Geocentrism

I love this picture from the Middle Ages. It is criticized as the representation of Christian ignorance concerning the universe, particularly the idea that the moon, sun, and stars we see with the naked eye are attached to a rigid dome which rotates around the earth.

Is that all that we see here? No, the artist understood that there are worlds beyond this one. Clouds (nebulae?), wheels (galaxies?), other light sources, and matter arranged in concentric circles. Is that ignorance?

Physicist Dr. John Hartnett, who has published more than 120 papers in scientific journals and holds two patents, has published a book attempting to explain how we see distant starlight in a universe only thousands of years old. The physics is far beyond my understanding, but one interesting thing he includes is the centrality of our galaxy.

Edwin Hubble's observations of galaxy redshifts indicated to him that we are at the center of a spherically symmetric distribution of galaxies. Hubble rejected his own conclusion. (Why he rejected it was philosophical, not observational.) More recent developments support his observations.

Large-scale mapping projects take a slice of the heavens and project it onto a plane. These maps look like wedges on which each galaxy is represented by a dot.  The dots "appear to form into enormous concentric structures centred on the middle" [point of the wedge] "where our galaxy is located."

Geocentrism is the idea that the earth—not just our galaxy—is at rest at the very center of it all, and that the universe moves around it. The small minority of people who hold to geocentrism believe this is the model of the universe found in the Bible. They may be right—I don't know enough to say. But I do know that "scientific" models of the universe are met with contradiction after contradiction, necessitating new theories and explanations all the time.

Link to Dr. Harnett's book, Starlight, Time and the New Physics
Link to Geocentrism website