This post has too many shares (over 100 as of now) to respond separately to each. It claims that "some of the most brilliant modern-day scientists" said wthe below, each in an image, with the author's photo (except for the first and last, which show the 1972 Blue Marble. a photograph of Earth taken on the way from Earth to the Moon, and the Michelson–Morley apparatus), huge quotation marks, and a hashtag #IAmSignificant, flat-earthers often object to saying Earth is not the center of existence. Let's examine each.
1. I. Bernard Cohen: "There is no planetary observation by which we on Earth can prove that the Earth is moving in an orbit around the sun."
While described as a physicist, Cohen was actually a historian of science. The quote is from The Birth of a New Physics
p78 has the full quote: "Galileo’s observations of the phases and relative sizes of Venus, and of the occasional gibbous phase of Mars, proved that Venus and presumably the other planets move in orbits around the sun. There is no planetary observation by which we on earth can prove that the earth is moving in an orbit around the sun. Thus all Galileo’s discoveries with the telescope can be accommodated to the system invented by Tycho Brahe just before Galileo began his observations of the heavens. In this Tychonic system, the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn move in orbits around the sun, while the sun moves in an orbit around the earth in a year. Furthermore, the daily rotation of the heavens is communicated to the sun and planets, so that the earth itself neither rotates nor revolves in an orbit. The Tychonic system appealed to those who sought to save the immobility of the earth while accepting some of the Copernican innovations."
p47 mentions parallax, 1838, one of the reasons the Tychonic system was rejected, also see aberration, discovered in the year Newton died, 1727. Only goes as far as Newton.
2. Hendrik Lorentz (not Henrick, as in the post) : "Briefly, everything occurs as if the Earth were at rest..."
This is from Lorentz's explanation for the failure of the Michalson-Morley attempt to detect Earth's movement through the aether. It was a precursor to Special Relativity.
3. Arthur Eddington: "There was just one alternative; the earth's true velocity through space might happen to have been nil."
As in #2, Eddington was talking about the M-M experiment in The Nature of the Physical World and this out of context quote looks like there was only one option, but in context the unmoving Earth is an alternative to the Lorentz contraction.
4. Wolfgang Pauli (not Paulil): "The failure of the many attempts to measure terrestrially any effects of the earth's motion..."
This is another partial quote, from Pauli's 1926 Theory of Relativity and the full quote, again referring to the M-M experiment, et al. is "The failure of the many attempts to measure terrestrially the effects of the Earth's motion on physical phenomena allows us to come to the highly probable, if not certain, conclusion that the phenomena in a given reference system are, in principle, independent of the translational motion of the system as a whole."
5. Henri Poincaré: "A great deal of research has been carried out concerning the influence of the Earth's movement. The results were always negative."
This is from his 1904 lecture, The Principles of Mathematical Physics, and again, he's referring to M-M et al.
6. Carl Sagan: "We are unreconstructed geocentrists hiding behind a Copernican veneer."
The quote is from p. 35 of Pale Blue Dot, Sagan was not saying that geocentrism was correct, but that people haven't fully grasped that they are not at the center of the universe.
Unlike the others, Sagan was not described as a physicist. Perhaps the author couldn't fit "astronomer, planetary scientist, and science communicator" into the image, or didn't like those terms.
7. Lincoln Barnett, foreword by Albert Einstein: "We can't feel our motion through space, nor has any physical experiment ever proved that the Earth actually is in motion."
Described as a historian, he was an author and editor. He wrote "The Universe and Doctor Einstein," a layman's introduction to the theory of relativity, with an introduction by the scientist.
8. Bernard Jaffe: "The data [of Michelson-Morley] were almost unbelievable... There was only one other possible conclusion to draw - that the Earth was at rest."
Jaffe was a chemist and a science journalist/historian, not a physicist as described in the image, but I suppose that's close enough for flerfing.
The quote is from p. 76 of Michelson and the speed of Light and like many of the others, Jaffe was rejecting a stationary Earth.
In short, selective quoting has been used to make it look like scientists believed in a stationary Earth, when they were saying the opposite.
