Am I still talking hot air here? Is there no one who is willing to look at this for what it truly is? Then let me add yet more failed experiments, all leading to one massive successful one (even though it was considered a failure among the heliocentrists) that scored big time for the geocentrists, to the repertoire. If you like history then you will love this:
In 1818, a French scientist named Dominique Arago performed two experiments to establish the motion of the Earth and prove it once and for all. For the hypothesis of the first experiment, he posited that, just as a camera must have its lens refocused to capture an object that has moved in position relative to his, either closer or away, the same must be done for telescopes viewing celestial bodies like stars as the Earth moves closer to them and further away from them as it's proximity to them changes throughout the course of its orbit about the sun. Simple enough, right? WRONG.
So he set about his experiment and set his telescope to view a particular star over a period of six months. During that time frame, he never once had to refocus the lens. His experiment failed, and he was astonished at the result. In light of this data, as it was known then that the speed of light was constant, he reasoned like any heliocentrist would that the star was simply so far away that the slight movement of the Earth in relation to it simply didn't provide a large enough difference to have to refocus the lens. However, from the geocentrist point of view, the focusing problem still applied, but that nothing needed refocusing because the star retained the same distance from the Earth the entire time, and thus the Earth had not moved.
So Arago did another experiment to explain the first. Knowing that light travels slower through denser mediums, such as glass or water, Arago reasoned that if the Earth were not revolving around the sun, then the space between the sun and the Earth, which was understood at the time to be composed of a rarefied substance called Aether, then the speed of light should be impeded to some degree or another by the Aether, just as it is in glass or water. The experiment, however, revealed that regardless of whether a beam of light was pointed in the direction of Earth's supposed orbit around the sun, or in the opposite direction of its orbit, there was no effect on the speed of light. The experiment also showed that the beam of light had the same refraction index in glass as that of starlight in glass. The data from this experiment only seemed to point to an Earth that did not move.
This was his conclusion from the experiments:
Arago submitted the matter to the test of experiment, and concluded that the light coming from any star behaves in all cases of reflexion and refraction precisely as it would if the star were situated in the place which it appears to occupy in consequence of aberration, and the earth were at rest; so that the apparent refraction in a moving prism is equal to the absolute refraction in a fixed prism.
- E.T. Whittaker, (A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity, 1910, Chapter: The Luminiferous Medium, pg. 116)
So, in response, this guy, Augustin Fresnel, comes along and says the experiment showed nothing because the lens, which contained Aether (which penetrated all substances), was dragged along inside of the lens against a fixed Aether background at just the right amount of drag to offset and equalize the 67,000 mph motion of the Earth relative to the star such that it would never appear that the Earth had moved at all! He even wrote an equation of drag to go along with it. This gave reprieve to the momentary tightness in the chest the heliocentric community was feeling. But of course this was only speculation (philosophy) and not direct empirical evidence, and they knew this. But guess what? We have known for some time that there is no Aether...or so they say, and therefore the experiment is valid!...or is it? O.o Just scratch your head and nod. It's what
I do.
Anyway, Armand Fizeau comes along and attempts to prove Frisnel's aetherial drag ad-hoc explanation by filling two parallel tubes with water, connecting the tubes with a little cross-tube, and inducing a rapid water flow from one to the other so that the current would be reversed in relation to the other. He then sent light through both tubes in the direction of the flow, and a separate beam against the flow. He posited that the light beam moving against the flow would move slower than the beam moving with the flow. And this is exactly what he measured in his experiment. And of course his excuse was exactly the same as Frisnel's...that the Aether against the light beam was dragging the light which retarded its speed. His hypothesis was immediately called into question and it has been found that he only succeeded in measuring a change in the water's refractive index based on the direction of flow in relation to the direction of the light traveling through it.
Since Fizeau's experiment was "indeterminate," along comes George Airy to take up the torch. His was a new and innovative approach. Fill up one telescope with water and the other with air. He reasoned that since light moved slower in water than in air, the starlight would thus refract more, causing it to refract outward toward the side of the telescope in a changing direction of refraction that correlated with the motion of the Earth around the sun before hitting the eyepiece. So he accounted for this by saying he would have to slightly tilt the telescope into the direction of the refraction (like pointing an umbrella in the direction of the rain to keep it off your body) so that the light would always hit the eyepiece.
To his amazement, no tilting was required. It captured the same amount of light from the same direction as the air-filled telescope did. Although the light did move slower, it did not refract into the sidewall and went straight into the eyepiece. This data seemed to be in direct opposition to the heliocentric/Copernican model, as it appeared from this experiment as well that the Earth was not moving! A moving Earth would have caused the starlight to constantly refract into the sidewall of the water-filled telescope, but this was not the case. This experiment, unlike the others, could not be questioned with notions of Aetherial drag and the limited speed of light. This experiment came to be known as Airy's Failure, and remains one of the strongest pieces of scientifically observed and experimentally verified evidence that shows that the Earth does not move.
Fifteen years later, in 1886, physicist Hendrik Lorentz, an advertised heliocentrist, in response to the unchallenged experiment, amazingly, conceded that "Briefly, everything occurs as if the Earth were at rest, and the relative rays were the absolute rays."