Galilean Relativity

By Taylor Moffitt of Halydean

The only way to gauge movement is through the movement of an external body. If we are in the darkness of space, alone, we have no external reference by which we may determine any movement. On earth, our usual reference is the ground under our feet, which is actually rotating about the earth’s axis at about 1,000 miles per hour, going through a procession on its axis, and orbiting the sun at about 67,000 miles per hour in an imperfect ellipse. Our solar system is at the same time traveling at about 514,000 miles per hour around the Milky Way galaxy, while it also is moving towards M31 (the Andromeda galaxy) at about 250,000 miles per hour. The thought of anything in our world being motionless is an illusion created by the fact that everything we see is moving with us, making us unable to gauge any of this movement. We don’t really even know if our galaxy is moving or if M31 is moving towards us, other than making an estimate of this relative to the movement of other galaxies.