A new documentary, The Principle, released in October 2014, challenged 400 years of faith in the Copernican Principle by providing shocking new scientific evidence that Earth has a special place in space. The film sparked an insane media smear campaign and a storm of controversy as angry academics fiercely defended their position. Perhaps this is a radically new understanding of our Universe and our place in it? Rick Delano, writer and producer of The Principle, thinks it is.
While most today believe that our brilliant scientific minds, space exploration programs, high-tech telescopes and equipment have long proven that the earth revolves around the sun, Delano argues that there is no experimental evidence of this. Historian Lincoln Barnett in his book The Universe and Dr. Einstein writes: "We cannot feel our movement in space, no physical experiment has proven that the Earth is in motion." Thus, Delano argues that Copernicus' principle is not a scientific fact, but a metaphysical assumption supported by compelling theories. The Principle is the first documentary in which leading scientists analyze the scientific basis of the Copernican principle and raise the question of the true position of the Earth in space.
Copernicus system.
Ancient beliefs about our place in space
For thousands of years, the predominant geocentric theory of the structure of the cosmos, the Earth was considered the center of the universe. Seeing day after day the movement of the Sun, Moon, planets and stars around the Earth in circular trajectories, the ancient people concluded that the Earth was stationary, and the rest of the universe moved around it. This was consistent with the notion that a god or gods created the Earth for a specific purpose.
However, Delano explained in an interview with Ancient Sources magazine that "ancient people were smart enough to understand that these phenomena also indicate the rotation of the Earth on its axis." Why didn't they accept this point of view?
"People of the ancient world found it more convincing and believable that the Earth is the focus and center of what revolves around it," Delano said.
Promotional video:
Thus, the geocentric model of the Universe served as the basis for the cosmological systems of many ancient civilizations, in particular Ancient Greece (from the 4th century BC), including the systems of Aristotle and Ptolemy. Astronomical predictions made in accordance with Ptolemy's geocentric model have been used to prepare astrological and astronomical charts for 1,500 years.
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 - 1543), a brilliant mathematician and astronomer from Royal Prussia, from the Kingdom of Poland, created a theory that turned thousands of years of belief in a geocentric model of the universe upside down.
Ptolemy's geocentric model.
Copernicus revolution
In his work "On the Circulation of the Celestial Spheres" in 1543, Copernicus proposed replacing the geocentric system with a heliocentric model, according to which the Earth and other planets revolve around the Sun. He believed that heliocentrism could better explain the motion of celestial bodies than the geocentric model. The point of this revolutionary idea is that the Earth was no longer seen as the center of the universe. This concept became known as the "Copernican principle".
This shocking statement was opposed by the Catholic Church, wanting to preserve the principles of civilization and religion. Suddenly it became clear that “we live on an insignificant planet of an unremarkable star, lost in the corner of the universe, in which there are many more galaxies than people,” as Carl Sagan succinctly put it in the 20th century.
Such a radical change in the worldview cannot happen overnight; at least it took another hundred years for Copernicus's ideas to become well known. Meanwhile, many scientists tried to measure the Earth's orbit around the Sun.
“For two centuries, the world's greatest scientists have been trying to find a way to measure the movement of the Earth around the Sun that everyone was almost certain of,” Delano says. "But paradoxically, over the course of two centuries, each of the experiments that tried to measure this supposed movement of the Earth around the Sun, consistently gave a zero value, and this has become a really big problem in science."
The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), a brilliant scientist, surpassed all in his experiments on measuring the positions of stars and planets, and they were made before the invention of the telescope. He proposed a model that served as a compromise between the geocentric system and the Copernican theory. In this model, all planets except the Earth revolve around the Sun. In other words, the planets revolve around the sun, and the sun revolves around the earth.
“It is noteworthy that Tycho Brahe's system is absolutely consistent with what we see in the sky, that is, the heliocentric system. There is no visual difference between the Tycho system and the Copernican system,”Delano explained.
Tycho Brahe's geo-heliocentric model.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, tremendous advances were made in the field of astronomy and science by Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton, whose works are too complex to be considered in this article. Thus, we will immediately move forward into the 20th century, to the work of Albert Einstein.
Einstein, puzzled by the failure of every experiment to measure the Earth's motion around the Sun, tried to explain why it could not be measured. Result? Einstein's famous theory of relativity. Einstein argued that the motion of the Earth could not be detected in an optical experiment, since the reference point is not certain. In other words, the Earth with the Sun revolving around it can be in the center of the Universe, and, conversely, the Sun is in the center, and the Earth revolves around it.
However, Einstein argued that, although it looks like we are in the center of the universe, and all galaxies are moving away from us (as Edward Hubble observed with a telescope in 1920), this is an illusion. He noted that since space is not flat, but curved, and at the same time expands, it will seem that galaxies seem to radiate from the point where the observer is. This theory, of course, supported Copernicus' principle that there is no center, no edge, no special position.
Illustration showing the relationship between space-time and gravity.
New cosmological observations challenge Copernicus' principle
Over the past decade, a large number of cosmological studies and observations have been carried out, the results of which do not correspond to the Copernican principle. In particular - data from the Planck satellite, obtained in March 2013. According to Copernicus' theory, any change in radiation from the cosmic microwave background appears more or less randomly throughout the universe. However, the results of three separate space missions, starting with the WMAP satellite in 2001, have revealed anomalies in the background cosmic radiation that are in line with our solar system and the Earth's equator. The never-before-seen alignment of the Earth has formed an axis through the universe, which scientists have dubbed the "axis of evil" due to shocking consequences for known space theories and models of the cosmos.
Lawrence Krauss, American theoretical physicist and cosmologist, commented in 2005: “If you look at the map of the Universe, you will notice that the structure that is observed is indeed strangely correlated with the Earth's plane around the Sun. Copernicus returns to haunt us? This is madness. We look at the entire universe. It is simply impossible for there to be a correlation with the motion of our Earth around the Sun - the plane of motion of the Earth around the Sun - the ecliptic. Then we can say that we are really the center of the universe."
Cosmologists, astrophysicists and other scientists immediately dismissed the strange conclusion as an artifact. Dozens of articles and reports by scientists trying to explain this anomaly followed. But when data was received from Planck, which returned in March 2013, the alignment showed photos with even higher resolution and detail, now confirmed by the results of three more separate missions. This suggests more than an "artifact".
“The hysteria in the media about our film was caused by the fact that we tore the veil from a dirty little secret that not only there is a certain structure, but that this structure is connected in an amazing way with exactly one place in the Universe - with our Earth,” Delano said. … - If there is something fundamentally wrong in the cosmology and theory of Copernicus, then our whole picture of reality will change again, and the irony is that the main thing, as in the last two great scientific revolutions, is the mysterious and insoluble question of our place in space.