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Online tutor?
It is unlikely that my English neighbors are going to give up the
iconic figure of Newton,all the same it is only fair that they understand the gravity of the situation,what exactly went wrong and perhaps a dozen other different topics,one more important than the next.It is only possible with the greatest difficulty to explain the ins and outs of this tragedy in a readable form although that may change in the future itt The background to the discovery of Copernicus that the Earth orbits between Venus and Mars rests on more than a few observations but one of them is the use of the time it takes the planets to make a circuit against the background stars so that the geocentric astronomers had the Sun between the roughly 225 day orbital period of Venus and the 687 day period of Mars insofar as an Earth year is 365 days and that is how long they gauged the Sun's annual motion.The point is that since antiquity the geocentric astronomers had started to think in terms of the motions of the planets in relation to the Earth rather than a homocentric above/below idea and there are good commentaries explaining why genuine astronomers looked into the celestial arena rather than up at the sky - "For if whatsoever space, and whatever thing exists away from the center of Earth, is the ‘above,’ then no part of Earth is ‘below,’ but Earth herself and the things upon Earth; and, in a word, everybody standing around or investing the center, become the ‘above;’ whilst ‘below’ is one sole thing, that incorporeal point, which has the duty of counterbalancing the whole constitution of the world; if, indeed, the ‘below’ is by its nature opposed to the ‘above.’ And this is not the only absurdity in the argument, but it also does away with the cause through which all ponderous bodies gravitate in this direction, and tend downwards: for there is no mark below towards which they move: for the incorporeal point is not likely (nor do they pretend it is) to exert so much force as to draw down all objects to itself, and keep them together around itself. But yet, it is proved unreasonable, and repugnant to facts, to suppose the ‘above’ of the world to be a whole, but the ‘below’ an incorporeal and indefinite limit: whereas that course is consistent with reason, to say, as we do, that the space is large and possessed of width, and is defined by the ‘above’ and the ‘below’ of locality." Plutarch In the late 17th century they took a decision to adopt Ra/Dec timekeeping as a basis for planetary dynamics and homocentricity returned with a vengeance as the theorists started to live in their heads and above/below remains the common currency and certainly the few contributors to this thread follow that tragic error whether they know it or not. It is unlikely that the English,at least the empiricists, will budge even though they have John Harrison's work on the 24 hour AM/PM system and the Lat/Long system which contains the actual information on planetary dynamics and this is a great shame for while the untangling of timekeeping principles from astronomical principles is an intricate affair,it is not torturous but rather fascinating in scope and reach. I cannot think of anything more dismaying than the loss we all face,not so much that the men in the late 17th century got it wrong but rather than there is no background against which to restore a stable astronomical narrative with today's imaging power and especially sequential and time lapse imaging.That any one person here has the power to change and refuses to do so by virtue of breaking ranks certainly draws me into a rare look at human nature as I didn't think it could be possible on such a large scale and almost overturning Lincoln's motto of not fooling people all of the time. |
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