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Old April 9th 17, 11:32 AM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Gerald Kelleher
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Default Time and timekeeping

There was a movie out a few years ago about a mathematician who ended up in a wheelchair so now I believe there is a similar docu-drama coming out via National Geographic about the originator of relativity.

I suppose the whole thing is like those Russian dolls where the largest and most visible contains a smaller and more concise technical structure of the same nature but further back in history. Winding it all back to the core assertion it all boils down to an attempt to make a timekeeping facility based on the calendar system look like time itself -

"Absolute time, in astronomy, is distinguished from relative, by the equation of time. For the natural days are truly unequal, though they are commonly considered as equal and used for a measure of time; astronomers correct this inequality for their more accurate deducing of the celestial motions...The necessity of which equation, for determining the times of a phænomenon, is evinced as well from the experiments of the pendulum clock, as by eclipses of
the satellites of Jupiter." Principia

Unlike the present astronomical imaging which is used to modify older and less productive insights, this thread merely points out that the theorists have been living off voodoo and bluffing for centuries and inevitably lead down a road to an intellectual cul-de-sac,if people haven't already noticed. This thread is a reminder that there is another way that leaves room for the theorists but they have to accept astronomy on what you can see and show instead of the useless speculation that has turned the celestial arena into a junkyard.

The Equation of Time which Newton so badly mangled is a wonderful expression of the Earth's dual surface rotations to the central Sun and it is about time there was support for the development of this fact.