Tom Swift and His Electric Runabout” or “Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle” or “Tom Swift and His Electric Locomotive.” I was too young to have read them when they first came out, but I had an uncle who stored a dozen or so of them in my grandparents’ attic, where I dug them out—that would have been in the 1950s—and read them cover to cover, just as I did Asimov a little later. I particularly remember an Asimov book in which he attempted to illustrate how to use a nuclear pile to operate just about anything. His atomic car, for instance, was basically a Stanley Steamer with a heat exchanger in contact with a wee atomic reactor. It really was a hoot. But his philosophy of life was so one-dimensional I rapidly came to the conclusion he was not worth reading any longer.

Never said that there was a 0 km/s velocity for both. Just for the galaxy – otherwise, how could it be attracting the GA? But it would be ridiculous to make this assertion, as the galaxy probably does not have the mass the attract the GA. Same for the Earth-Sun. In any case, the whole point was that it is completely irrelevant for the purpose of determining whether the Sun revolves around the Earth, or vice versa.

Joe: If you gaze at the heavens, the sun appears to be moving. All that GTR does is affirm that point of view, a very natural one for observers on earth, IF YOU PREFER THAT. You may also affirm that the earth is moving (even though it doesn’t seem to be) IF YOU PREFER THAT. The physics will yield the exact same measurements, including things like planetary retrograde motion and so forth.

Let’s say that we do prefer to say that the Earth is the center of the solar system. How would one explain that there is no other solar system in the entire universe that has a tiny planet with an enormous star revolving around it? And what explanation would there be for this, and the retrograde motion?

Joe: Oh by the way, I am pleased to learn that after a lot of obtuse and pointless haggling on your part, you agree with me that the faithful reason on the basis of evidence, such evidence as the testimony of the Bible supplies.

What I disputed is that one can beg the question and label it ‘revelation’. But if you demand that it be taken as the same sort of evidence as the Iliad, or the Enuma Elish, or the Theogeny, or Harry Potter, and that they are entitled to the same consideration as people who take these works as the Word of God, fine.

Joe: Please don’t waste time listing the reasons why you don’t like the evidence. Who cares?

It’s ultrarelativism to think that reasons and arguments are simply personal preferences. Or perhaps an emotivism.

Joe: For what it’s worth, I myself believe that the Bible must be interpreted rather than taken literally, but even so, there is a lot more to the Bible than the Parting of the Red Sea.

I know, and I never disputed that.

Joe: But go ahead, scribble away. I shall; have nothing further to say in reply to you, on this or any other topic.

As you wish.

As Maximilian points out, physicists still use Newton’s Laws. Heck, even NASA uses Newton, with the occasional relativistic fudge factor, because a fully-relativistic treatment of the course of their space probes would be prodigiously complex without adding any useful level of accuracy.

The basic notions of common descent and natural selection have been established at a level equal to Newton’s accomplishments. (Heck, we know the tree of life to greater precision than we know G, the gravitic constant.)

Darwin’s already been wrong in some respects – his account of heritability was tossed, and good riddance, by the discoveries of Mendel, then the discovery of DNA after that.

But heck, the point’s already been made decades ago by Asimov. Go read the essay I linked to.

Look, my remarks about the Great Attractor were intended to deal with your foolishness about far-apart objects having zero gravitational effect on each other. The Great Attractor is approximately 200 milllion light years away, yet cosmologists describe the Milky Way as “falling” toward it at the above-mentioned speed. In fact, both the Great Attractor and the Milky Way are falling at high speed toward something called the Shapley supercluster, which is approximately 650 million light years distant.

It is the mass–energy density of the entire universe that determines the curvature of space locally according to GTR That is NOT an inverse-square effect. Inverse-square laws derive from inverse-square forces, which is to say, from newtonian gravity. The General Theory, as I have already pointed out, eliminates the need for a concept of a gravitational force. All moving objects—relative to some rest frame—are moving inertially, yet their velocities are NOT constant, if only because spatially the velocity vector is changing direction.

If you gaze at the heavens, the sun appears to be moving. All that GTR does is affirm that point of view, a very natural one for observers on earth, IF YOU PREFER THAT. You may also affirm that the earth is moving (even though it doesn’t seem to be) IF YOU PREFER THAT. The physics will yield the exact same measurements, including things like planetary retrograde motion and so forth. It has to. Gauge transformations do not affect measurements except trivially. What you CANNOT do is affirm one or the other absolutely. There is no such thing as absolute motion, whether accelerated or unaccelerated, according to GTR. When Galileo said that the earth moves, he clearly meant that it moved absolutely, which would require some frame of reference that was known to be at rest absolutely. There is no such Frame. I do not know how to put it any other way.

Oh by the way, I am pleased to learn that after a lot of obtuse and pointless haggling on your part, you agree with me that the faithful reason on the basis of evidence, such evidence as the testimony of the Bible supplies. As I wrote before, whether and why you find it convincing is supremely irrelevant to the argument, which began way back when you stated “. . . secularist arguments and evidence are privileged above people who say that ‘God says it, I believe it, that settles it.’” That is a straw man. What the believer is actually saying is “On the basis of the evidence presented in the Bible, God says it, I believe it, that settles it.” Please don’t waste time listing the reasons why you don’t like the evidence. Who cares? Your objections are so petty, truncated, elliptical, snarky, and unserious that they remind me of nothing so much as a grumpy old drunk sprawled on a park bench, quart of Night Train in hand, grousing about the weather while throwing stones at the pigeons. It’s quite unseemly. I have rarely debated anyone with such little profit to myself.

For what it’s worth, I myself believe that the Bible must be interpreted rather than taken literally, but even so, there is a lot more to the Bible than the Parting of the Red Sea. That you can’t see it, is a problem, but it’s not the Bible’s or the believer’s problem.

But go ahead, scribble away. I shall; have nothing further to say in reply to you, on this or any other topic. This time, you may be pleased to learn, I mean it.

No problem at all, I wasn’t offended, I was just curious at to what sparked that thought.

Joe: The entire MilkyWay galaxy is rushing at approximately 1000 miles a second toward something called the Great Attractor because of gravity, that’s how close to zero those gravitational effects of distant objects on the Milky Way are?

Well, according to you, they are close to zero if I just assert that the Milky Way is at rest and attracting the Great Attractor. Same way as the Sun exerts less gravitational attraction on the Earth than vice versa if you assert that the Earth is the center of the solar system.

Joe: How may our galaxy be affected and not our solar system?

You tried to use it to explain why the Sun would revolve around the Earth. But if the entire galaxy is moving relative to the GA, the entire solar system moves relative to the GA, and it makes no difference whatsoever for the relation between the Sun and the Earth. Hence, it can’t be an explanation for why the more massive Sun would revolve around the tiny Earth.

I suppose that you just revel in being a contrarian – attacking Galileo and all.

Yet some believe that in an Argand diagram one can draw a picture of an imaginary number. I disagree and wonder if you do also. There is a while lot that may be said on the differing epistemic truths suggested by a drawing of the diagonal of a square and that of a complex number. Hhe question of the relationship of perception to cognition, namely, is very much in the foreground here. Here be shameless self-promotion: Consult the latter third of “The Body of Myth (1994),” by J. Nigro Sansonese (that’d be me!), which is devoted to just that sort of question: what is the connection between our science, including mathematics, and our neurobiology? You can find it on Amazon.

This is complete nonsense, and you know it. Newton wasn’t wrong. Einstein is just more right. Newton’s theories are still used by, probably, most physicists – because they are very highly accurate, to a point.

Newton was perfected, not shown to be wrong. Darwin has been perfected, and will be perfected more, and will not shown to be wrong.

Joe: Irrationality consists SOLELY in making an assertion that is self-contradictory, such as claiming that “A triangle has four sides.” Any other definition of irrationality is hopelessly vague and often

You just defined ‘irrationality’ out of existence.

Joe: Logic and, hence rationality, have nothing essentially to do with the truth of reasoning, but only with its validity.

Rationality is more than formal logic, and don’t you know it.

Joe: Nor am I the one trying to force a choice between Copernicus and Ptolemy with loony physical arguments like Maximilian’s, who in virtually the same breath claims to understand relative motion but also to reject the necessary conclusions deducible from it. THAT is self-contradiction. THAT is fanatical irrationality.

If that is irrational, explain the motion of the other bodies and the physical laws that underlie it. Explain why a less massive body is the center of this solar system, and nowhere else.

Joe: You exclude what the pious CALL “revelation” as evidence, when that is exactly what it is.

I have done no such thing, I only demand that what is labeled “revelation” be treated like any other historical work that is not labeled a “revelation”.

Joe: It is historical evidence.

That it is. So you basically agree with me that believing in the Bible is as reasonable as believing that Homer was inspired by the muses, and that Hector received divine aid in killing Patroclus.

Joe: I can defend the religious person against the calumny that he is irrational without being religious myself.

Theoretically possible, but… no.

Gravitational attraction falls off exponentially, and other solar systems, let alone other galaxies and the entire universe, are sufficiently far removed from ours to have zero effect on it in our solar system.

And again, Joe, I did not say that you can’t arbitrarily decide that the Earth is at rest, I said that there is no way you can come up with a coherent and unified explanation for the motion of the other bodies in our solar system. Nor can you explain the retrograde motion of the planet. Nor why in all other solar systems, the planets revolve around their star – all of which exposes your ridiculous ploy.

Joe: I have no more time to waste on you as you seem to be truly ineducable,

God forbid a religious enthusiast find one area in which he is better versed than his atheist interlocutor (usually not his own religion).

Joe: the near perfect exemplar of what the Good Book warns us of in Proverbs: “Better to meet a she bear with her whelps than a fool in his folly.”

“[W]hosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.” Matthew 5:22

Funny how that ‘good’ book contradicts itself so much. I am actually an Amalekite, so there is a whole other prescription for me and my family.