Introduction to Geocentrism

Dr. Neville Thomas Jones, Ph.D.

In GEOCENTRIC COSMOLOGY, the World does not rotate.
In GEOCENTRIC COSMOLOGY, the World does not orbit the Sun.
Hence, in GEOCENTRIC COSMOLOGY, the motions we see are real.

Geocentric means World-centred. In particular, a geocentric universe is one in which the centres of the World and of the (finite) universe coincide.

Observational data, together with our instincts or senses, indicate to us that the universe is in reality geocentric. In addition, all physical experiments designed to demonstrate some alleged motion of the World have consistently produced a null result. Only theoretical ideas support a different interpretation of our surroundings than this.

Cosmology is the area of physics which deals with the workings and structure of the universe as a whole.

Ancient cosmologies were invariably geocentric, the main four of which being those due to Apollonius of Perga (c.262 - c.190 BC), Hipparchus of Nicaea (c.190 - c.125 BC), Claudius Ptolemy (Latinized form of Klaudios Ptolemaios, c.90 - c.168) and Tyge (Latinized as Tycho) Brahe (1546-1601). These are often dismissed as unsound or clumsy, and certainly the deferents, epicycles and equant constructions of the Ptolemaic model, for example, cannot be defended from physical foundations. The situation with modern ideas, however, is no better in either respect, meaning that the fundamental workings of the heavens are just as relevant to us as ever they were in the past.

We feel no motion of the World on which we all live. Furthermore, no experiment in all physics has ever demonstrated that the World moves around the Sun, or that it rotates on an axis. From the standpoint of our senses, therefore, it seems simply common sense to attribute the motion of the Sun, Moon, planets and stars to those objects themselves, rather than to some multi-component, contorted movement of the World. Certainly, to a good approximation, the stars appear to go around us as if they are each attached to the inner surface of a huge celestial sphere, which is itself rotating above our heads from east to west on a celestial north-south polar axis.

Figure 1: The celestial sphere.

In some geocentric models of the universe, the Sun goes around the World every day, following a path in the sky called the ecliptic. The seasons are simply explained by the Sun traversing the ecliptic over a period of twelve months, such that the declination of the Sun (effectively a measure of its height above the celestial equator) will vary slightly from one day to the next. Contemplation of Fig. 1 will illustrate the mechanism by which the Sun reaches its highest position in the sky on the summer solstice, its lowest position on the winter solstice and that it crosses the equator at the points referred to as the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.

Some geocentrists, the most notable of which were three patriarchs of the Cassini family, maintain a central, but rotating, World. In this case, the Sun would still take twelve months to go once around the ecliptic and this would correspond the the time it took to orbit the World.

The difference between the non-rotating-World and rotating-World geocentric models is that in the former the ecliptic itself rotates about the World in one sidereal day (23h 56m 4s), whereas in the latter the ecliptic is fixed on the non-rotating celestial sphere.

Cosmogony is the name given to research into the origin of the universe.

We are currently taught the notion that everything around us sprang into existence, of its own accord, between twelve and twenty billion years ago via an explosion of everything out of nothing. However, the considered opinion of the primary authors of this website is that such a proposal is an untenable fairy-tale. In this respect, at least, we are in agreement with the prominent twentieth-century cosmologist, Professor Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), who originally, and contemptuously, nicknamed this hypothetical explosion the "Big Bang" (after which he never referred to it by that name again).

Summary

Within a geocentric cosmology, the World is always positioned at the very centre of the universe (which means that the World is not a planet and it does not orbit the Sun).

Even though the concept is currently out of favour, there are several geocentric models of the universe which fit observational data. In some of these models the centrally-located World rotates about an axis, and in others it does not.