A new start

On Friday, February 15, 2019 at 6:40:37 PM UTC-7, corvastro wrote:

What are you babbling about?

In Junior High, my science textbook had a table of the Solar System.

It had a table showing things like the diameters of the various planets, and how
long their days were.

According to the table, the day on Mercury was 88 days long, and the day on
Earth was 23 hours and 56 minutes long.

Of course, if the day on Earth wasn't 24 hours, there would be something wrong
with our watches. And, if Mercury always kept one face to the Sun, as was
believed then, its day and night would last forever... which was the clue as to
what was wrong with that table.

Apparently, he must have had a similar experience, but he was scarred for life
by it, and has decided that the true rotational period of the Earth must be 24
hours exactly as well as its day. Which, of course, is easily shown to be
ridiculous because of the Equation of Time, but he doesn't listen.

He thinks the fact that the night is cold and the day is warm proves that
"stellar circumpolar motion" is insignificant, and only the solar day is
meaningful and must be the Earth's rotation.

Furthermore, since Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler were good Roman Catholics,
while Newton was a Protestant, he has concluded that the Law of Universal
Gravitation was a gigantic hoax, and in fact while the planets do truly orbit
the Sun and not the Earth, they're still being pushed around by angels - none of
this applying inertia, momentum, angular momentum, and gravity to celestial
bodies, thank you very much.

So, yes, his views are pretty ridiculous. So ridiculous that posters here are
now criticizing him even when he is actually _right_ about something for a
change.

What could he possibly be right about?

Well, when Mars or Jupiter goes retrograde, that's just an illusion caused by
the motion of the Earth.

He has recently observed that in the case of Mercury or Venus, their overall
apparent orbital motion around the Earth and through the Zodiac once per year is
the illusion, while the loops that give rise to retrogrades represent their real
motion around the Sun - in the loops, we see them orbiting the Sun much as we
can see the Galilean moons orbit Jupiter.

This is exactly right - but he expresses it so clumsily that some people are
replying to it as if he is saying some other thing which is wrong.

John Savard