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Old December 2nd 17, 06:38 PM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Quadibloc
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Default The Equation of Time(keeping)

On Saturday, December 2, 2017 at 9:57:30 AM UTC-7, Gerald Kelleher wrote:

Look around you, what person would dare bring up the Equation of Time(keeping)
as absolute/relative time knowing it means the end of the theorists as we know
them.


Pendulum clocks, quartz crystal clocks, and stellar circumpolar motion... all
keep the same kind of time.

The 24 hour cycle, which relates to all of those by the Equation of Time, is the
one that is different. And the explanation for the difference is not hard to
find: the Earth's orbit around the Sun is an ellipse instead of a perfect
circle, and it is in the Ecliptic plane, not the plane of the Earth's equator.

So we take the uniform time which is reflected by stellar circumpolar motion as
fundamental - and sundial time as a circumstantial result of the Earth's
particular orbit, the result of a compound motion.

That just makes sense. Of course the 24 hour day is more important in daily life
and biological cycles... but that is *irrelevant* to the issue of the mechanical
cause of the day.

To say that since the sunlight cycle is important, we shouldn't try to look
behind it for anything more fundamental... is today regarded as merely bizarre.
But your temperament opposes the reductionism of today's science. That will not
get scientists to change, because the way they do things has yielded answers and
results that have borne technological fruit.

You may not like what Newton did - reducing the Solar System to a mechanism -
but because he did that, it was possible to discover Neptune, through the
visible small effects of its gravitational pull.

John Savard