CellBioGuy comments on Open Thread, Apr. 13 - Apr. 19, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I discovered, today, a letter by the Lubavitcher Rebbe in which he claims that the sun revolves around the Earth:
Does anyone understand what this is trying to argue? I suspect he's saying something analogous to, you know, the universe shifting around the Earth in sync with the sun, which technically makes the sun revolve around the Earth (in a semantical sense). But I'm not confident of that.
Not actually valid. You can only shift non-accelerating reference frames without introducing extra gravity sources or fictitious forces. The reference frame of Earth falling around the Sun, and the Sun falling around the Earth, are not equivalent in the way that a frame moving 1000 km/s relative to another is.
If you're dealing with general relativity, there's no way to avoid gravity. You can pick a reference frame where you're not accelerating at the origin, but if you look at a path epsilon away then it will be accelerating against the tidal forces.