If the earth were moving, would we see great vortexes like the Great Red Spot on Jupiter?
A viewer asks whether, if the earth were moving, we would see great vortexes like the storm on Jupiter.
Answer
No, because Jupiter's Great Red Spot is a special phenomenon: Jupiter has far more gravity than the earth, so its atmosphere behaves very differently, producing far more cyclones and vortexes. The earth is just the right size with just the right atmosphere for life, while the other planets are too big or too small with poisonous or absent atmospheres. The earth does have forces to contend with, such as the Coriolis force, which is why every hurricane in the northern hemisphere turns counterclockwise and every one in the southern hemisphere clockwise, a powerful force; multiply that many times over on Jupiter. And the key point is that the Coriolis force arises whether you take the earth as rotating under a fixed universe or as fixed with the universe rotating around it, because relativity here is not merely kinematic but dynamic: each system has to account for the same forces we actually feel. So it would make no difference to these forces which system is true.