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Ferociousfeind t1_j7gz5o3 wrote

There isn't a medium that the sun is moving through, nothing is dragging on its material like would produce "waves of fire" in its "path". The movement is imaginary- only real when you're measuring relative to other objects. No motion is universal, this is the big revelation of Einstein's theories of relativity.

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starryeyes224 t1_j7h0sqw wrote

This doesn’t apply to Earth right? Especially since it does move - by revolving around the sun

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Scro86 t1_j7h1elf wrote

It does apply to earth. All motion is relative to something else. How fast are you going right now? You may be sitting still and think, I’m not moving at all. Ok, but the earth is spinning, so now how fast are you going? Ok, but the earth is also rotating around the sun. It’s also part of the solar system, which is moving, but it’s also part of the Milky Way, which is moving. But it also is part of the universe, which is expanding. So how fast are you going? The only way to answer it is to measure your speed “relative” to another object

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Medeaa t1_j7hdlrz wrote

This was such a good answer! Thank you!

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Scro86 t1_j7hhk85 wrote

Thanks. I’m paraphrasing the explanation from a book called “Why does E=MC2?” By Dr. Brian Cox and Dr. Jeff Forshaw. The book is written to explain the theory of relativity in a way normal people can understand, and talks about the implications of that theory on the real world. Makes a hard topic easy and fun to understand, so if you are interested I highly recommend it.

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Medeaa t1_j7hk815 wrote

Awesome I’ll for sure put that on my TBR

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Ferociousfeind t1_j7h2j88 wrote

It applies to everything. If you fix earth in one universal place, the sun revolves around the earth. Nothing really makes sense, because there are phantom accelerations everywhere (because a more truthful model makes the sun stationary, since it is the much larger object, and experiences less acceleration than the earth does) but aside from those phantom accelerations, which are all real accelerations that the earth is experiencing, which we are applying to the rest of the universe to force earth to stay still, all the other math still checks out.

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PogTuber t1_j7h75mu wrote

Sorta, we have indeed measured our motion and the motion of the galaxy against the CMB. That's the biggest "rest state" we can measure against.

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