Our art project reflects the history of astronomy and actualizes historic beliefs using the mathematics of vector addition. There was a time in human history that people believed that all the heavenly bodies orbited around the Earth, an idea called geocentricism.
We have been taught that the earth and the heavenly bodies
orbit the sun, but why do we think this? Occam's razor states that the simpler
answer is the solution. If we were to monitor the paths heavenly bodies take as
they pass through the sky, we would expect these paths to be simple.
Tracking the orbits of heavenly bodies from Earth, their
paths are very wonky. It is only when we assume that the sun is the center of
the orbit do the paths of the planets become nice ellipses.
By using the math of vector addition, we were able to
simulate the paths heavenly bodies take while moving through the sky from the
perspective of different planets. The assumption of Geocentricism creates
beautifully complex patterns in the paths of the planets. We extended this to
allow for the perspective of each planet being at the center of the solar
system.
The paths of the planets are beautifully complex, and it is
only when the Sun is the center of the solar system that the complexity
dissolves to simplicity.
References:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epdf/10.1177/002182860203300301
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_926-1
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_67-1
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-011-4179-6_10
Lovely!
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