We know the Earth is spinning because of several direct effects like how the foucault pendulum slowly changes its swing direction as the ground turns beneath it, from the coriolis effect that makes winds, currents, and hurricanes curve in predictable ways, like the star trails that form circles in long-exposure photos of the night sky, and the day–night cycle happens every 24 hours due to Earth’s rotation and astronauts and satellites can directly see the Earth spinning from space.

Yes, I think it is a natural progression in science to give up things we once thought fundamental because knowledge itself is never fixed, it shifts as our perspective widens or as we gain more understanding on a certain subject. I think Plato’s Allegory of the Cave captures this perfectly like how the prisoners mistake the shadows on the wall for reality because that is all they know , but once one prisoner escapes into the light, he sees that the shadows were only partial truths. What had seemed “fundamental” inside the cave was revealed as limited when compared to a deeper reality, also like in matrix , science often works in the same way. At one time from the lecture and notes, people believed the Earth was the center of the universe, or that atoms were indivisible or that the notions of time and space were absolute, and all these ideas were “fundamental” to their worldview just like the shadows were to the prisoners, but as new evidence and better theories emerged, scientists had to step out of the “cave” and recognize that those truths were only approximations. This does not mean the old fundamentals were meaningless but the allegory reminds us that clinging too tightly to what we think is final truth can blind us to broader realities.perhaps one day we can find alternative explanations for Einstein’s theory of relativity or expand out from the laws of thermodynamics as we delve more into singularities of blackholes