Re: dialectal diversity in English

En réponse à John Cowan :


>Ah, it seems I have garden-pathed you successfully.  The description
>"the Earth revolves around the Sun" is only mathematically simpler than
>the description "the Sun revolves around the Earth".  It's possible to
>transpose all of Newtonian dynamics to the key of Tycho, so to speak,
>in which the Sun revolves around the Earth and the other planets revolve
>around the Sun; the mathematics is more complicated, but not incorrect.
But the physics would be all wrong, since strictly speaking when we talk
about a two-body system linked by gravity (let's neglect the influence of
the other bodies in the solar system. Since the influence of the Sun is so
overwhelming, this can be done without making errors of more than a few
percents), both bodies revolve around the inertial center of the whole
system (if you take one of the bodies as point of reference, you're not in
a Newtonian referential anymore and you cannot apply Newtonian laws as they
are, nor the expression "revolve around"). In the case of the system
Sun-Earth, the center of inertia happens to be *inside* the Sun (at a few
tens of kilometers from the actual center of the Sun, IIRC). So saying that
the Earth revolves around the Sun is indeed correct (it's a valid
approximation, seen the distance Sun-Earth) while saying the opposite is
not (it's not a valid approximation).

In Physics, some things *are* incorrect, even if they are mathematically
correct. That's what makes Physics different from Mathematics.

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.