When I paused to think about the tower argument, I noticed a sudden shift in my thinking when I wondered “wait, how much did they know about inertia at the time?”
If you know about inertia, then you should be able to calculate (even before Newton...I think?) that a falling object will drift, but only negligibly so, for plausible tower heights. In this case, the one arguing for a stationary earth has correctly identified a real effect, but failed to consider its scale.
If you don’t know about inertia, and you imagine a dropped ball will instantly lose all velocity (in some privileged reference frame) and fall “straight down” while the world rotates beneath it, then you’d predict a far larger drift. In this case, they’re wrong about the qualitative rules, not just the effect size.
When I paused to think about the tower argument, I noticed a sudden shift in my thinking when I wondered “wait, how much did they know about inertia at the time?”
If you know about inertia, then you should be able to calculate (even before Newton...I think?) that a falling object will drift, but only negligibly so, for plausible tower heights. In this case, the one arguing for a stationary earth has correctly identified a real effect, but failed to consider its scale.
If you don’t know about inertia, and you imagine a dropped ball will instantly lose all velocity (in some privileged reference frame) and fall “straight down” while the world rotates beneath it, then you’d predict a far larger drift. In this case, they’re wrong about the qualitative rules, not just the effect size.