On Wednesday, November 16, 2005 8:07:35 PM UTC, Chris L Peterson wrote:
On 16 Nov 2005 11:30:45 -0800, "oriel36"
wrote:
Centrifugal forces,yeah,yeah yeah,this has been the story for hundreds
of years and it will tell you why the Earth and all rotating celestial
objects are spheres but it is useless to explain deviations from a
perfect sphere.
Centrifugal forces do not explain why the planets are spheres (rotating
or not). They are spherical because of gravity. Centrifugal force
explains why rotating spheres are oblate.
Perhaps you are the one who is special for it takes quite an effort to
miss the shape of the Earth as a geological feature.Unless you live in
a cave you would know that the Earth's fractured crust is composed of
plates that are subject to rotational forces in the plastic-molten
mantle.As all rotating celestial objects display both differential
rotation and a bulge,it takes quite a special person to ignore it.
Rotating celestial objects that are solid, e.g. the Moon or Mars, do not
display differential rotation, just equatorial bulges.
Almost certainly, there is some differential rotation in the plastic
interior of the Earth (I don't know that anyone is denying this, as you
seem to suggest). The point is that convection currents in the mantle-
which have been observed experimentally- explain very nicely the
movement and evolution of tectonic plates. If that motion resulted from
differential rotation as you suggest, you would expect fault lines and
plate boundaries to lie preferentially on east-west axes, which they do
not. You would also expect plates on opposite sides of the equator to be
rotating, and in opposite directions. But the directions that plates
rotate isn't correlated with their hemisphere.
It is not my fault that everyone is intent in shooting themselves in
the foot with the 'scientific method' when simple intution will
do.
Terrible problem there, what with rational methodology corrupting
intuition. g
I think my own intuition is pretty good; it has generally served me
well. But boy, on occasion it has really led me down the wrong path!
(And I doubt there is a scientist alive who wouldn't say the same.) If I
trusted only my intuition, and valued it higher than empirical evidence,
I'd sure have a strange world view by now. Hmmm... sound like anyone you
know?
_________________________________________________
Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com
In 2005 when that post was published linking the spherical deviation between equatorial and polar diameters with plate tectonics using the common mechanism of an uneven rotational gradient between equatorial and polar latitudes (differential rotation) there wasn't a sign of a rotational mechanism being discussed anywhere -
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php...oldid=29688503
About ten years later and because empiricists like Peterson here are not good enough to comprehend the neat reasoning that connects planetary shape and evolutionary geology together using already observed differential rotation in all rotating celestial objects with exposed viscous compositions,they threw every assertion they could find at rotation so the Wiki article looks like this now with 'rotation' added -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics
So,differential rotation across latitudes which first appeared here in respect to the 26 mile spherical deviation of our planet across the same latitudes and the mechanism for crustal evolution and motion but is still not being discussed properly.