How often does the letter "r" occur in:
Does the earth orbit the sun or the sun orbit the
earth?
To believe the earth orbits the sun requires us to
disbelieve our instincts, that we are standing still.
To believe the sun orbits the earth requires us to
believe in epicycles.
Only when we analyze the planetary motions using the sun
centered model do we understand that this spirograph motion
is an illusion caused by the relative motion of Earth and
Mars.
When people discovered this..that the sun was at the
center of things, the orbits still didn't fit exactly. This
is because the orbits are not exactly circular but a tiny
bit elliptical.
This illustrates another idea about scientific
models--your model often ignores some of the details and
just gets the general behavior right.
In fact people later found that the orbits weren't
precisely ellipses but that planets tugged on each other due
to gravity when they came near each other.
This is how we discovered Uranus (pronounced Your Anus)
and illustrates an additional feature. Another point of a
good scientific model--deviations from the behavior
predicted by the model often lead to new discoveries.
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This page was last modified on Fri, August 02, 2002 04:32 PM
user
I counted 58 "r"s in that text.
assistant