1 in 4 Americans Don't Know Earth Orbits the Sun. Yes, Really.

Here's a different way of looking a the data, on page 23 of http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind14/content/chapter-7/c07....

Americans know about as much as people in similarly developed countries.

Really. Compare to the success rates versus South Korea and Japan. And then compare it to less economically developed parts of the world. Americans were the most correct among the surveyed populations about radiation, antibiotics, atomic structure, and lasers.

The takeaway shouldn't be "Americans are ignorant" but really that "Education is hard" and "Poverty inhibits education"

Also interesting, only 32 percent of Indians answered "true" to the statement "The continents have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move" whereas 83 percent of Americans answered this question correctly.

In other news : 3 in 4 hacker news readers don't know the earth doesn't orbit the sun at all. That is an impression created by the fact that the space around the sun moves as a result of gravity. This results in that the location of the earth doesn't change, but as the sun is sucking in space and constantly pushing out it's matter the distance doesn't change. This results in the fact that a straight line path around the sun at the relative speed difference that the earth the sun have, and then transpose said trajectory into an approximate euclidean space with the sun as it's point of origin results in a (roughly) ellipsoid trajectory.

But make no mistake : the earth is standing still, it's not moving. There is no actual movement of either the earth, or the sun, or for that matter, any other planet or body, as a result of gravity. The earth is not circling the sun, it is moving in a straight line through what just happens to be non-euclidean space. Hell there is no gravity acting on the earth, nor for that matter on you (on the contrary : you are being accelerated upward, not downward at roughly the rate at which the earth sucks up space).

(Here movement is defined as the only viable relativistic definition of movement : a movement that can be observed to be different from standing still, meaning travelling at a fixed speed in a straight line is not moving at all)

If the earth ever starts orbiting the sun, life on earth will become impossible in a matter of minutes, as the resulting acceleration would affect magma flow and would very quickly change the entire surface of the earth into a liquid state. In that case the earth's surface would quickly change to the average temperature of the earth itself : ~6000 degrees celcius.

People say that the earth is orbiting the sun, because people are thinking within an euclidean reference frame. If you ignore the fact that we live in a relativistic universe and just act as if it's euclidean, it looks like the earth is orbiting. But in (what we think) is the real structure of the universe, that's not the case at all.

Saying that the earth orbits the sun, or God forbid, that it circles the sun, are flat-out wrong statements. The last time scientists actually believed that was about 1931. The "science" that is being popularized is either old, or just flat-out wrong. This goes for other popular versions of scientific theories as well. If evolution is "mutate + natural selection + goto 1", then humans don't evolve at all, and neither does any larger lifeform (and it's still an open question if bacteria evolve or not). Hell, did you know the earth is the exact center of the universe ? No joke. Read a bit about Hubble's discovery. The big bang is not actually the beginning of time, google inflation theory (and even inflation theory doesn't model the beginning of time). Did you know that we lost ~98% (that's a lower bound) of all mass in the universe ? We have zero clue where the rest of the universe is.

This is exactly what I mean. Science is not a religion. It is not a faith. Calling it that betrays a lack of understanding of the scientific method. The scientific method is not perfect and there are worrisome trends in modern practices of science (see the recent story about p-values being misused) but this is the sort of thinking that leads people to believe in nonsense like psychics, dowsing, homeopathy, anti-vaccine propaganda, etc.