This Is How Earth Actually Moves Through Space

At a glance

Ridddle takes the most famous piece of bad space content on the internet, the "solar system is a vortex" animation where the planets trail behind the Sun like a comet's tail, and rebuilds it correctly. The animation gets one thing right (the Sun really is moving) and the geometry catastrophically wrong: the ecliptic is tilted roughly 60 degrees to the plane of the Milky Way's disk, so the solar system cuts through the galaxy at an angle rather than plowing through head on, and Earth spends the year weaving slightly ahead of and slightly behind the Sun rather than trailing it. From there the video climbs the ladder of nested motions: the Sun's wobble around the solar system barycenter, the slow grinding of the Milankovitch cycles at 100,000, 41,000 and 26,000 years, the 230 km per second orbit around the galactic center that takes 230 million years, a 60 to 70 million year bobbing motion through the galactic disk, and finally the whole Local Group drifting toward the Great Attractor at 370 km per second relative to the cosmic microwave background. The payoff is the physics lesson underneath: there is no single true speed and no single true trajectory, because there is no universal stationary grid to measure against. Every answer to "how fast are you moving" is only complete when it names the reference frame, and the boring textbook ellipse is not wrong, it is just local.

Seven billion kilometres per birthday (0:00)

The video opens on birthdays. Every year you celebrate one, and over that time Earth completes one full orbit around the Sun. That is the picture everybody carries. But measured against the center of our Milky Way galaxy, the entire solar system travels about 7 billion kilometres in a single Earth year. The candles are a local event. The room they sit in has moved seven billion kilometres since the last set.

That number is the video's opening hook and its thesis in one line. Nothing about the birthday story is false. It is just told in a frame that quietly deletes almost all of the motion.

From childhood we get the convenient version: a big yellow Sun hanging motionless in the center, Earth obediently tracing an ellipse around it. Ridddle's question is the obvious follow up that nobody asks. If the Sun itself is hurtling through the galaxy, what does Earth's path actually look like?

The viral vortex, and the one thing it gets right (0:32)

That question is exactly where the viral 3D animations come from, and you have almost certainly seen one. The solar system portrayed as a giant vortex: the Sun racing forward, the planets strung out behind it in a long helical tail, the whole thing looking like a corkscrew tearing through a fluid.

Ridddle is careful here and refuses the easy dunk. These animations are not entirely fabricated. They start from a real fact: the Sun is moving. What they do next is the problem. They combine that real fact with the wrong geometry, and the result creates a false impression that our star is physically dragging the planets behind it through some dense medium, like a boat pulling a wake.

To see where they get it right and where they go wrong, you need two things: the actual orientation of the orbits, and, most importantly, the reference frame you are viewing them from.

Relative to what? (1:02)

This is the hinge of the entire video, and it is stated as a rule of physics rather than an opinion. You cannot depict motion without first answering one question: relative to what?

There is no such thing as a velocity full stop. A velocity is always a comparison between two things. Leave out the second thing and you have not stated a fact, you have stated half of one.

The fly on the train (1:32)

The analogy Ridddle uses to make this concrete is a fly buzzing around a light bulb on the ceiling of a moving train.

Inside the train, the fly's path is a closed circle. It loops the bulb, comes back to where it started, loops again. Nothing else is needed to describe it.

From the platform, the same fly does something completely different. The train's forward motion stretches that circle into an open wavy path, a loop that never closes because every lap starts further down the track than the last one.

The point is not that one view is the real one. Both descriptions are correct. They just use different reference frames. The fly is not doing two things. There is one fly, and two equally valid accounts of it.

The creators of the viral animations are trying to show us the view from the platform, which is to say the view relative to the galaxy rather than relative to the Sun. That part is correct. If you track Earth in a galactic reference frame, its closed orbit genuinely does become an open three dimensional curve. The exact shape of that curve, however, depends entirely on the orientation of the orbital plane, and that is where the viral videos start cutting corners.

The geometry the animations get wrong: a 60 degree tilt (2:14)

Look closely at the famous spiral. In the animation, the orbital plane is positioned almost perpendicular to the Sun's direction of motion. That single choice is what produces the vortex look. If the planets orbit in a plane standing across the direction of travel, then as the Sun advances they appear to trail directly behind it like a comet's tail.

In reality our system's orientation is completely different. The ecliptic, the plane of Earth's orbit, with most of the other planets orbiting close to that same plane, is tilted by about 60 degrees relative to the plane of the Milky Way's disk. On a human time scale this orientation remains practically unchanged, so it is not a detail you can average away.

Because of that tilt, the solar system does not move through the galaxy head on the way the animation suggests. It cuts through at an angle. And because it cuts through at an angle, the planets cannot remain permanently behind the Sun and form a tail. The geometry simply does not allow it.

What Earth's galactic path actually looks like (3:03)

Replace the bad geometry with the real one and the trajectory falls out. In a galactic reference frame, Earth's path becomes a looping three dimensional curve superimposed on the Sun's journey through the galaxy. Over the course of a year, our planet alternates between being slightly ahead of and slightly behind the Sun along the direction of its galactic motion.

That is the honest version of the viral video. It is still a beautiful open curve, still nothing like the closed ellipse in the textbook, but it is a weave rather than a tail. Earth overtakes the Sun and falls back behind it twice a year, not because the Sun is towing anything but because the orbit is a real orbit set at an angle to the direction of travel.

The Sun does not fly straight either: the barycenter (3:33)

Many of the animations contain a second major oversimplification that is easier to miss: they show the Sun itself moving along a perfectly smooth, straight path.

Every system of bodies has a common center of mass, the barycenter. In a gravitationally bound system, all of its objects orbit around this shared center of mass. Not around the biggest object. Around the shared point.

The Sun accounts for 99.8 percent of the solar system's total mass, which is exactly why the schoolbook picture works as well as it does. But those remaining fractions of a percent are more than enough to influence the star. The gas giants play the main role, primarily Jupiter, which the video describes with characteristic bluntness as "really, really big," more than 300 times as massive as the Earth, along with Saturn. Their combined mass constantly shifts the solar system's barycenter around.

The consequence is a fact that surprises most people the first time they hear it. Sometimes the barycenter is deep inside the Sun, and at other times it lies beyond the Sun's surface, depending on the alignment of the giant planets. When Jupiter and Saturn line up on the same side, the balance point of the whole solar system is outside the star. The Sun is, in that moment, orbiting a point in empty space.

So as it moves through the galaxy, the Sun undergoes a continuous gravitational wobble around this invisible point. On the scale of its galactic trajectory that oscillation is incredibly small, which is why no animation is really obliged to show it. But it is there, and it is not decorative.

The same wobble is how we find other worlds (4:35)

Ridddle drops in the aside that turns the wobble from trivia into a tool. This wobble on other stars is one of the ways astronomers find exoplanets. They measure periodic tiny shifts in a star's position or in its spectral lines, and from the rhythm and size of that shift they infer an unseen companion pulling on it.

The radial velocity method and astrometry both live on this idea. The thing that makes our own Sun's path imperfect is the same thing that makes other stars legible.

Milankovitch cycles: gravity edits Earth's orbit too (5:05)

Gravity does not stop at the Sun. The shape of Earth's orbit and the orientation of its rotational axis also change slowly over time. These changes are the Milankovitch cycles, and the video gives all three with their periods.

• Over cycles of roughly 100,000 years, Earth's orbit becomes slightly more elongated and then slightly more circular again. This is eccentricity.
• The tilt of Earth's axis varies over a cycle of about 41,000 years. This is obliquity.
• Every 26,000 years the axis slowly precesses, tracing out a circle under the gravitational influence of the Sun and the Moon. This is axial precession.

Ridddle is careful about what these cycles do and do not do. They cannot freeze the planet overnight. What they do is gradually alter the distribution of solar energy across different latitudes and seasons. Combined with Earth's own climate feedback loops, such as changes in the extent of reflective ice cover or in greenhouse gas concentrations, these cycles set the long natural rhythm for the onset and retreat of ice ages.

The framing matters. The cycles are a pacemaker, not a switch. They redistribute sunlight, and Earth's own feedbacks amplify the redistribution into glaciations.

And all of that is still just what is happening inside the solar system.

Zoom out to the galaxy: 230 km/s, 230 million years (6:07)

Zoom out to the Milky Way and things get weirder. Our entire galaxy is rotating, and the solar system is hurtling around its center at a speed of roughly 230 kilometres per second.

At that speed it takes about 230 million years to complete just one full orbit of the galaxy. That is the galactic year. One lap. The last time the solar system was in this part of its orbit, the first dinosaurs were new.

Multiply 230 kilometres per second out over an Earth year and you land back on the number the video opened with: about 7 billion kilometres per birthday.

Bobbing through the disk: a 60 to 70 million year wave (6:38)

As it orbits the galactic center, the Sun does not follow a perfectly circular path around the galaxy. It simultaneously bobs up and down relative to the midplane of the stellar disk.

The cause of these oscillations is the gravity of the Milky Way itself. The bulk of the stars and gas is concentrated in the disk. When the solar system rises above this plane, the combined gravity of the disk begins to pull it back down again. The Sun gains speed, passes straight through the midplane, sinks below it, and then gravity begins to pull it back up. It is a mass on a spring, with the spring made of the galaxy's own stars.

Ridddle gives the mental picture that makes it click: if we mentally unroll the Sun's galactic orbit into a straight line, the trajectory would look like a wave. A full cycle of these vertical oscillations takes about 60 to 70 million years.

So the galactic orbit is not a lap, it is a lap with roughly three or four vertical crossings folded into it.

The Oort Cloud hypothesis, honestly labelled (7:40)

Here the video hands over a genuinely interesting idea and then immediately puts a leash on it.

Some researchers have suggested that passing through the densest parts of the galactic plane increases the gravitational pull on the Oort Cloud, that hypothesized spherical reservoir of icy bodies on the distant fringes of the solar system. The idea is that this tug could send more comets plunging into the inner solar system, and, by extension, that the 60 to 70 million year rhythm might show up in Earth's impact record.

Ridddle does not run with it. Researchers have never convincingly linked this cycle to mass extinctions on Earth. So for now, it remains only a hypothesis. That is the whole treatment, and it is the right length for a claim with that much evidence behind it.

Dark matter wind: what the orbit is actually good for (8:10)

Earth's orbital motion does give physicists something more practical: a possible way to search for dark matter.

The Milky Way is thought to be surrounded by a vast, roughly spherical halo of dark matter. Since the direction of Earth's orbital velocity changes throughout the year, our speed relative to that hypothesized halo changes too. Earth moves along its orbit at about 30 kilometres per second.

The timing is specific and the video states it precisely:

• Early every June, Earth's orbital velocity has its largest component pointing in the same direction as the solar system's motion relative to the halo. Speeds add.
• In early December, the component points in the opposite direction. Speeds subtract.

The analogy is the best one in the video. Imagine you are driving a car in pouring rain. The faster you go, the more raindrops hit your windshield every second. This so called dark matter wind follows the same basic idea. Same rain, different rate, because you changed your speed through it.

That gives you an experimental signature you can actually chase: not a detection of a particle in isolation, but an annual modulation in the count rate, peaking in June and dipping in December.

The detectors, the crystals, and the joke (9:11)

To block out background cosmic rays, physicists place ultra sensitive detectors deep underground. In the DAMA/LIBRA, COSINE-100 and ANAIS-112 experiments, the sensitive material is ultra pure sodium iodide crystals, which Ridddle describes as "a kind of crystalline salt, but definitely not the kind you put on your french fries."

The logic is simple. If dark matter consists of hypothetical particles like the so called WIMPs, weakly interacting massive particles, then they should pass through the Earth almost entirely unimpeded. But very rarely, such a particle might, in the video's deliberately hedged phrasing, "just maybe, could, should" collide with an atomic nucleus inside a crystal. The collision would produce a tiny flash of light that the detector could then register. That is the idea, anyway.

Under the standard halo model, these detectors should register slightly more collisions in June than in December.

And here is where the story gets uncomfortable. The DAMA/LIBRA experiment in Italy has claimed for years to have detected exactly this seasonal modulation. It sits under the Gran Sasso mountain, it has run for a very long time, and its modulation is statistically strong.

But combined results from COSINE-100 and ANAIS-112 failed to reproduce this modulation, casting serious doubt on the idea that DAMA is detecting dark matter. Both of those experiments use the same sodium iodide target material specifically so that the comparison is apples to apples, which is what makes the null result bite.

Ridddle closes the section without resolving it, because it is not resolved. What causes the DAMA signal, however, is still unclear. Something is modulating in that detector. Almost nobody now thinks it is the halo.

The galaxy is moving too: the Great Attractor (10:42)

Climb one more rung. The Milky Way itself is moving. Our galaxy, together with Andromeda and the rest of the Local Group, is moving through space under the gravitational influence of enormous concentrations of matter far beyond our own galaxy.

One of the best known of these regions is the Great Attractor, and the video is careful to describe it as a part rather than a thing: it is part of a much larger pattern of galaxy clusters and superclusters whose combined gravity influences the motion of galaxies across hundreds of millions of light years. It is not a single object exerting a single pull. It is the mass distribution of a whole region of the universe, of which Laniakea is the modern name for our own supercluster scale neighbourhood.

Why there is no single number (11:43)

At this point the natural move is to add everything up. Earth's orbit, the Sun's wobble around the barycenter, its vertical motion through the galactic disk, the drift toward the Great Attractor. Sum the vectors, get your true speed.

No such single number exists.

The reason is the same one from 1:02, restated with the full ladder now visible: since there is no universal stationary coordinate grid in the universe, any speed must be measured relative to something else. There is no platform outside everything to stand on. Every measurement is a comparison, and you have to name the other side of the comparison or you have not said anything.

The CMB as the most convenient frame (11:43)

What you can do is pick a frame that is convenient and widely agreed on, and one of the most convenient cosmological reference frames is provided by the cosmic microwave background, the microwave echo left over from the Big Bang that almost uniformly fills the observable universe.

The measurement uses the Doppler effect. This ancient radiation background appears slightly hotter, or blue shifted, in the direction we are flying, and slightly colder, or red shifted, behind us. Measure that temperature difference across the sky, which is the CMB dipole, and you have both a speed and a direction.

In this reference frame, the entire solar system is moving at a speed of about 370 kilometres per second.

That is the closest thing to a universal speedometer we have, and it is still a relative measurement. The CMB is not stationary in some absolute sense. It is just a frame that every observer in the universe can identify and agree on, which is exactly what makes it useful.

Why the textbook diagram survives (12:45)

If the simple diagram shows only the most local reference frame, why is it still the one in every classroom? Ridddle's answer is the most useful thing in the video for anyone who actually calculates anything.

The textbook model is not wrong. It is simply local. For any calculation, you choose the reference frame that makes the problem easiest to solve.

The worked example: when calculating a probe's trajectory to Mars, engineers do not need to account for the solar system's overall movement through the galaxy, or its speed relative to the CMB. The spacecraft, the Earth, and Mars all share the same bulk motion through the galaxy, so all of that cancels out when you compute their positions relative to one another. Carrying 230 km/s through the arithmetic would add nothing except an opportunity to make a mistake.

This is the practical face of the whole video. Choosing a frame is not a philosophical concession, it is an engineering decision, and the right one is whichever one makes the terms you do not care about vanish.

Earth has no single true trajectory (13:16)

The closing statement is the thesis in three lines:

• Relative to the Sun, Earth traces a nearly closed ellipse.
• Relative to the center of the galaxy, it traces a complex three dimensional path.
• Relative to the cosmic microwave background, it traces yet another, even more complex path.

None of these descriptions contradicts the others. Each is valid in a different reference frame.

So the viral vortex animation is not really guilty of exaggeration. It is guilty of drawing the wrong tilt and then implying that its frame is the true one. Both halves of that are avoidable, and correcting them costs nothing except the drama of the corkscrew.

The sign off, in keeping: "See you at the next set of coordinates."

Key takeaways

• Relative to the galactic center, the solar system covers about 7 billion kilometres per Earth year. Your birthday cake has travelled further than you think.
• You cannot state a motion without naming a reference frame. The fly on the train circles a bulb from inside and traces an open wave from the platform, and both accounts are correct.
• The viral vortex animations start from a true fact (the Sun moves) and ruin it with a false geometry: they draw the orbital plane nearly perpendicular to the direction of travel. The ecliptic is actually tilted about 60 degrees to the galactic disk, so the system cuts through at an angle and the planets cannot form a trailing tail.
• In a galactic frame, Earth alternates between slightly ahead of and slightly behind the Sun over the year. A weave, not a wake.
• The Sun holds 99.8 percent of the solar system's mass, yet Jupiter (over 300 Earth masses) and Saturn shift the barycenter enough that it sometimes lies outside the Sun's surface. The resulting wobble is how astronomers find exoplanets around other stars.
• Milankovitch cycles: eccentricity roughly every 100,000 years, obliquity about every 41,000 years, precession every 26,000 years. They cannot freeze the planet on their own; they redistribute sunlight and Earth's climate feedbacks do the rest, pacing the ice ages.
• The solar system orbits the galactic center at roughly 230 km/s, completing one galactic year in about 230 million years, while bobbing through the disk on a 60 to 70 million year cycle.
• The galactic plane crossing and Oort Cloud comet showers idea has never been convincingly linked to mass extinctions. Ridddle labels it a hypothesis and leaves it there.
• Earth's 30 km/s orbital velocity adds to the solar system's motion through the dark matter halo in early June and subtracts in early December, which should produce an annual modulation in underground detectors. DAMA/LIBRA claims it. COSINE-100 and ANAIS-112 do not reproduce it. What DAMA is actually seeing is still unknown.
• Relative to the cosmic microwave background, measured from its Doppler hot spot and cold spot, the entire solar system moves at about 370 km/s, carried with the Local Group toward the Great Attractor.
• Adding all of these together does not give a true speed, because there is no universal stationary grid. The textbook Sun centred ellipse is not wrong, it is local, and locality is exactly what makes it useful for flying a probe to Mars.

Chapters

• 0:00 Seven billion kilometres per birthday
• 0:32 The viral vortex animation and the one fact it gets right
• 1:02 Relative to what: the rule underneath everything
• 1:32 The fly on the train
• 2:14 The geometry the animation breaks: the 60 degree tilt of the ecliptic
• 3:03 What Earth's galactic path really looks like
• 3:33 The barycenter and the Sun's wobble
• 4:35 The same wobble as an exoplanet detector
• 5:05 Milankovitch cycles: 100,000, 41,000 and 26,000 years
• 6:07 The galactic orbit: 230 km/s and a 230 million year year
• 6:38 Bobbing through the disk on a 60 to 70 million year wave
• 7:40 The Oort Cloud comet shower hypothesis
• 8:10 Dark matter wind and the June to December asymmetry
• 9:11 DAMA/LIBRA, COSINE-100 and ANAIS-112
• 10:42 The Milky Way drifts: the Great Attractor
• 11:43 Why no single true speed exists, and the CMB frame at 370 km/s
• 12:45 Why the textbook diagram is still the right tool
• 13:16 Three trajectories, none of them false

Notable quotes

"Relative to the center of our Milky Way galaxy, the entire solar system travels about 7 billion kilometers in a single Earth year." (0:00)

"These animations aren't entirely fabricated. They start with a real fact, the Sun is moving. But they combine that with the wrong geometry, creating a false impression that our star is physically dragging the planets behind it through some dense medium." (0:32)

"In physics, you can't depict motion without first answering one question. Relative to what?" (1:02)

"Both descriptions are correct, they just use different reference frames." (1:32)

"The ecliptic is tilted by about 60 degrees relative to the plane of the Milky Way's disk. So the solar system doesn't move through the galaxy head-on as the animation suggests. It cuts through at an angle." (2:14)

"Sometimes the barycenter is deep inside the Sun, and at other times it lies beyond the Sun's surface, depending on the alignment of the giant planets." (3:33)

"If we mentally unroll the Sun's galactic orbit into a straight line, this trajectory would look like a wave." (7:10)

"Researchers have never convincingly linked this cycle to mass extinctions on Earth. So for now, it remains only a hypothesis." (7:40)

"Imagine you're driving a car in pouring rain. The faster you go, the more raindrops hit your windshield every second. This so-called dark matter wind follows the same basic idea." (8:41)

"Ultra-pure sodium iodide crystals, a kind of crystalline salt, but definitely not the kind you put on your french fries." (9:11)

"Combined results from COSINE-100 and ANAIS-112 failed to reproduce this modulation, casting serious doubt on the idea that DAMA is detecting dark matter. What causes the DAMA signal, however, is still unclear." (10:11)

"It might seem like all we have to do now is add up all these movements to get our true speed. But no such single number exists." (11:12)

"The textbook model isn't wrong, it's simply local. For any calculation, you choose the reference frame that makes the problem easiest to solve." (12:45)

"Earth does not have a single true trajectory. None of these descriptions contradicts the others. Each is valid in a different reference frame." (13:16)

"See you at the next set of coordinates." (13:47)

Resources mentioned

Concepts and frames

• Frame of reference and inertial frame of reference, the idea the whole video hangs on
• Ecliptic, the plane of Earth's orbit
• Galactic plane and the Milky Way disk it defines
• Barycenter, and specifically the solar system barycenter
• Galactic year, the 230 million year lap
• Galactic Center, and Sagittarius A* at the middle of it
• Doppler effect, redshift and blueshift
• Cosmic microwave background and its dipole anisotropy, the source of the 370 km/s figure
• Big Bang, the origin of that microwave echo

Orbital and climate cycles

• Milankovitch cycles
• Orbital eccentricity, the roughly 100,000 year cycle
• Axial tilt (obliquity), the roughly 41,000 year cycle
• Axial precession, the 26,000 year cycle
• Ice age and ice albedo feedback, the amplifiers the video names

Bodies and structures

• Jupiter, more than 300 Earth masses
• Saturn
• The Sun, 99.8 percent of the solar system's mass
• Oort cloud, the hypothesized icy reservoir
• Comet showers, the proposed consequence of disk crossings
• Andromeda Galaxy and the Local Group
• Great Attractor
• Laniakea Supercluster, the larger structure the Great Attractor sits within
• Mars, the worked trajectory example

Dark matter search

• Dark matter and the dark matter halo
• WIMPs, weakly interacting massive particles
• Annual modulation, the June versus December signature
• DAMA/NaI and DAMA/LIBRA at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso
• COSINE-100
• ANAIS-112
• Sodium iodide, the scintillating crystal all three use
• Scintillator physics, the tiny flash of light the detectors look for
• Cosmic ray background, the reason the detectors live underground

Exoplanet aside

• Doppler spectroscopy (radial velocity), finding planets by a star's spectral wobble
• Astrometry, finding planets by a star's positional wobble

Source

• Ridddle on YouTube
• This Is How Earth Actually Moves Through Space

Where it stands

The physics in this one is mainstream and the numbers are the standard ones, so the honest notes are about precision rather than correctness.

The figures are right, and they are rounded. The solar system's orbital speed around the galactic center is usually quoted between 220 and 240 km/s depending on the model of the Milky Way's mass distribution, so 230 is a fair central value. The galactic year is likewise quoted anywhere from about 225 to 250 million years. The CMB dipole gives the solar system's motion as roughly 370 km/s, which is the figure the video uses and is well measured by COBE, WMAP and Planck. Earth's 30 km/s orbital speed is exact to the precision given. The 60 degree ecliptic tilt is the standard value for the angle between the ecliptic and the galactic plane, which is why the north galactic pole sits in Coma Berenices rather than anywhere near the ecliptic pole.

The vertical oscillation period is the softest number on the page. Estimates for the Sun's bobbing through the disk run roughly 50 to 90 million years across different studies, because the answer depends on the local disk surface density, which is itself an active measurement problem. The video's 60 to 70 million years sits inside that range without flagging the spread.

One thing the video leaves out entirely: Earth's rotation. The ladder of frames runs orbit, galaxy, CMB, but never mentions the spin you are doing right now, roughly 1,670 km/h at the equator and effectively zero at the poles. That omission is defensible in a video about trajectories rather than speeds, and it is also the frame most people think of first when asked how fast they are moving. The greyed bar in Figure 2 is added here for scale and is not a Ridddle number.

The DAMA section is the most current part and it is handled well. DAMA/LIBRA's annual modulation is a real, statistically strong, decades long signal, and the null results from COSINE-100 and ANAIS-112 using the same sodium iodide target are the reason almost nobody in the field now reads it as a dark matter detection. Saying plainly that the cause is still unclear is more accurate than either of the two easy stories.

The Oort Cloud and mass extinction connection is correctly leashed. Periodic extinction claims tied to galactic plane crossings have a long history of not surviving better data. Calling it a hypothesis and moving on is the right call.

Where the video is strongest is the philosophy, not the astronomy. "No universal stationary coordinate grid" is the honest statement of a foundational point that a lot of popular science fudges, and the Mars probe example is the best possible defence of the boring textbook diagram: you choose the frame that makes the terms you do not care about cancel. That is not a compromise with reality, that is how physics is actually done.