On Wednesday, March 14, 2018 at 3:13:23 PM UTC, palsing wrote:
Gerald, must you hijack virtually every thread


I keep to my own topics by and large and it has been that way for quite some time.

Physics at an engineering level is fine but astrophysics, cosmology or whatever buzz word attached to it nowadays always was contrived.

Timekeeping is easy enough despite the multiple reference systems used through history but unfortunately Sir Isaac adopted the RA/Dec celestial sphere system which tries to undermine timekeeping and the Lat/Long system as it refers to the Earth's daily and orbital motions.

Sir Isaac was trying to bridge the gap by doing a hatchet job on the Equation of Time by trying to define that timekeeping facility as 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

I give you more than a brief history of timekeeping, I presented this forum with a comprehensive perspective of 5 reference systems all the way back to the creation of the calendar framework and the astronomical event that determines it.

Unlike the originator of relativity as another outrigger of Newton's absolute/relative 'definitions' who became acclaimed, the astrophysical narrative is so burdened with voodoo and bluffing presently that Hawking is only recognized for the headache inducing pronouncements about God.