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Comment by yyyk | Hacker News Reader

The comparison is bad all around. Geocentrism actually had decent reasoning and was not a superstition. It's just we couldn't see the parallax with then-current instruments. As soon as instruments allowed, humanity changed rather quickly.

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Time moving in one direction actually has decent reasoning and is not a superstition. It's just we can't detect time moving backwards with now-current instruments. As soon as instruments allow, humanity will change rather quickly.

The problem with the comparison is what it's used to imply. The popular understanding* is that scientists believed in religious dogma, and that led them to 'unscientific' geocentrism and believing that time has only one direction. It's a backhanded accusation of superstition, and that's unfair towards both current scientists and past scientists.

(On a personal note, I'm actually sympathetic to the article's retrocasual proposition. I suspect reality is non-local and TSVF etc. naturally tend towards non-locality.)

* This is Vice, of course they use the popular understanding and not something more sophisticated.

It seems to me that the popular understanding is influenced by grossly misleading 20th century anti-religious propaganda. The geocentric model is not something the Catholic Church plucked out of the bible; they got it from Ptolemy and other 'heathen' classical thinkers, whom the Catholic Church considered meritorious despite not being Christians. Sure, they then found some biblical citations to back themselves up in this, but the idea was never their own in the first place.

We've always been able to detect that some celestial objects appear to move backwards at times.

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