1 in 4 Americans Don't Know Earth Orbits the Sun. Yes, Really.
news.discovery.com
news.discovery.com
http://i.imgur.com/FXMlOZB.png
[source: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind14/content/chapter-7/c07....]
So actually, the U.S. had the second highest score on that question, behind South Korea. Furthermore, the U.S. consistently performed on par or higher vs. the other countries/regions for the remaining questions.
The real outlier for the U.S. on this survey was the question about evolution -- only 48% of Americans got that right, significantly behind the rest of the pack.
Creation is only simpler if you exclude the axiom of having some omnipotent creator in the first place.
Which, the way the question was worded, could reasonably be attributed to people just affirming their belief in creation irrespective of their actual ignorance of the accepted scientific explanation for the origin of humans.
Departing from this is what allows folks to believe violent terrorism to be a viable strategy to "win."
There has been plenty of atheistic terrorism in the last hundred years...
The people who don't believe in objective right and wrong also worry me.
It's a long list.
The history of religion? The Inquisition, as just one example among many? Being absolutely sure that God is on your side is a powerful drug.
> There has been plenty of atheistic terrorism in the last hundred years ...
Yes, but it can't compare to the well-established historical connection between religion and war.
One example -- try to imagine recent Indian history without the effect of religion, without Muslims and Hindus killing each other at every opportunity, true to the present day.
Another example -- 9/11 wasn't an attack by have-nots against haves, it was a largely successful effort by religious fanatics to snuff out some infidels.
There is absolutely no historical connection between religion and war. From http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/08/06/god_and_the...
"Moreover, the chief complaint against religion -- that it is history's prime instigator of intergroup conflict -- does not withstand scrutiny. Religious issues motivate only a small minority of recorded wars. The Encyclopedia of Wars surveyed 1,763 violent conflicts across history; only 123 (7 percent) were religious. A BBC-sponsored "God and War" audit, which evaluated major conflicts over 3,500 years and rated them on a 0-to-5 scale for religious motivation (Punic Wars = 0, Crusades = 5), found that more than 60 percent had no religious motivation. Less than 7 percent earned a rating greater than 3. There was little religious motivation for the internecine Russian and Chinese conflicts or the world wars responsible for history's most lethal century of international bloodshed."
Absolutely false -- you have grossly overstated your claim and even contradicted your own sources. You have posted statistics that say either 7% or 40% (depending on source) of wars are caused by religion, and then blithely made a claim that contradicts your own evidence.
If your claim were true, having religious beliefs would produce a reduction in warlike tendencies and violence in religious believers, a claim that is obviously false. If you want to argue that religion doesn't lead to violence in and of itself, you have to ignore India, 9/11, every bombed abortion clinic, and dozens of other examples from the recent past, to say nothing of history. You would have to live in perpetual denial of reality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_violence
I can't meaningfully quote from the above article -- every line contradicts your claim.
Consider WW2: it was not backed up by religion. USSR was an atheist state and Germany was only mildly religious.
How about Cambodian Civil War: what was Pol Pot's religion?
"Atheism?" You're absurdly arguing that every war not started by a recognized religion is started by atheists. You're overlooking the fact that a non-religious war is most often fought by people with religious beliefs -- not atheists.
> USSR was an atheist state
Oh, do learn some history. By that reasoning, prohibition stopped Americans from drinking, and laws against prostitution prevent sex workers from plying their trade.
Do you know the term "self-reference"? This conversation has a big element of self-reference. You're defending religion for a reason other than a dispassionate pursuit of truth, and you're not very bright. You represent the I.Q. norm that's been scientifically established for religious people.
If your arguments were more than paper-thin and self-contradicting, if you had the requisite intellect to construct substantial arguments, you wouldn't have religious beliefs and we wouldn't be having this conversation. Self-reference.
7% of all wars in history have been religiously motivated (note, that is not by body count: if we went that way the atheistic russian and Chinese civil wars plus nationalist world wars would make them a round-off error.)
Do some religious people commit violence? Yep. So do some environmentalists. Is the problem environmentalism? So do socialists. Is the problem socialism?
I get it: HackerNews commenters generally don't like religion, mainly on first-principle and emotional grounds. But there is no reason, logically, to exaggerate the dangers of religion, nor to deny the observable benefits.
You're picking data to suit your beliefs. Another of your own sources said the number was 40%. In any case, this contradicts your prior claim that: "There is absolutely no historical connection between religion and war." That's quite false, however you cut it.
> Do some religious people commit violence? Yep. So do some environmentalists.
You're moving the goal posts and posing an absurd argument -- not unlike the child molester who says, "So? Who's perfect?"
> But there is no reason, logically, to exaggerate the dangers of religion, nor to deny the observable benefits.
I can't possibly exaggerate the dangers of religion in a country that (because of religious belief) rejects science and critical thinking, murders health workers, and tries to force Creationism into public school classrooms as though it's science.
And what benefits did you have in mind? A way to control the behavior of people who aren't very smart and need to have their hand held as they cross the busy street of life?
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence
Quote: "In a 2013 meta-analysis, led by Professor Miron Zuckerman, of 63 scientific studies about IQ and religiosity, a negative relation between intelligence and religiosity was found in 53 out of 63 ..."
Religious people are happier and more moral. They are less intelligent, for sure, but there is no correlation between intelligence and morality. Furthermore, since there are far more religious people in the world than non-relgious people, in absolute terms there are more intelligent religious people than intelligent non-religious people.
Good times are to be had outside the anti-religious bubble most people swim in here, you should come on out.
Blaming it on Islam is missing the point.
The original stated objection of AlQ was indeed to remove US presence from Muslim holy sites, but Lawrence Wright's book on what happened (for example) makes it pretty clear that the religious stuff was more emblematic of the real problem than it was the real problem itself.
I didn't blame it on Islam, I attributed it to religious extremism, something the vast majority of Muslims reject. That attribution is absolutely correct and supported by an unbiased analysis of the events.
Are you also claiming that religious extremism is worse than non-religious extremism? Available data shows us that it's not the case.
No, only that a prior poster's claim that religions have no connection to wars is false. This is easily established by reading the thread's contents instead of inventing views for people.
Is that actually correct? This was before cosmic inflation, so the whole universe was very small at the instant of the Big Bang, and so wasn't it actually a small explosion?
Cosmic inflation changed the density ratio between spacetime and mass/energy, but the entirety of the universe's mass/energy came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang. So yes, some explosion that.
Remember about this particular explosion that it wasn't an explosion of mass/energy into the empty space of a pre-existing universe, but an explosion of mass/energy and spacetime into nothing -- the Big Bang was space, time and mass/energy.
In other words, there was no "before" before the Big Bang, and there was no "outside" outside the Big Bang. The Big Bang was everything.
More detail here: http://arachnoid.com/gravity
To me the worst part is on page 25. Only about 30% of Americans understand scientific inquiry. I believe this is the root of the anti-science undercurrent in mainstream American society.
I believe that is the case. Those studies you mention generally use results of standardized tests taken by students. For what it's worth I'm not convinced the methodologies used by those studies are very good.
That statement is a non-sequitur. It _could_ be interpreted as evidence of manipulation, but that's hardly the only possible explanation. As much as we all wish science was given all the funding it needs and scientists wouldn't have to resort to hoarding information to protect their turf, that's not the world we live in.
I've found that among a lot of the people I talk to there's this severe, fundamental lack of understanding around how science works. Not a lack of scientific knowledge per se; just a misunderstanding of science's modus operandi.
Well they are correct.
It's the same with almost any natural science theory. Theories try to be very good aproximations of the truth, until a better guess comes out.
I'm sure you're aware, there's a bit more to it than that.
Law: A descriptive generalization about how some aspect of the natural world behaves under stated circumstances.
Hypothesis: A testable statement about the natural world that can be used to build more complex inferences and explanations.
Theory: In science, a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses.
(Source: http://arstechnica.com/science/2006/08/5164/)
Edit:
How it works...
"Massive objects are attracted to each other by the force of gravity." == Scientific Fact.
"Objects in motion remain in motion. For every force there is an equal an opposite reaction. Force is mass times acceleration." == Scientific Law (Newton's Laws of Motion).
"The bending of space under the influence of gravity can cause light to curve around massive objects." == Scientific Hypothesis (Verified by Eddington's 1919 solar eclipse observations).
All of the above (and a whole lot more) put together == General Theory of Relativity.
...that can be wrong and often are replaced by better theories as more tests and better explanations came out.
Science is based in doubt. If you are too sure of a scientific theory, you are missing what science really is about and what you need is religion.
But a Theory is not a guess. It is a framework built from individual pieces, some of which may be hypotheses (effectively guesses) that have been tested and found to hold within the larger structure of that framework.
Nothing is known with absolute certainty. What is the point is referring to everything as a "guess" simply because it isn't known for certain? Context is important here.
It was a very good guess though.
Newton's LAWS of Motion are not a THEORY. They are a descriptive generalization about how gravitation behaves under stated circumstances. Those circumstances being slow speeds and large masses. In those circumstances, they are not wrong. They are a generalization. The THEORY of General Relativity contains Newton's LAWS of motion as a part of the overall framework.
Equivocation on top of religious biases.
I bet if you showed two pictures, with a large sun orbiting the earth and one with a small earth orbiting a large sun, you'd get a much higher percentage right.
When he heard I was a physicist, he apologized in advance for being such a tool ... and then admitted that he thought the earth rotating around the sun was a mistake. He saw the sunrise every morning, always in the East, move around ... and then set in the West. Plus, wouldn't we feel the speed, or even disintegrate if we travelled so fast around the sun?
It was the first time I had encountered somebody who didn't think heliocentrism was possible, let alone other cosmological models. I paused before answering ... but then realized the man was right.
What evidence did he have that contradicted a sun rotating around the sun? He only studied until age 12. He never had a Foucault pendulum. And even if he had had one, the fixed stars idea and the earth's rotation is not the only interpretation.
I asked ... what about the astronauts who have been up there? Surely they must have seen the earth rotating. He was unconvinced. Things seem to rotate when you are very high as a result of vertigo. Could that be the explanation? What about the great speed of the earth he insisted? Wouldn't we feel that? [nobody had ever explained that to him, including his son who was an engineer]
I realized that this man was much more of a scientist than his peers who blindly believe what they are told in school: "the earth rotates around the sun". But ask them a deeper question: What is the evidence? Could the evidence be interpreted otherwise? Are we fooling ourselves (as is very common in science)?
Of course the answer to these questions is child's play for most technical people. There is a ton of evidence. But are the 3/4s aware of it? or do they just parrot the accepted wisdom.
The man turned out to be very smart, having learned the names of all his souvenirs in Korean, Japanese, German, French ... and having strong opinions about the dogmatism that religion blindly accepts.
So it's possible that in that 20% of "non believers" there are true scientists (or Quixotes!) who refuse to believe what they are told before seeing credible experimental evidence that they can reason deeply about.
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"
The last thing we should do is try to mash heads with this level of warm comfort and confidence in ignorance and instead ask questions to probe the depths of what they do know and why.
Why do you believe this? How would that happen?
People may be allergic to being told what to do and what to accept, but inviting them to wade in the waters of the scientific method may allow them to find answers themselves.
I once met a person who was anti-anything which isnt coming from her own mind.
Science? Nah, she got "power of her mind" to bend and twist metals(move objects around - only if she could just focus and use more than 10% of her brain.
We got into a heated discussion about knowledge, science and philosophy, it all boiled down to "I believe whatever I want and thats the only thing that matters, no matter what you say or how things appear or whatever else".
At one point I asked her how she knows that she is right about that about anything, she said she doesnt really but she chooses to believe it. And hence anything, science, philosophy, knowledge, if the rock over there really is hard and if it really is going to fall to the ground if I keep it in the air and drop it, its all a matter of belief, and if people believe it hard enough it wont necessarily always fall to the ground.
How would you approach further discussion with her?
Heated arguments aren't very helpful IMO. I have a good friend who still believes the Earth is 5000 years old, but the last thing I want to do is bash his head into science.
That takes a long conversation over coffee (hopefully several cups) and ensuring that I don't make him feel like I'm looking down on him for what he believes. That's the worst way to convince anyone of anything, reality or not.
People have a tough time separating belief from idea. Beliefs need no evidence, but ideas are testable. Find out what her ideas are and we can move on to her beliefs later (or maybe you won't even need to go that far when she realizes the fallibility of unyielding belief).
Even if title quote is true, what percentage of the population needs to know this (to live better, work better, act in some different fashion)? 5%? 1%? less?
In other words, it is knowledge of trivia for most people. Perfectly fine, if you go in for that sort of thing (and I do), but why look down your nose at those who don't?
Of course, knowing the scientific method can change how you act, but so can understanding lots of things. Finite time and attention. Or be a hater.
Perhaps asking whether "the planets" orbit the Sun would lower the chance of ambiguity.
Imagine that you are in a vast empty dark abyss without gravity (a.k.a. the space) and all you can see is a transparent sealed container with some water in it positioned above your head. Consider these two scenarios: 1. You are rotating around the axis of your body with velocity Ω, and 2. The container has the velocity -Ω around the same axis. You might expect these two scenarios to be identical. After all, the relative velocity of two objects is similar in these cases. But only if the container is the moving body we will observe that the water is affected by centrifugal[1] force.
It is obvious that earth is rotating around the sun not the other way around. You just have to consider the forces.
[1] I know, I know. And you know it too.
Not to give the OP undue attention for what is a truly weird post, but a curved path through curved spacetime (as seen from a different perspective), as with a gravitational orbit, can have zero acceleration.
> It is obvious that earth is rotating around the sun not the other way around. You just have to consider the forces.
That's not obvious at all -- there are no forces at work in a relativistic orbit (because gravity is not a force). The earth and the sun orbit their mutual center of mass, neither experiences acceleration, and neither of them experience a real centripetal or fictional centrifugal force.
Therefore there would be no way to use centrifugal force to argue that one of the bodies has a special role in the orbit. It's easy to see why -- just adjust the relative masses, gradually make the sun's mass smaller and the earth's mass larger, and try to argue that there's a special moment where their roles reverse. Clearly not the case -- regardless of their relative masses they're always equal partners in an orbit, with one of the bodies farther from the mutual center of mass in proportion to its (smaller) mass.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/145286/Four-Americans-Believe-Str... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/23/believing-in-angels...
I too would answer that the Earth orbits the moon if a sciency guy approached me in any kind of test and asked this question.
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.
But, contrary to the OP, if you took a position above the sun's north pole, you would certainly see the planets orbiting the sun, just as in pre-relativistic physics. The reason? A different spacetime curvature at that location.
It's true that, in modern physical theory, there's no force called gravity. It's also true that the earth is moving in an inertial "straight" path through curved spacetime. But it is absolutely false to say that the earth isn't orbiting the sun.
Wait, is the earth moving or not? I also can't figure out what definition of orbit you are using. Your comment feels far too clever for it's own good.
The OP could have simply said that, in relativity, there's no force called gravity, instead planets orbit their parent bodies because of curved four-dimensional spacetime. He then could have quoted physicist John Wheeler, who famously said, "Matter tells space how to curve, and space tells matter how to move."
After the OP correctly said that the earth is moving through curved spacetime in a straight line, IMHO he should have turned in his golf clubs.
> Your comment feels far too clever for it's own good.
You got that exactly right. The OP's intention is to confuse, not enlighten.
You may have this somewhat right in your head but it comes out as contradictory nonsense in your comment.
The newtonian / euclidian model is going to be accurate enough for most people (and some space missions) + its much simpler to compute and also it lies closer to human 'common sense' making it a lot easier for people to grasp and think about intuitively.
This is just one of many egregious errors the OP makes, scattered alongside a few obviously misunderstood elements of real physics. I advise HN readers to ignore the OP's post.
1. Stellar parallax: Stars will appear at slightly different positions in the sky due to the changing position of the Earth during its orbit. Many astronomers from the 1500s to 1800s hoped to measure parallax, and it was finally measured by Friedrich Bessel in 1838. This is the work that first made Bessel famous.
2. Stellar Aberration: Stars appear at slightly different positions during the course of the year due to the finite speed of light relative to the (changing) velocity of the Earth. This was first explained and carefully measured by James Bradley in 1729, making him the most famous scientist of the 18th century according to scientists of the time, including Laplace.
3. The Foucault pendulum: Pendulums on Earth precess. This is not so much proof that the Earth orbits the Sun, but that the Earth rotates in place. The fact that the sun appears to rise/fall/go around us is an illusion due to this rotation. First demonstrated by Foucault in 1851.
I disagree with you on the reference frame/general relativity argument. It is true that, by GR, the actualy picture of spacetime is more complicated. However, there is an intuitive notion of 'orbiting' which is very useful which applies in classical/SR, which applies in inertial reference frames, and in that ase the above observations make clear that the Earth orbits the sun.
Also:
>it's still an open question if bacteria evolve or not
> If the earth ever starts orbiting the sun...as the resulting acceleration would affect magma flow
This is silly.
It should be clear that it can never be the case that by using a new mathematical model we can come to the conclusion that "the earth is standing still". This would be equivalent to inventing a new theory of mind according to which people never get angry. At best, what we can achieve is a new interpretation of the words "standing still", different from what they actually means, under which the earth is doing something else. However, this would simply be a matter of choice, not of discovery, and a pretty bad one at that (see Wittgenstein's criticism of Freud).
Apart from the OP's many outright errors, this one suffers from the defect that it assumes there is only one possible frame of reference. One can obviously choose a frame of reference in which the earth is motionless, but relativity denies any special significance to a particular frame of reference -- indeed, that's what relativity means.
If you look at it in the original relative space, without an euclidean transformation, there's only 2 ways to see it : you can only pick reference frames where the earth is standing still entirely, or you pick reference frames where it is moving along a straight line. You cannot pick a reference frame in relativistic space that shows ellipsoid movement (like the one predicted by the Newtonian theory which is generally what people mean by "orbit").
So you can't actually pick reference frames to do whatever you want. In order to get something looking like an orbit you have to pick a reference frame where you not only have messed with the point of origin, but also projected the distances between objects to be invariant under the influence of gravity. Which they're not in reality (effectively you're claiming that distances everywhere in the universe are as they are at an earth-sun lagrange point, which is not true). Only by doing that transformation can you get an orbital pattern.
At that point, from a purely mathematical point of view you can analyze what other motions you could get that are equally true as saying it orbits. So you can say, you can put the origin point anywhere you like, moving, accelerating, whatever you want. In addition to that you can arbitrarily change the distance function. So you could make one where the earth spirals into the sun. Or spirals away from it (simply introduce a time component in the distance function). Hell, you could make one where the earth and the moon look like they're bouncing on the surface of the sun that looks like the disc in the discworld (put origin at the center of the sun, distance function is a the normal multiplied by the tangent of an angle that goes from the center of the sun to where the moon was 48 hours ago, and in the z direction all distances are zero). Hell, I bet that even if you demanded the reference frame be euclidean you could still make it look pretty silly (I think my spiraling examples would still be euclidean). Reasons for picking one over the other ? None.
Well, one : if you want to calculate the influence of the laws of physics inside our solar system, having an euclidean reference frame centered on the sun-planets lagrange point (which is not the center of the sun) is pretty useful, as it means you need 11 (number of planets) transformations to calculate the path of a satellite moving through the solar system, whereas a relativistic reference frame would require 12 transformations (imho because they don't change rotation they're simpler though).
Aside from the utilitarian choice, all those statements are simply equally true to saying that "the earth rotates around the sun". Just because we prefer one arbitrary kind of reference frame above others here on earth (ie. euclidean) doesn't make it any more real.
And yes, compared to objects "near infinity" the earth arrives at the same spot once a year, but that doesn't make it's path any less straight.
Note that Occam's razor does not actually have the authority to dictate anything. Occam's razor is a useful heuristic -- like frames of reference, you may treat it (or various similar heuristics) as true, but may also treat it as not true.
----
This whole exchange reminds me of one of my favorite Asimov essays, The Relativity of Wrong [0]. You can certainly make the argument that the reference frame "the earth goes around the sun" is not true, but it's less not-true than "the sun goes around the earth". "The earth goes around the sun" is a correct assessment of the relative behavior of the bodies in a reference frame which is in a sense arbitrary, while "the sun goes around the earth" is an incorrect assessment of the relative behavior of those bodies under either Euclidian or relativistic reference frames.
[0] http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm
No, both are true, yet you claimed that "3 in 4 hacker news readers don't know the earth doesn't orbit the sun at all" which is a false and ignorant claim.
> So saying the earth orbits the sun is a choice : it is not a true or false statement, just a statement reflecting an opinion.
False! Mathematical physics is as far from opinion as you can get, and it has vast amounts of supporting evidence.
> You cannot pick a reference frame in relativistic space that shows ellipsoid movement (like the one predicted by the Newtonian theory which is generally what people mean by "orbit").
Yes, you can! As I said earlier, sufficiently above the sun's north pole, you would see a classic Newtonian orbit, because of the choice of reference frame.
> you can only pick reference frames where the earth is standing still entirely, or you pick reference frames where it is moving along a straight line.
I just proved this claim to be false. But you know what? I'm not going to go through and correct all your false arguments (they're all false). I've had this exact experience more times than I care to remember. You don't know anything about physics or mathematics, your overall argument is post-modern ("It's all opinion"), and you're a waste of time.
If you actually understood the topic, you would use 10% of the words you use while being wrong, and your posts might become worth reading.
No you would not. Here I assume a correct reference frame : the start point is above the sun's north pole, but it is in gravitational freefall, not artificially accelerated to the same relative position above the sun. If you looked at the earth moving and describe it's movement as an equation in relativistic space you'd get p = k * s + c (with k a real number, p s and c vectors).
This is not a rotation, obviously.
Intuitive observation would show rotation, but that's wrong, or at least that's not really what's happening. Note that your position "above the sun's north pole" is actually an accelerated movement at a point in time. As such it is not a reference frame that is at rest, and as such is not the type of reference frame you'd want to use for anything, unless of course you're using newtonian physics.
You got it all backwards. Our preference for a certain reference frame is exactly what makes it real, because that's what 'real' means.
Certain frames of reference are almost useless, while others are very useful in our everyday life. This is why "I'm going to the store" is true, while "the store is moving toward me" is false: it is our application of those words in everyday life that defines what we would call 'true' and 'false' here.
It is ridiculous to claim that the above are equally true because supposedly we can choose our reference frame however we like: this is simply not what we mean when we talk about "true" and "false" here. By focusing too much on physical vocabulary, you are losing sight of what certain words mean in the first place.
If you develop a theory that says the fridge is moving toward me when I'm hungry (= I'm going to the fridge, from a different frame of reference) - you are not making a discovery, you are simply making up new definitions of existing words, and you are confused.
Also, mathematical models are just that - math, useful abstractions we can predict stuff with. Assigning to them an ontological status is a matter of choice and of personal belief, not of knowing anything about physics.