Sunday, April 24, 2011

Bones is stupid sometimes. Yeti = Heliocentrism.

In Season 6 episode 18 of Bones, Bones and Booth have a discussion where Booth claims to have seen a Yeti and Bones scoffs at it. Then Booth says that she's just the same as those who were certain that the Sun revolved around the Earth.

Heliocenticity was never an entirely terrible claim. It was lost between Aristarchus and Copernicus but largely lost because, most science was lost and Ptolemy was a towering genius whose geocentric model was the go to method of calculation until after Newton. While theoretically simple, it wasn't an accurate way of predicting the future. And the Inquisition voted 11 to 0 to dogmatize geocentrism (because geocentrism was Biblical) during the time of Galileo. In a real sense, you really could see it either way and it just changes the math a lot. Generally due to universal gravitation it's clear that the Earth travels around the sun far more than the reverse is true, but from a standpoint of calculation it might be easier to go from the Earth because being on Earth this is where observations are made.

However the comparison between such "close-mindedness" and the failure to accept Cryptozoological crap by hearsay is rather unfair. The proper position is always to go where the evidence leads you, and really there was a lot of evidence on both sides of the solar system debate (it wasn't until after Newton that people dropped Ptolemy all together, even when he lost the theory debate he was still better at calculating the planets position.) Whereas there's no good evidence for bigfoot, chupacabra, or yetis.

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