Or you can put the satellite in the back of a truck and back the truck out of your garage and see the sun orbiting the earth. Yet it remains sane to put anywhere in the center depending on your context.
Those two sentences contradict each other. If something unobservable implies some observable, i.e. predictable, consequences, then falsifying these predictions would also falsify the unobservable antecedents.
Newtonian Mechanics are falsifiable, but no one could figure out an example that actually did so, until roughly when the orbit of Mercury was fully observed.
Then it was obvious something was missing.
Is there the equivalent for quarks? Or not?
We can't even see a table. We can only see the nerve impulses resulting from the photons resulting from the sunlight bouncing off the table.
A computer can't play sound either, it can only send bits to a DAC.
I think in a common sense way you do get what I mean though when I say it is obvious that when we see two billiard balls colliding we know it but when think of electrons colliding it is only indirectly through whatever happens after the collision, never the process itself.
It isn't. You can easily define a coordinate system for the universe in which the earth is the center.
Heliocentrism just makes some approximate computations easier because the sun is so heavy. Thus in heliocentrism, the orbits of the planets are approximately ellipses (near-circles) around the sun, while in a geocentric model, the orbits have more complicated shapes.
Nevertheless (to explicare "approximate" even in the Newtonian gravity model (i.e. not Einsteinian gravity)) be aware that even in the heliocentric coordinate system the earth (and the other planets) don't move along an elliptical (near-circular) orbit around the sun, but both the sun and the planet move around a common center which is near to the sun.
> There is no sane way to put the earth in the center once you do that. [...] Hence I feel heliocentrism is simply an observable fact. It's not a mathematical convenience. It's a fact you can see with a camera. The relativism or perspective argument is irrelevant because as we established you have to be very unreasonable to describe a picture of a huge ass sun that hardly moves with small planets zooming around it as earth centric.
Modern physics really is about that there is no preferred coordinate system: this manifests itself in the fact that conserved quantities can be derived via Noether's theorem from such symmetries in the natural laws. There is just a choice of a coordinate system which in our solar system makes computations easier.
Within the sun, with one exception.
OK, I admit that I never did the actual calculations, but only knew this property of the formulas. :-)
On the other hand nobody has observed any particle or ever will, we only see effects of particles (cloud chamber trails, other particles, radiation, etc). This makes it very different for the traditional "seeing is believing" claim. In this case you actually possible to argue it's a mathematical convenience. It's possible to say we are stuck in the pre Copernican age in QM, we're modelling these things in such a complicated way, maybe one day we will see aha we got it all backwards, electrons are actually made of trapped light, or some crazy theory will come out... And I can't blame string theorists and physicists in general for trying.
Take for example quarks. QCD actually forbids naked quarks. That means you can never observe one on its own. How's that for a falsifiable scientific theory? Yet it is very successful in all its predictions. So obviously the Popperian "falsifiability" is too simple a criteria for science.