https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/02/26-percent-of-americans-say-the-sun-revolves-around-the-earth/453834/

Every two years, the National Science Foundation conducts a nationwide survey that stands as the "State of Science" in America. As well as tracking progress in science education and science jobs in the labor force, it provides a baseline of Americans' understanding of their natural world.

And not all of the findings on this year's survey are as horrible as the headline on this post implies. For instance, "Levels of factual knowledge in the United States are comparable to those in Europe and are generally higher than levels in countries in other parts of the world." For instance, 44 percent of those surveyed in the European Union in 2005 said the sun revolved around the Earth.

Too bad they don't have the benefit of knowledge from The Lord's Servants, The Prophets.

Then they would know the truth. The sun reflects light from kolob to the earth. Also, per Brigham Young, a Prophet of God - men live on the sun.

Prophets are real, science is guessing...

Waste of time these stupid things.

We gotta get those Quaker oat peeps off the moon!

The other 75% know that the earth is flat and the sun goes under the earth at night.

The pancake that is the Earth spins on the north/south axis as it orbits old Sol, which is the same size as the moon.

Who you gonna believe, your own eyes or some guy wearing long pants?

"America will soon pay down the National Debt, because it's the right thing to do!!

"And we'll balance the budget, too!"

--Buffalo Bob Smith, host of the Howdy Doody Show, to a despondent young female guest crying in the Peanut Gallery.

Their vote counts exactly as much as your vote.

How many U.S. residents believe DJT won the 2020 election?

How many believe Santa Clause is coming tonight with a win for Donald? The GOP was sleeping all snug in their beds...

GNPE Wrote:
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> How many U.S. residents believe DJT won the 2020
> election?

Don't make fun of him. That J stands for Genius...

What percentage of Americans believe that snakes talk ?

Welcome to Exmormon.org, where politics and educating the unwashed is the new paradigm...

Mormonism is just a token topic for the less fascinating and learned folk.

We never went to the moon. It was a movie secretly shot in the Nevada desert.

Hairy Cro Magnon men domesticated and tamed meat eating dinosaurs and rode them on saddles.

The Great Salt Lake is proof of Noah's flood. When the oceans rescinded, they left behind the salt flats.

We must hold the cities in the event of a nuclear war. The radiation dissipates after two days. I saw this in a civil defense film from the 1950s.

This reads much like a Ziller post--which is a good thing.

And just what time is that?

OIC ლ(╹◡╹ლ)
Goodnight Sweetie

I'm not sure why you need the self-portrait, but people can be proud of the strangest things.

Heh

Lot's Wife Wrote: ლ(╹◡╹ლ)
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> I'm not sure why you need the self-portrait, but
> people can be proud of the strangest things.

Put down the bat, a feather pen will work just fine..



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/06/2021 02:14AM by josephssmmyth.

Heh

All this poll proves is that the people stupid enough to answer polls are very stupid indeed. Most people I know avoid answering them! (I made the mistake once and had mountains of junk mail as a result. Never again.)

What's the old saying? At least half of people are below average intelligence? However, this shows just how bad some schools actually are. I remember our teacher telling us about this when I was around eight or nine. He turned a light bulb on and brought out a ball (basketball or soccer ball - something like that) and demonstrated how it worked. Maybe I was luckier than these people or they weren't paying attention.

Who are they anyway? I meet regular folk all the time, and haven't heard anyone tell me they think the sun goes around the Earth except small children. I suppose we talk about the sun going up and going down, but that's about it. I hear people say some idiotic things, but not this.

Your (true ;-) comment that "At least half of people are below average intelligence" made me think of Michael Gove, currently Minister for Putting Things on Top of One Another (oh all right, he's really Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office, whatever they both mean ;-) in the UK government, but was formerly Minister for Education (from 2010 to 2014), who said that he wantedall schools to be "above average"...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/06/2021 07:04AM by Soft Machine.

Soft Machine Wrote:
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> he wantedall schools to be
> "above average"...

:D The weird thing is that we understand what he means. I guess he should say something like "above the current average" or "to be of a higher standard" etc. Thanks to outliers, "averages" aren't as close to the norm as people think! We have some good public schools near where I live, and some bad ones - they're night and day compared to each other. The bad ones are in low income areas of course, and the high ones in rich ones. I think we have enough good ones locally to pull the average up, but it also means some pretty "regular" schools would be counted as below average because of it! (Even though they are nowhere near the worst.)

I've a friend who is a retired newspaper journalist. He says their nightmare story was if someone found someone was found lying in a graveyard somewhere. How do you phrase it? "Dead body found in graveyard"? Nope - graveyards are full of corpses, that's not news and no one will buy a paper based on that. "Murder victim found in cemetery"? Nope - if the police haven't released details, it could be a natural death or suicide. It's impossible to write a nice short headline on this!

Never-buried dead body found in cemetery, perhaps? :-D

After the theft of a newly deceased body from a hospital, it is found at the cemetery...crossdressed and holding an Oscar Meyer weiner, on which is written 'Anthony'.*





*Dragnet, S3E8

It could be just people trolling the polsters. I never answer polls, either -- I value my privacy.

I'm betting if people had to answer this question correctly to get a driver's license, they would do just fine with it.

When I've taught young children about the sun and the planets, I take them out to the playground. I appoint one child to play the sun. Then I take the most active kid, call him, "Mercury," and tell him to keep running like crazy around the sun. Then I keep going with the other planets, and even appoint a moon to run around the Earth. The kids love it, and it helps them to realize why the outer planets take a lot longer to circle the sun, because they have further to go.

Some schools still have those really cool solar system models.

How do you teach gravity?

I taught it frequently. I would hold a pencil in the air and let it drop to the floor. :)

For older kids, you could have several children hold a tablecloth in the air, while you drop a heavy ball in the center to show how gravity bends space. You could then drop a few marbles in as well to show why moons are caught by planets.

A lot of an elementary teacher's time is taken up by figuring out how to make abstract concepts physical and concrete. It's one of the most interesting aspects of the job.

> A lot of an elementary teacher's
> time is taken up by figuring out
> how to make abstract concepts
> physical and concrete.


So...

Are you implying that some of the kids who post here did not have elementary school teachers who really gave a darn?

I'm not arguing, just inquiring.

Some people do not learn from being told the facts, let me put it that way. I always told my students, "You can learn the easy way, or the hard way. But you will learn."

Some delusions such as this have little impact on life and others. Far more dangerous are delusions such as the one filling the headlines today that can have a far reaching impact if remotely allowed to stand.

Thank you.

Just saw this, LW. I am far more stunned, too, in reading the other day that only 42% of Americans have a passport.

Wait...

The sun doesn't go around the earth?

I'm sorry, the earth going around the sun is absurd. It the earth were spinning on its axis, SLC would be moving at 880 mph, and if the earth were moving around the sun, the orbital velocity would be 66,000 mph.

If I were moving that fast, I damn well would know it, and I can tell that I am obviously hardly moving at all. Scientists don't have a clue. They're just making s*** up to get research grants funded.

</s>



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/06/2021 01:06PM by Brother Of Jerry.

brother of jerry ~



has got it right in this thred ~



look up at the sky ~


֎֍֎


jump up in the air ~



you fall straight back down again ~



common sense exmos ~


֍֎֍

What are you doing here? It is supposed to be macaRomney who chimes in to agree. He is the champion of personal observation being the only real truth.

heh

This is a repeat of an older post.

In 1968 When Apollo 8 was orbiting the moon and sending back photos of the Earth, some British reporter interviewed the president of the British Flat Earth Society. This august personage said that it was interesting that from certain angles, the Earth "appeared" to be round; but it was just a clever photographic trick by the astronauts, or else an optical illusion. Of course, he and the Flat Earth Society knew better.

Another well-known Brit, Sherlock Holmes, didn't know that the Earth orbited the Sun until Dr. Watson told him. He then said he would do his best to forget it, since that kind of information was irrelevant to his primary interests.

We could always ask Borat's daughter. She says her "daddy is the smartest man in the whole flat world."

You do know Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character, right?

Hahaha! You mean, like Jesus?

Jesus is real. I am a witness to the name of Jesus.

I'm eternally grateful dad got us a subscription to National Geographic when I was 7 and NEVER told me what not to read.

Speaking about General Relativity, physicist Richard A. Muller, of Physics at UC Berkeley concluded:

“According to the general theory of relativity, the Sun does orbit the Earth. And the Earth orbits the Sun. And they both orbit together around a place in between. And both the Sun and the Earth are orbiting the Moon. . . . So it is not wrong to say that the Sun orbits the Earth. It just leads to much more complicated equations that give you no good intuition for the behavior of gravity.”

How General Relativity Complicates What We Know About Earth's Orbit (forbes.com)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/03/12/how-general-relativity-complicates-what-we-know-about-earths-orbit/?sh=6ed30a244951

Now: The Physics of Time: Muller, Richard A.: 9780393285239: Amazon.com: Books
https://www.amazon.com/Now-Physics-Time-Richard-Muller/dp/0393285235

Anyone scientifically literate knows the above, because it is a basic result of general relativity. Someone at the NSF needs to be fired.

Also, perhaps we should be more careful with our "<sighs>" "<yawns>" and "<groans>"

...and <burps> Let's declare jihad on out of context <burps>!!

No, not burburs! <burps>

Exactly.

This is not out of context at all!

The context (presumably) was a modern NSF survey--one inquiring specifically about scientific literacy in the context of today's scientific knowledge. If some such survey asked a question about whether the sun revolved around the earth, the correct response is YES!

When you suggest this is about context, the alternative context you apparently are proposing is a classical, Newtonian view of scientific reality. That is one context, but it is NOT the context of modern science. Presumably, the survey was asking about scientific knowledge as established TODAY! At least it would be fair to presuppose that when answering the survey.

But what really troubles me about this is that for some people what is important is not the correct answer to a valid survey, but the answer which confirms the survey's preconceptions; i.e. that people are scientifically illiterate.

I can only assume that your pushback here is based upon your own desire not included in that group.

Which is the better first-approximation of the solar system, Henry? The sun circles the earth or vice versa?

Neither. The concept of first approximation has no application in this context. Moreover, under relativity there is no favored reference point: Neither the earth, sun, or solar system is a favored reference point to be assumed when giving an answer about the motions of celestial bodies. This is not just a casual observation such that one reference frame should be "favored" for all practical purposes, or "as a first approximation." Relativity of motion is at the very heart of general relativity.

So, again, the answer to such a hypothetical (Does the sun revolve around the earth) is an unequivocal YES! This means that there *is* a reference frame which accurately describes the sun as revolving around the earth, and *that* reference frame is no more contrived or disfavored than one where the earth revolves around the sun. That is *the* scientific answer.

I understand, of course, the point of such a question. But it is a misguided question given the intent of the survey. And the ambiguity is worse than what is common in other social scientific surveys because it is a question involving the physical sciences, where the answer is presumed to have certainty and objectivity. And, of course, it does--but the certainty and objectivity depends upon a stated frame of reference.

So you think those who answered that the earth circles the sun are no wiser or better educated than those who answered that the sun orbits the earth.

I'm sure that will stand up to scrutiny.

Look, I readily admit that the vast majority of people responding to the survey most probably had no clue about general relativity, and were answering out of their own ignorance, and not out of acute scientific literacy.

But that fact does not excuse a bad question, and certainly does not justify published interpretations directed at demonstrating scientific illiteracy. The burden is on the propagating social scientists to make the survey and report accurate and meaningful. And interpreting answers to ambiguous questions as confirmation of a predefined negative thesis does not meet that burden.

"But that fact...does not justify published interpretations directed at demonstrating scientific illiteracy." This would only be true if there was some reason to assume that huge swaths of the respondents are familiar with general relativity and answered that the Sun revolves around the Earth *for that reason*.

I'm usually pedantic, but this level of pedantry is beyond even me. Well done!

Anziano Young Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> "But that fact...does not justify published
> interpretations directed at demonstrating
> scientific illiteracy." This would only be true if
> there was some reason to assume that huge swaths
> of the respondents are familiar with general
> relativity and answered that the Sun revolves
> around the Earth *for that reason*.
>
> I'm usually pedantic, but this level of pedantry
> is beyond even me. Well done!

I'm sorry. I seems to me that scientific reporting, and criticisms of the same, *should* be somewhat pedantic--unless, of course, it reports what you want to hear. Then, why worry about it!

Okay, so the question should have been posed like this?

Does the Sun rotate around the earth?

A) Yes, medieval science is correct.

B) No, for the reasons Newton elucidated.

C) Yes in a general relativistic sense.

Somehow I don't think that would give us a sense of scientific literacy in the general public. Only 5% of people could even understand the question.

Context matters.

I won't tell social scientists how to formulate their survey questions; except to do so with care. Certainly we can all agree that ambiguity (not to mention outright error) should be avoided.

I also would recommend that when considering scientific questions for such surveys, they might want to run it by a scientist. My guess is that no physicist or cosmologist would have approved such a question because they would have immediately seen the problem I have noted here.

So, perhaps this is just not a good question considering the intent of the survey. Speaking for myself, I would have understood the intent of the question, but still would have answered "Yes" with a sly chuckle; just because I hate surveys. Maybe that's my problem.

Here's a question for you:

"If the Sun orbits the Earth, how do you account for the orbits of the other planets, comets, stars, etc?"

You can only use the epicycle Spirgraph type theory from Ptolemy to explain it that way, but things don't move like that.

It doesn't happen.

So, even though you can make the numbers come out right to a degree, you can't account for it.

You can actually measure the parallax between the apparent positions of nearby stars when seen from opposite sides of the Earth's orbit.

If the Earth was in the center of the Universe, there would be no parallax -- but there is.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/14/2021 07:05PM by anybody.

Speaking of the Sun, how about the percentage of Americans who not only receive guidance from the Sun, the Moon, the planets and the stars, but count on it!?

The retrograde motions of Mercury (three times a year) & Venus (every 18 months) have always been a complete scandal!!

What's retrograde motion? It's when Mercury and Venus stop, back up, stop and then again march forward. It's an optical illusion, but because 'seeing is believing', explanations had to be given by practitioners of the ancient science of Astrology.

Once old Sol was made stationary and the planets set orbiting, the explanation for the optical illusion became clear.

But take a look at astrology... How many people have faith in this alternative 'science'? And within this science of the signs of the Zodiac, actions (even optically illusionary ones) must have consequences!

It is apparently a well established astrological fact that when "...Venus appears to be moving backwards [sic] in its orbit, all of the qualities Venus embodies slow down and get directed inwards. Venus represents your love life and how you socialise [sic]; so, during this retrograde, these areas in your life may become less clear.”

Is that clear?

I didn't bother to look up what it means when three times a year, Mercury appears to stop, back up, stop and then go forward. But whether I'm in a huge majority, a small majority, or in the minority, I just don't know. I'm probably better off this way.


Two of my father's brothers went to a numerologist. After paying their money, one of the take-aways was that each uncle named his two kids with names starting with the letter H: Henry, Horace, Hazel & Helen...very typical Mexican names, right?

elderolddog Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> I didn't bother to look up what it means when
> three times a year, Mercury appears to stop, back
> up, stop and then go forward. But whether I'm in
> a huge majority, a small majority, or in the
> minority, I just don't know. I'm probably better
> off this way.

It means that things underway during that period of time need to be double-checked (or more) for accuracy and understanding....and also, that apparent set-backs during the retrograde period may turn out to be for the ultimate good (that an apparent "set-back," from an in-the-rear-view-window perspective, actually had a protective effect).



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/15/2021 01:20AM by Tevai.

It's not really ‘push back’. It's just standing behind you, making faces.

It's not important like a tractor pull, or a basket of soggy nachos at the racetrack. The sun's up or it ain't.