Talk:Copernican principle
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How about a page on "The Copernican Revolution". I see that term used a great deal!—Preceding unsigned comment added by 156.98.118.254 (talk • contribs) 12:58, 1 June 2005
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[edit] Comment moved from main page
The Copernican pricipal alone would leave no center of the solar system. Applying Occam's Razor however places the sun at the center of the solar system. Hackwrench 18:43, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Some content to be removed
The paragraph "The philosopher..." does not beloing here at all. The topic should be under Copernican revolution or something. The redirect from Copernican revolution to here is inadequate. The last paragraph would be more apprioprate in the article Cosmological principle. This content is lacking there. Andres 08:05, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Major re-write
I removed the definition that was here before, namely
that no "special" observers should be proposed.
since in science at least the Copernican principle refers to us, it does not prohibit some other class of observers from being special.
I'm tidying up the discussion of the Copernican principle in cosmology. This page needs to be separated into two, one for the Copernican principle, and one for the Copernican revolution. These are very different concepts!
Oops, forgot to sign: PaddyLeahy 20:11, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
I removed the discussion of the "isotropy" of time since there is nothing in the Copernican principle itself which insists on isotropy. Spatial isotropy comes into the picture because of the observed large-scale isotropy around the Earth, but there is no observed "isotropy" of time (ie. past and future have very different properties in many senses). PaddyLeahy 20:43, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
I've created a page on the Copernican revolution as suggested above, moved relevant material from this page to there, and added a bit more myself. PaddyLeahy 00:15, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Cleanup
This article needs a bit of general cleanup, especially in tone, which is too informal for an encyclopedia article at points. It could also benefit from some expansion.
In any case, I added the NPOV Check tag because it doesn't seem entirely fair to criticisms of the Copernican principal. This entire section could use a lot of work and expansion, and really ought to include more recent evidence, like the evidence discussed by Dr. Gonzalez. Moreover, there is not a section dedicated to evidence for the Copernican Principle, so the article is unbalanced. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 207.152.116.237 (talk • contribs) 14:37, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
- Hi 207..., please sign your comments! Feel free to improve the English. An NPOV check would show that critics of the Copernican principle are a tiny minority of cosmologists and thus on the usual NPOV rules they are grossly over-represented by even being mentioned in this article. But since Krauss is a major figure and the WMAP results have attracted some publicity it seems reasonable to include this section. I very much doubt that Krauss believes we should abandon the CP but he obviously felt an open-minded statement was called for. If you can cite a published, peer-reviewed article by Dr Gonzalez you could try to include it... I have no idea what his position is. The evidence for the CP, of course, is that the whole of modern cosmology is based on it and that theory now has many successes of both the predictive and explanatory kind. PaddyLeahy 15:08, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Citation for metric expansion
I don't believe the theory that the universe is expanding (metric expansion), because of the Copernican principle! Well... I don't have a full understanding of it really... lol but at any rate PLEASE properly cite the theory in the article. haha Robert M Johnson (talk) 17:42, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Relevant Information Prejudicially Removed
On 20 Sept, 2007, someone going by the name of, "Chalnoth" removed the following text from the article, stating that; "Lawrence Krauss was in no way, shape, or form intimating that the Earth is at the center of the universe". Although the referenced Edge article makes clear that Krauss was not advocating that the observational data was correct, he was indeed confirming the direct observational implications of the WMAP anomalies, which have since been refined to include other galaxy systems in a similarly meaningful manner, as was anticipated might happen within the very text of the Wikipedia article. This person also removed other evidence from an article from CERN that was only confirmed by Krauss' statement, strongly indicating that "Chalnoth" is consciously attempting to prejudicially censor the evidence. It should be emphasised that this kind of unscientific and preconceived ideological prejudice is commonly known to stem from what Brandon Carter identified as "anticentrist dogma", which scientists generally harbor, both, consciously and subconsciously, that causes them to willfully ignore clear evidence that runs contrary to the copernican cosmological extension, especially if it includes any form of anthropic significance.
The section to be restored and modified, previously read as follows:
Evidence against the Copernican principle
Some recent results from WMAP appear to run counter to Copernican expectations. The motion of the solar system, and the orientation of the plane of the ecliptic are aligned with features of the microwave sky which on conventional thinking are caused by structure at the edge of the observable universe[1][2]
Lawrence Krauss is quoted as follows in the referenced Edge.org article:[3]
"But when you look at CMB map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That's crazy. We're looking out at the whole universe. There's no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun — the plane of the earth around the sun — the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe."
It would be somewhat surprising if the WMAP alignments were a complete coincidence, but the anti-Copernican implications suggested by Krauss would be far more surprising, if true. Other possibilities are (i) that residual instrumental errors in WMAP cause the effect (ii) that expected microwave emission from within the solar system is contaminating the maps.[4] Richard A. Ryals (talk) 20:42, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
