this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
396 points (99.5% liked)
xkcd
8832 readers
194 users here now
A community for a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There is no cosmic frame of reference. Earth is moving, the sun is moving, the galaxy is moving, but you can choose any frame of reference within that. It'd be really silly to use the suns frame of reference, you'd use Earth's.
There is. Just because we can't correctly find and use it with our knowledge doesn't mean there isn't.
What would be silly is thinking that earth is some magical center of the universe.... We have abandoned this concept about 500 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentric_model
We disproved a cosmic frame of reference, or "ether" hypothesis using interferometry. It is well worth a read, I think you will enjoy it.
Not exactly - what was proven is that there's no way to distinguish between inertial frames of reference. There could be a universal frame of reference, which would most likely be the average velocity of all things in the universe. There's not much point in making a distinction in most cases, because if you can't detect it, it might as well not exist - but since we're making up time travel, we might as well make up a universal frame of reference, it doesn't break anything time travel hasn't already broken...