Why is that? Because of the Earth’s rotation. It is much more expensive to launch rockets westward than eastward, so both government agencies and private companies avoid it. In this post I want to describe the best proof I know of that the Earth rotates daily, using something else our ancestors didn’t have. Unlike the demonstration furnished by a Foucault pendulum, this proof is clear and intuitive, involving no trigonometry, no complicated diagrams, and no mind-bending arguments. Let’s start by imagining we owned something perfect (almost) for demonstrating that the Earth is spinning daily. Suppose we are given a magic wand, with an amazing occult power: if you point it at a distant star, any star (excepting the Sun), from any location on the Earth, it will forever stay pointed at that star. Just think of all the wonderful things you could do with this device!Īs a simple example, imagine you go to the equator near Quito, Ecuador, on the day when Mintaka, the right-most star in the belt of the constellation Orion, is directly overhead at midnight. Right at midnight, you point the magic wand straight up at Mintaka. By 6 am, Mintaka is setting in the west, and the wand points west too. At noon, with the Sun overhead, Mintaka is directly opposite the Sun, on the opposite side of the Earth and so your wand points straight down. At 6pm Mintaka rises, and the wand points toward it in the east. And when Mintaka is again overhead, the wand points straight up. From your perspective, it has rotated once during the 24 hour period.Īnd from then on, through this second night and into the third and fourth, the wand follows Mintaka on its path around the sky. It doesn’t matter if it’s cloudy or stormy or clear it doesn’t matter if it’s day or night. Always, like magic, the wand points at Mintaka.
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