So, I've been thinking about this for a while and I wanted to weigh in on the debate about the opening credits to The Daily Show. If you're not familiar with this debate, just Google "Earth rotating wrong direction" and you'll see dozens of articles and video clips about it.
First, I think The Daily Show should keep their opening credits as is. Second, I'm a huge fan of Neil DeGrasse Tyson. If you're not a fan, you should follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/neiltyson because he's brilliant while being able to explain complex concepts in a way that everyone can understand.
So, with the raging debate about the direction the Earth rotates in the opening credits to The Daily Show, how can I reconcile the two statements above? It is actually pretty easy. Let me explain.
Let's start with how much attention this has gotten. Dr. Tyson has been on The Daily Show a few times. He has talked about the opening credits enough that Comedy Central did a special version of them with a video of someone manually turning a globe the correct direction the last time he was a guest. It was hilarious. If nothing else, this debate has brought attention and commentary on something we take for granted every single day. You can't beat the sort of interest that this has brought to get people to do the research on their own and think about Earth rotation based on scientific fact. It is great.
No consider that many, many animations of the Earth used on television programs spin the "wrong direction" as identified in this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AEarth's_rotation#TV_.22earths.22_often_rotate_the_wrong_way. Before Wikipedia, I had heard the story that CBS's Wide World of Sports actually had their Earth animation spinning the "wrong direction" and had to spend lots of money to get it corrected.
Now, I'm putting "wrong direction" in quotes because the Wikipedia article points out that the direction of the rotation is based on your Point of View. If you were able to sit at a point between the Earth and the Sun, say Lagrangian Point 1, you would see the continents moving from left to right, the way Dr. Tyson describes is the way the opening credits should roll. However, if you're aboard the International Space Station (ISS) or any other satellite orbiting in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), you would be completing an orbit in less than a day. Most satellites, like 85%, are launched towards the East, so the you would be moving across the ground very quickly. From that vantage point, the continents would appear to move from right to left, as the do in the current opening credits. Since both perspectives are equally valid, there is no "right" or "wrong" direction for the Earth to appear in the animation.
Now consider that NASA, who certainly knows which direction the Earth rotates, regularly produces videos with the Earth rotating the same direction as the opening credits because they are usually produced so you can see their latest satellite in the foreground with the Earth spinning below. The best place to get lots of NASA videos and do your own inventory of them is from the NASAcast video podcast available at http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/podcasting. I was watching the March 14, 2014 episode which had one of these videos, which prompted me to finally write this post.
Without getting too serious about the "right" or "wrong" direction for Earth rotation, I want to remind everyone that we're talking about The Daily Show. This is not a news program. It is a comedy program. It is just as valid (and I'll say more entertaining) as Weekend Update in Saturday Night Live. Fans of The Daily Show know that most of the comedy in the program comes from Jon Stewart making fun of the cable news networks and other news programs. What better way to make fun of news programs, than to mock the problems these shows have had in getting people to accept their rotating Earth animations. One of the first to get public notariaty was a news program and they got so much public comment about it, they went back and had the animators change the rotation. I don't think it is because The Daily Show doesn't know which direction the Earth rotates. I think it is because they are making fun of all the public commentary these animations get. Keep an eye on all of the spinning Earths in animations during the show. When the show returns from commercial just before brining the guest out, the intro, transition video has a more realistic looking Earth (with clouds and the like) the is spinning the opposite direction as the opening credits.
I claim that the opening credits are more about the comedy and less about the science.
Does this mean that Dr. Tyson is wrong? Absolutely not. He is right, from a certain point of view. He's more right to create controversy over it because it makes the audience grab a book or search the Internet or apply the Scientific Method to determine on their own which direction the Earth rotates. He is in the business of teaching science, and making it a talking point of one of the most popular TV shows is a great way to teach science and Scientific Method.
One final word about my great respect for Dr. Tyson. I want to publicly thank him for demoting Pluto to a dwarf planet. He brought to light an issue that was covering up the many objects in the Kuiper Belt. As long as Pluto was a planet, none of the other objects in the Kuiper Belt would get the recognition they deserve. Pluto never really fit in as a planet because of the inclination of its orbit and the fact that it crosses inside the orbit of Neptune. I'm glad we have an objective definition of a planet and are not working from a subjective "Star Trek" test to know a planet from the many other objects traveling through deep space. If you feel bad that there are only 8 planets when you learned in grade school that there were 9 planets, relax. Thanks to astrophysicists like Neil DeGrasse Tyson and many people behind the Kepler mission, we now have over 400 confirmed planets. You can see all of them at http://kepler.nasa.gov/Mission/discoveries/. With this many planets in the very small focus area of the Kepler telescope, there must be thousands, millions, and even billions of planets in the Universe. Some day we may actually be traveling between them as fantasized about in the show Star Trek.
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